PANCAKE KISSES, BACON HUGS

Why breakfast is the secret of everything

I suppose I should confess upfront that I am a morning person. I wake up cheery, chatty and at the very first fingers of sunlight creeping over the [...]]]> THE SECRET OF EVERYTHING is out today! To celebrate, a love song to breakfast.

PANCAKE KISSES, BACON HUGS

Why breakfast is the secret of everything

I suppose I should confess upfront that I am a morning person. I wake up cheery, chatty and at the very first fingers of sunlight creeping over the horizon. I know you find this annoying. I know you wish I’d stop humming under my breath as I crack eggs and start the coffee, but I can’t help it. I was born a singing lark. This does, however, offer benefits to all you blinking owls and sleepy headed in-betweens.

Once upon a time, I had a job working the breakfast shift at an upscale diner. It meant getting up at 4:30 am to creep around the dark of my teeny-tiny house so I wouldn’t wake my roommate. I dressed in my uniform with its plunging neckline (an unfortunate feature of many waitress uniforms of the early 80’s), and braided my Rapunzel hair. In the cold dark, I drove to work in my clunker, feeling—yes, I admit it–smug that I was awake before the rest of the world. Here and there, a light clicked on in a kitchen, but mostly, the world slept on. Porch lights glittered against the velvet blackness of mountains on the horizon, the air was fresh. All was newly reinvented, and it was mine.

At work, I dove into the bustle of getting the place ready for the doors to open. It smelled faintly of cleaning supplies from the night crew, of baking biscuits and potatoes grilling. Every morning, I fell in love all over again with the empty stage of tidy, waiting tables, with the clatter of cooks prepping, and the heat of flatware straight out of the dishwasher. We waitresses made pot after pot after pot of coffee, filled cream pitchers; wiped down syrup dispensers and set out glasses of ice to fill quickly with water. We drank coffee by the gallon ourselves, and snitched bacon when we could get away with it. It made me feel important to create a world of efficiency and nourishment for the hungry humans about to stumble in and beg for coffee.

This passion for breakfast arrived in a roundabout way, I must admit. My mother, who is a very good cook under many circumstances, was born an owl, and she finds early morning painful, especially when her lark child rose well before sunrise and was known to dust siblings with flour or lipstick or explore—well, never mind. It was early, that’s all.

Because she loved us, my mother did manage to get up and fix us breakfast. She believed in a hot breakfast, but cooking anything much would have been dangerous considering her eyes were barely open. So she made hot cereal. Endlessly. Malto-Meal and Ralston, Cream of Wheat and a colorless, gluey oatmeal I loathed with the considerable passion of a toddler foodie. Thankfully, she left us to our own devices once we made it to late grade school and we never had to choke down porridge again.

Not the best circumstances to fall in love with breakfast, I know. The happy accident is that my mother briefly took a job at a manufacturing plant when I was about seven. The other three children went to my grandmother’s house for the day while I stayed home with my father and walked to school on my own.

Once in awhile, my father got dressed and took me to a little café downtown, where there were individual jukeboxes along the counter and at the tables, and we ate pancakes and eggs and tea. We sat at the counter on round stools. I flipped through the jukebox offerings as if I knew what they were while he flirted with the waitresses and they flirted back, and there was usually music playing, and cigarette smoke hanging in the air with heady notes of bacon and coffee and frying onions. I loved the food—little balls of cold butter on top of my French toast, glass pitchers of syrup, tiny tubs of jelly—but mostly I loved the time with my dad, having him all to myself. Afterward, my dad would drop me off at school and I’d head up the stone steps feeling warm and special, a girl who had extraordinary experiences.

I fell in love with breakfast then and there. All good breakfasts, but especially a good café breakfast. And from that love was born a book.

At the heart of my new book, The Secret of Everything, is a restaurant called 100 Breakfasts, where a lark of a woman cooks to heal the hearts and souls of the people in her town.

It is to 100 Breakfasts that the protagonist, Tessa Harlow, comes to explore the questions that have been haunting her. She is heart sore and weary, recovering from a freak accident and trying to find answers to questions that have only just now bobbed to the surface. When she sits down at the long counter at the 100 Breakfasts Café, she unwittingly sets in motion a tangled array of connections and reveals secrets that have been hidden for a long, long time.

It is also at 100 Breakfasts that Tessa gets to know widower Vince Grasso, who is trying to heal his own family, including the troubled Natalie, a 9 year old who takes food very seriously, and is working her way through the entire list of 100 breakfasts on the menu.

The Secret of Everything was born out of my passion for breakfast, for the power it has to heal and renew, to nourish and ground. It’s a book that was born out of those days when I was a child hating oatmeal and loving the French toast at the local café; when I fought with my sisters and the mornings when my father took me out to breakfast, just the two of us, because this is, at the heart of it, a story about fathers and daughters and how that connection can make or break a woman’s spirit. Tessa’s father is nothing like my own, of course, but a father who is devoted to his child gives her permission to be as mighty as she can be.

Ironically, Tessa’s favorite breakfast is oatmeal, because in my adulthood, I learned to love great oatmeal. It is my own breakfast of choice most days. Whole grain oats served with butter and my own spiced apples that are cooked to a deep, dark flavor. Because I am that lark, so smugly and cheerfully alert at the first glimmers of dawn, it falls to me to get up and make the tea and start the coffee so it fills the air with its fragrance. I set the water boiling and set the table with cloth napkins and the good sugar bowl and the milk pitcher. I set the stage for my sleepy headed partner, sometimes a child, to come blinking to the table and fill his belly and drink his coffee.

In this small act, I am offering the most solid secret I know: breakfast is the secret of everything.

Breakfast is love.

What is your favorite breakfast?

Not long now!

I get so excited when it gets so close. I’ve known Tessa and Sam (oh, you will love her father!) and Vince and Natalie (darling, troubled Natalie) for more than two years. Very happy for you to be able to finally meet them.

Here’s my favorite review of [...]]]>

Not long now!

I get so excited when it gets so close. I’ve known Tessa and Sam (oh, you will love her father!) and Vince and Natalie (darling, troubled Natalie) for more than two years. Very happy for you to be able to finally meet them.

Here’s my favorite review of the week, from the B&N.com website:

“December 21, 2009: The Secret of Everything is a beautiful story about love and family, good food and gorgeous landscape, faithful dogs and a mysterious town. Tessa is a hiking tour guide who is recovering from a traumatic, near drowning experience. As she recovers strange memories from her mysterious childhood begin to surface. She sets out for Los Ladrones, the small town in New Mexico where she was born, in an attempt to uncover the truth.

“What a gorgeous book! The strength here is in the real, down to earth characters. I just fell in love with them and then became so wrapped up in their stories I couldn’t put the book down. The detailed descriptions of New Mexican landscape, its ferocious storms, and the enticing food are icing on the cake. The plot is unique enough to be interesting and only requires a little suspension of belief. Barbara O’Neal writes the kind of captivating novels that keep me up late at night turning pages. I will anxiously await her next one!”

At thirty-seven, Tessa Harlow is still working her way [...]]]> PRE-ORDER NOW

Coming your way January 5, 2010:

At thirty-seven, Tessa Harlow is still working her way down her list of goals to “fall in love and have a family.” A self-described rolling stone, Tessa leads hiking tours for adventurous vacationers–it’s a job that’s taken her around the world but never a step closer to home. Then a freak injury during a trip already marred by tragedy forces her to begin her greatest adventure of all.

Located high in the New Mexico mountains, Las Ladronas has become a magnet for the very wealthy and very hip, but once upon a time it was the setting of a childhood trauma Tessa can only half remember. Now, as she rediscovers both her old hometown and her past, Tessa is drawn to search-and-rescue worker Vince Grasso. The handsome widower isn’t her type. No more inclined to settle down than Tessa, Vince is the father of three, including an eight-year-old girl as lost as Tessa herself. But Tessa and Vince are both drawn to the town’s most beloved eatery–100 Breakfasts–and to each other. For Tessa, the restaurant is not only the key to the mystery that has haunted her life but a chance to find the home and the family she’s never known.

I’ve crept out out of the hotel room, leaving behind my sleeping roommates, and am writing this from the lobby of the Hobart Quest Hotel.  Last night, we sought out the Lark Distillery, where we sampled the local specialties, some whiskey for the others and a taste of the pepperberry (?) liquor, which one [...]]]>

I’ve crept out out of the hotel room, leaving behind my sleeping roommates, and am writing this from the lobby of the Hobart Quest Hotel.  Last night, we sought out the Lark Distillery, where we sampled the local specialties, some whiskey for the others and a taste of the pepperberry (?) liquor, which one of the guides on the hike yesterday recommended.  He gave us all a leaf to sample, sweetly peppery and pleasant (also tiny red mountain berries, which tasted like the smallest apple in the world).   I tried an alcoholic ginger beer, which didn’t taste appreciably different from the regular, and we played cards.   Rummy, for which we had three different forms of rules (imagine that! A Brit, an American, and an Australian) and listened to the Celtic band that set up.   A good time all around.  You can also play bolles on the lawn, if you’re so inclined. 

We travel to see who we are as much as to see the world.  Hiking in the dark-and-light day yesterday, I was as peaceful as it is possible to be, my feet on the trail, my pack filled with heavier clothes and water and some rations, just in case.  A knowledgable pair of guides who spend their lives outside, who know what the bushes are, and the berries and the age of the trees.  A couple out of Melbourne, just in Tassie for the weekend, trying on lives to see where they might fit.  

Sometimes I forget I am not in America, and then I’ll hear the cadence of voices around me and think peacefully, “oh, yes, this is Australia.”

Where is the writing in all this? This morning, I noted that I feel like there is fresh lava moving in me, deep and rich and hot, full of power.  But I think it’s more like the growing forest, full of new birds and plants I’ve never seen before and 800 varieties of trees that offer oxygen to the skies. 

We are headed for Uluru in the morning.  Talk about contrast!

Still working on those photos. And I realize I haven’t blogged about the conference at all, which was absolutely wonderful.