Edited by Jason Erik Lundberg First printing December 2004 $9.99, 166 pp. SOLD OUT

• "The Cockaigne Poet Speaks of the Lackey King" by Toiya Kristen Finley
• "The Apocalypse and Then Oyster Loaf" by Kevin James Miller
• "L'Alchimista" by N.K. Jemisin
• "Seared Scallops and Steamed Green Beans" by Christopher Rowe
• "Love and Goat Cheese" by A.K. Cotham
• "Our Last Piece of Pizza" by Bruce Boston
• "How to Cure an Iron Skillet" by Luna Black
• "Bitter Pudding" by Dominick Cancilla
• "And a Sprig of Rosemary" by Robert J. Santa
• "Grumblebelly" by Rhys Hughes
• "I Dream of Strawberries" by Marguerite Croft
• "Along With the Usual" by Jon Hansen
• "The Crush" by Louise Dolan
• "Chemistry" by Brendan Connell
• "Rice Pudding" by Jun Z. Lim
• "Mallory's Quick-Quick Seduction Cookies" by Mark Teppo
• "Food for Thought" by Dena M. Martin
• "Cake for $200" by Anna K. Meade
• "Tea Ceremony" by Heather Shaw
• "Chocolate" by Susan Wardle
• "The Strange Case of the Lovecraft Cafe" by M.F. Korn, Des Lewis, and Jeff VanderMeer
• "The Night-Soil Boys" by Barth Anderson

• "Absolutely the Last Monster to be Boiled in a Pot at My House" by Rhys Hughes
• "Doldrum-Defying Stir-Fry" by Barth Anderson and Lisa Stuart
• "Burbank With a Biryani: Bleistein With an Aloo Kofta" by Rhys Hughes
• "Prune Chicken" by Elizabeth A. Jasper
• "The Gourmet Cook Takes a Husband" by Tina Connolly
• "Vice Bread" by Barth Anderson and Lisa Stuart
• "Tabasco Caribbean Jerk Barbecued Chicken" by Michael Lohr
• "Madras Guillotine" by Rhys Hughes
• "Anti-Authoritarian Mediterranean Burritos" by Jamie Bishop
• "Avocado/Green Mango Salad" by Nalo Hopkinson
• "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Vindaloo" by Rhys Hughes

Barth Anderson is a Minneapolis-based writer of food, fair-trade, the cooperative movement, organics, and speculative fiction. His fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Mojo: Conjure Stories and Alchemy, and his online work can be found at Strange Horizons and Fantastic Metropolis. His story "Lark Till Dawn, Princess" won the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for short fiction, and his first novel, Patron Saint of Plagues, is forthcoming from Bantam Spectra. He also throws a mean tarot. [website]

Mild-mannered, bespectacled Jamie Bishop works as an Academic Technology Liaison at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he provides technical support for faculty, staff and graduate students. After 5:00, he battles the drudgery and ennui of the 40-hour work week, heroically pursuing creativity. (Victory or no, the glasses always stay on.) Often inspired by his artistic superheroes Dave Mckean, Frank Miller, Diane Fenster, and the ever-groovy Ren? Magritte, Jamie enjoys creating digital art. Recent work includes book covers for Michael Bishop's Brighten to Incandescence and A Reverie for Mister Ray, as well as Mike Jasper's short story collection Gunning for the Buddha. Despite a penchant for art, Jamie received both his B.A. and M.A. in German at the University of Georgia. Between 1993 and 2000 he lived for four years in Germany where he spent most of his time learning the language, teaching English, drinking large quantities of wheat beer, and wooing a certain Fr?ulein. He lives with his wife Dr. Stefanie Hofer and their cat Trinity in Carrboro, North Carolina. [website]

Luna Black lives with her husband Andreas and her best snake Ernst in Raleigh, NC, and has a day job that completely fails to put her B.A. in English to any good use whatsoever. Her stories generally involve someone dying in varying degrees of ickiness, which is how she can tell that she's reached the end. She puts this down to reading Edgar Allen Poe in elementary school because it's as good an excuse as any other. Other interests include the Surrealist movement, most things Goth, and art. [website]

Bruce Boston is the author of forty books and chapbooks, including the novel Stained Glass Rain and the best-of fiction collection Masque of Dreams. His fiction and poetry have appeared most visibly in Asimov's SF, Amazing Stories, Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and the Nebula Awards Showcase. His collection Pitchblende (Dark Regions Press) won the 2004 Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association. Other writing awards include a Pushcart Prize, the Asimov's Readers' Choice Award, and the Rhysling Award. He lives in Ocala, Florida, City of Trees, with his wife, writer-artist Marge Simon. [website]

Dominick Cancilla has had dozens of horror stories published in magazines and anthologies over the years, and his first novel, Revenant Savior, was published in 2004. His wife performs all of the family's food preparation, because his cooking does not meet the minimum requirement of the Geneva Convention.

Brendan Connell was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1970 and currently lives in Ticino, Switzerland, where he teaches English and writes. He has had fiction published in numerous magazines, literary journals and anthologies, including The Journal of Experimental Fiction, Fantastic Metropolis, Flesh and Blood, Leviathan 3 (Ministry of Whimsy 2002), and Album Zutique (Ministry of Whimsy 2003). His novella Dr. Black and the Guerrillia is being published by Grafitisk Press, and his first novel, The Translation of Father Torturo, is being published by Prime Books.

Tina Connolly is an actor and writer in the Kansas City area. She is also the co-producer of the Borogove Theatre, a company dedicated to producing new and gently used scripts. Her other SF credits include works in the Eggplant Literary Publications' Library, Nocturnal Ooze, and Aoife's Kiss. Her poem is absolutely not based on anything that personally happened to her five years ago when she married her husband. [website]

Born and raised in Northern California, A.K. Cotham received her degree from UC-Berkeley and promptly disappeared into the corporate netherworld of Los Angeles. Ten years later, she is glad to finally back home. A fiction writer and poet since the age of six, Cotham has had work published in magazines such as ByLine, Iconoclast, and Kimera. Currently a staff writer at Solano Magazine, her latest project is cleaning up the mess left over from NaNoWriMo 2004.

Marguerite Croft, a recovering anthropologist, lives high on a hill in the wilds of Idaho with her husband, son, dog, and cat. When she's not herding the household wildlife, she can be found studying languages or ancient texts, writing, or experimenting in the kitchen. This is her first fiction publication. [website]

Louise Dolan is from Hartland, Wisconsin, a small town that still does not have a McDonalds! She has lived and traveled in Mexico and Argentina and currently teaches Spanish at North Carolina State University. She is the mother of three children, Julia and Buck, 22 years old, and Penn, 6 years old, and has two cats, Nutmeg and Longtail. She's taken several writing workshops at NCSU under the direction of Tim McLaurin, John Kessel, and Wilton Barnhardt. Currently, she is working on a novella, "Going Up," and her first novel, We Could Be Gypsies, is being circulated. She looks forward to writing more stories about her experiences in Argentina. [website]

A retired professional student, Toiya Kristen Finley received her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from Binghamton University in 2003. She now finds herself back in her native wilds of Nashville, TN working as a freelancer of various stuffs. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in or are forthcoming in pop culture encyclopedias, The Elastic Book of Numbers, Tales of the Unanticipated, Fortean Bureau, Full Unit Hookup, NFG, H.P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror and Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America. She is the founding and former managing/fiction editor of Harpur Palate. You might say she is obsessed with baseball, animated series, movies, and Wild Cherry Pepsi. Okay, "obsessed" may be too strong of a word, but not by much.

Jon Hansen has been publishing speculative fiction and poetry since 1996. His work has appeared in a number of places, including Black Gate, Strange Horizons, and Albedo One. When not writing, he works as a librarian for Kennesaw State University. He currently lives on the edge of Atlanta with his wife Lisa and a small army of cats. His chief amusement when not writing is watching the cats eye the birdfeeder. [website]

Nalo Hopkinson was born in Jamaica, but she now lives in Toronto, Canada, where neither avocados nor mangoes can grow. Perhaps this is why she's a fantasy author. Tesseracts 9, an anthology of Canadian science fiction and fantasy which she co-edited with Geoff Ryman, is about to appear from Canada's Edge Books. Her novel The Salt Roads has been nominated for Dublin's IMPAC Award. [website]

Rhys Hughes published his first short story in 1992 and since then he has embarked on a project to write exactly 1000 stories. His books include the collections Worming the Harpy, The Smell of Telescopes, Stories From a Lost Anthology, Nowhere Near Milk Wood and Journeys Beyond Advice. He has also published a novel, The Percolated Stars. An essay on his work in Scribner's Encyclopedia of Supernatural Writers commented on his fondness for "images of food and food preparation." He is the first to admit that food has played perhaps too large a role in many of his plots and he has resolved to make "Grumblebelly" his final story based on this theme. He particularly favours the cuisines of India, Lebanon, China and Italy, but his main devotion is to chocolate. His favourite food story is probably Italo Calvino's Under the Jaguar Sun and his favourite food film is Como Agua Para Chocolate. Despite his enormous appetite, he is capable of fasting for many days and has been known to set off into the mountains with nothing edible apart from a packet of crackers. [website]

Elizabeth A. Jasper has been cooking for almost two decades and is just now getting the hang of it. She works as an occupational therapist at WakeMed hospital and she lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with her husband. Their first child is due any minute now.

N.K. Jemisin currently makes her home in Boston, although it's a little chilly there for her Southern blood. Her short fiction has also sold to Ideomancer and the Dark Sins and Desires Unveiled horror anthology. She is a 2002 graduate of the Viable Paradise writers' workshop, and the recipient of the Speculative Literature Foundation's 2004 Travel Grant. Now working on her third novel, in her spare time she always cooks frugally, from scratch, and low carb. (Yeah, right.) [website]

M.F. Korn has written eleven novels and had over 230 story appearances in magazines worldwide. His new paperback, Swamp Witch Piquante and Scream Queen Bisque is just out now. Currently available are two paperback collections, Confessions of a Ghoul and Other Stories and Aliens, Minibikes and Other Staples of Suburbia, and two novels, Skimming the Gumbo Nuclear and Rachmaninoff's Ghost. A collection of four science fiction novels, All the Mutant Trash in All the Galaxies is out as well. He resides in Louisiana as a programmer and has a daughter, Savannah, seven years old. One of his degrees is in Piano Performance. Mike enjoys playing Rachmaninoff, Gershwin, Chopin and ragtime, and listening to Requiems, Sacred Masses for the Dead. [website]

Des Lewis was born in 1948. He has been married for 35 years and has two grown-up children. He was the recipient of the British Fantasy Society Karl Edward Wagner Award in 1998, and is the tsar of the legendary literary journal Nemonymous. Currently he is re-publishing on a network of free blogs most of the 1500 stories he had published in print from 1986 to 1999. [website]

Jun Z. Lim is a college senior in search of herself. She is a person of very few words. This is her first published piece.

Michael Lohr is a professional international journalist. His writing has appeared in such diverse magazines as Rolling Stone, The Economist, Southern Living, Flight Journal, Hiking Magazine, Men's Journal, Vermont Living, Vermont Life, Cowboys & Indians, ESPN Magazine, Bluegrass Unlimited, Outside Magazine, Euroman, Gear, Caribbean Travel & Life, Canoe Journal, Canoe & Kayaking, Outdoor Life and Blue Ridge Country, to name a few. He is currently Senior-Editor-At-Large and a member of the Board of Directors of Beyond Borders Press based in Reykjav?k, Iceland and Bay of Islands, New Zealand. [website]

Dena M. Martin is a Southern California native with a love for the dark side of life. Although her days are spent toiling as a commercial underwriter, she spends her nights scribing macabre tales. Her work can be seen in Sinisteria Magazine and the upcoming Mirrors in Flame anthology by Cyber Pulp Books.

Anna K. Meade lives in Louisville, Kentucky. This is her first publication.

Kevin James Miller has, among other jobs, operated a Tilt-a-Whirl at a carnival, sold candles door-to-door, and stuffed pamphlets into perfume boxes. Since 1997 he's been a college English teacher. He holds a B.A. in Film from Columbia College/Chicago and a M.S. in Writing from National Louis University, also in Chicago. Since the late 1990s, over fifty of his horror, crime, science fiction, and fantasy stories have been published on webpages, in audio/visual media, in downloadable digital files, and in small press magazines and books. His five latest publications are in Dawnsky, Dark Krpyt, Editions de l'Oxymore's Mythophages: 16 sagas d'hier et d'aujourd'hui, Cyber-Pulp's Halloween Anthology 3.0, and Neverary: Speculative Fiction Writing. [website]

Christopher Rowe was born in Kentucky and lives there still, in Lexington at the moment. He attended both the Clarion West and Sycamore Hill writing workshops. His fiction has appeared in SciFiction, Realms of Fantasy, Ideomancer and Electric Velocipede, and his chapbook Bittersweet Creek was released by Small Beer Press in 2003. With Gwenda Bond, he runs a small press, The Fortress of Words, which produces a critically acclaimed magazine, Say... [website]

Robert J. Santa has been writing speculative fiction for twenty years. He works mostly in all areas of fantasy, though he has written roughly two dozen science fiction and horror short stories. Robert has been most recently published in Artemis, Paradox, Horror Garage and Ralan Conely's Spectravaganza and has material forthcoming in Amazing Journeys, Here & Now, Hadrosaur Tales, and Nova SF. His short stories will soon be appearing in several anthologies, including F/SF, Travel a Time Historic, Dream the Dark Majestic, Amazing Heroes II, Kings of the Night III, and Magisteria. He lives in Rhode Island with his beautiful wife, Rachel, and equally beautiful daughters, Elizabeth and Lily. He is an active member of Andrew Burt's Critters and a frequenter of SF Reader.com. Robert has also been known to make some very nice soups, though he almost never uses rosemary in them.

Despite her penchant for sex, risky fiction and midnight walks, Heather Shaw is just a nice girl from Indiana now living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her fiction has appeared in cool places such as Polyphony and Strange Horizons, and she co-edits Flytrap, the little zine with teeth, with her fianc? Tim Pratt. Her day job, buying books for the catalog Blowfish and editing their erotica webzine Fishnet is pretty cool, too. While not working on her novel, she enjoys dancing, cats, (but not dancing with cats), gardening and mangos. [website]

Lisa Stuart is a librarian-chef living in Minneapolis. Her Mississippi Mud Cake can stop traffic, and don't underestimate her Tomato Soup with Dumplings. She's also been known to thrown down a wicked Chowder.

Mark Teppo lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, son, and the world's neediest cat. By day, he's a byte-jockey for a biotechnology company where he does web design and IT infrastructure support. At night, he invents time so that he can write obsessively about modern electronic music, the recontextualization of symbolism and whatever fiction he can sneak through the cracks of the world. [website]

Jeff VanderMeer is a 35-year-old two-time World Fantasy Award winner whose books of fiction and edited anthologies have been finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award and the International Horror Guild Award. He is best known for writing City of Saints & Madmen and Veniss Underground, and co-editing the Leviathan anthologies and The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases. His publishing house Ministry of Whimsy has been a World Fantasy Award finalist and a British Fantasy Award finalist, with the Ministry book The Troika by Stepan Chapman winning the Philip K. Dick Award in 1998. VanderMeer's nonfiction has appeared in Publishers Weekly, The Washington Post, and The New York Review of SF. A definitive short story collection (Secret Life) and nonfiction collection (Why Should I Cut Your Throat?) appeared in 2004. [website]

Susan Wardle has recently stopped talking about writing and actually started doing it. Her stories have appeared in Antipodean SF, an online webzine devoted to "down under" speculative fiction, and in 2004 she was gratified to receive a first place and two honourable mentions in some Australian-based writing competitions. Also in 2004, Susan was selected to attend Clarion South 2005 in Brisbane, the speculative fiction boot camp. During daylight hours she works for a small council in Sydney, Australia, which provides her with a marvellous array of strange creatures to write about!

"It's rather diverting stuff — sometimes dark, sometimes whimsical."
—Rich Horton, Locus

"You will want a copy... Weird stories about food. And weird poems about food. And recipes for foodish items. And a beautiful, amusing cover."
—Matt Cheney, The Mumpsimus

"This entertaining collection of fiction and poetry about food preparation and consumption, interspersed with recipes ranging from unusual dishes like 'Bitter Pudding' to more traditional fare, has something for every taste."
—Paul Witcover, Realms of Fantasy

"A wirebound anthology that deliciously pushe[s] the limits of its 'food' theme."
—Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant, "Summation 2004: Fantasy," The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror vol. 18

"A clever oddity of stories and poems, some of them including recipes and some of them dark."
—Ellen Datlow, "Summation 2004: Horror," The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror vol. 18

"...the star contribution to the anthology, without a shadow of a doubt, is 'The Strange Case of the Lovecraft Cafe' by M.F. Korn, Des Lewis and Jeff Vandermeer... Pan-Tossed Nemonymi From Yuggoth anyone? Flaming Whole Giant Penguin, delivered fresh from the Mountains of Madness? Darioles of Nethermost Blight in Black Being Sauce? I haven't laughed so much in a long time. The book may well be worth the cover price for this story alone."
—Cheryl Morgan, Emerald City

A bonus: the cover letter submitted along with "The Strange Case of the Lovecraft Cafe." (Requires Adobe Reader)

External bonus #1: Podcast of "L'Alchimista" by N.K. Jemisin, read by Paul Tevis.

External bonus #2: "The Wages of Food-Play" by Anna Tambour.

External bonus #3: Podcast of "The Girlfriends of Dorian Gray" by Gregory Frost, read by Stephen Eley.

External bonus #4: "Larks' Tongues in Aspic" by Richard Kadrey.

External bonus #5: poetry in food, recipes by Maya Angelou.

External bonus #6: a recipe for Jambalaya by Maureen McHugh.

External bonus #7: Best War Time Recipes, by the Royal Baking Powder Company, New York, copyright © 1918.

External bonus #8: recipes for Confederate Fruit Cake, Lemon-Ginger Beer, and North Carolina Style Jawa Barbecue.

External bonus #9: Alton Brown's Baking Tips on NPR's All Things Considered.