Awards Season for a Debut Novel (or: scheduling for potential squee)

As I mentioned in last Thursday's post, I have a hard time finding methods of self-promotion that I'm comfortable with, but sharing excitement is one that I'm pretty much ok about. I have hopes of being about to get a fair amount of mileage out of sharing my excitement over book awards. Fortunately for writers, there are plenty of different awards out there, from the highly-specialized to broad categories, so there's plenty of excitement to go around. Since many of my readers may be unfamiliar with the details (or what various stages in the process mean) here's a brief rundown.

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Historic Cooking: Mackerel in Sauce from Apicius

Every once in a while I get the urge for fresh fish, and having a local Ranch 99 market (Asian specialty grocery store) it's all a matter of finding a day when I can purchase and cook the fish on the same day. Saturday the mackerel looked good, so when I got it home I started looking for interesting recipes and found this in Sally Grainger's Cooking Apicius:

Apicius 9.10.5 Sauce for tuna or mackerel

This sauce can be used as a marinade, then the ish can be cooked in it and finally a little can be poured over the tuna.

1/3 tsp lovage seeds
1/2 tsp celery seed
generous freshly ground black pepper
2 tsp fresh mint
1 tsp fresh rue
1 tbsp date syrup
1 tbsp honey
2 tbsp vinegar
2 tbsp olive oil
50 ml sweet white wine
mackerel fillets

For the sauce, I didn't feel like cracking a bottle of wine just for the marinade, so it was a bit thicker than it would have been otherwise. And in addition to the date syrup and honey I added a splash of saba (reduced grape juice, i.e., must). The mint, rue, and lovage seeds all came out of my garden and the saba and vinegar were Gifts from the Estates of Friends. The folks at the fish counter gutted the mackerel but nothing more. I pulled out the spine and ribs (which came out cleanly) leaving a single fillet, which I covered with the sauce, in a foil-lined pan. After a couple hours, I baked it at 350 for 15 minutes, as specified by Grainger, then served it over a bed of tofu noodles (definitely NOT a traditional Roman method).

Results: Absolutely delicious. There wasn't quite enough of the sauce (which there might have been, if I'd added the wine), but by dint of picking up some noodles and some fish with every bite, it worked out. I ate it in combination with some sorrel soup, fresh from the garden (sorrel and onion sauteed in butter, heated with chicken broth and pureed with a stick-blender, then thickened with an egg yolk and some cream).