Carle-Sanders - Outlander Kitchen: the Official Outlander Companion Cookbook

FOREWORD

F ood disappears all the time...

Especially when you have small children, teenage boys, husbands, girlfriends, or holiday guests, but even when youre home alone, the siren song of savory snacks echoes faintly behind the refrigerator door.

The fact is that every living thing has to eatand people being the inventive creatures they are, we seldom settle for grubs from under the nearest rock or even raw salmon swatted out of a stream. No, we like our food varied, imaginative, tasty. And usually cooked. Hence the constant demand for something new and delicious.

My first encounter with Theresa Carle-Sanders was some years ago, when she emailed me to ask my permission to use brief quotes from my novels in conjunction with her website. A professional chef with a beautiful (and mouthwatering) website, she had become intrigued with all the mentions of food in the Outlander novels, and wanted to explore some of these dishes: inventing or adapting recipes, then posting the results with instructions, photos, and videos, with a relevant quote from one of the novels alongside.

Cool! I said. Why not?

Theres something rather odd about the Outlander novels. People who read them seem to be creatively inspired to do all manner of wonderful things.

To this point in my career, Id had people ask permission to name racehorses, show dogs, and even a housing development after my books, or the people, places, and objects in them. Creative fans had composed ballads, symphonies, and band arrangements based on the books; there was even a CD, Outlander: The Musical. People make amazing jewelry, Christmas ornaments, standing-stone birthday cakes, and lighted Halloween pumpkins carved with a back view of Jamie Fraser in the nude. To say nothing of soaps, candles, herbal concoctions, Lord John Grey tea, and La Dame Blanche wine. A cooking websiteeven one with recipes like Stephen Bonnets Ballsseemed refreshingly normal.

Speaking of Stephen Bonnets Balls... I met Theresa for the first time in the flesh when she came to a book signing at a writers conference in British Columbia, bearing a green glass pot filled with said ballsdelicious pretzel balls, filled with bittersweet chocolate. Had I had any doubts as to her bona fides as a chef, they would have vanished in an instantjust like Stephen Bonnets Balls did....

For several years now, Ive watched with fascination (and the occasional salivary spasm) as Theresa has gone from Mrs. Fitzs Porridge to Rolls with Minced Pigeon and Truffles, Roast Beef for a Wedding Feast, and Murphys Mock-Turtle Soup (with plenty of sherry, to be sure). A wonderful cook and an equally talented food writer, her recipes and adaptations are nearly as entertaining to read as they are to eat.

With so much excellent material available, Theresa had been wanting to do an official Outlander Kitchen cookbookand I was all for it. We were advised, though, that it would be best to wait until the television showthen in the early negotiating stageswas aired, in order to assure the best visibility for the new project. The STARZ original show Outlander is the latest and most visible part of the evolving creative phenomenon, and Im happy to say that its not only been a delight in itself but has definitely paved the way for this wonderful cookbook finally to reach its audience.

Food is, of course, a matter of passionate interest to everyone. Tastes may differ, but not the basic need, the appetite for food. And one needs no explanation for the swift disappearance of any food prepared from this delicious and imaginative collection.

Congratulations, Theresa!

Diana Gabaldon

Introduction

I have always been a reader. And a cook.

My mom read to me in the cradle, priming me for a life of adventure both on and off the pages. Decades before anyone had heard of the 100-Mile Diet, my dad was a champion of fresh, local ingredients. I tagged along wherever he went, whether to Chinatown for live prawns fresh from the boats, the farm stands outside Vancouver for just-picked fruits and vegetables, or to the neighborhood bakery for bread on weekend mornings. I was his Sunday-breakfast sous-chef almost every weekend until I moved out on my own.

I filled out an application for culinary school right out of high school, but instead I listened to my wanderlust and spent five years traveling across much of Europe and Asia between bouts of work and study. By the time I got back from my last trip, now with a long-distance English fianc, dreams of cooking school had been forgotten, and I was told by many around me that it was time to grow up and get a job.

No one, least of all me, really remembers how, but seven years later, at thirty years old, I found myself an operations manager for a multinational transportation company. A good jobeven an enviable onemy boss was great, my employees too. I had a competitive salary, benefits package, and even my very own, much-prized parking space in Vancouvers downtown core.

There are no words to describe how incompatible I was for that job. The 24/7, at-all-costs pursuit of guaranteed on-time package delivery did not call to my soul, and my dissatisfaction spilled over into my personal life. I went from a happy, somewhat-sociable bookworm to an anxious, prematurely gray thirtysomething who hid at home between shifts, unable even to enjoy the comfort of my books.

Eventually, after a drama-filled encounter with an unhappy customer put me over the edge one afternoon, I gathered my courage and, with the encouragement of my husband, Howard, threw that job away, as well as the stress, grief, and cell phone that went with it. I cashed in my retirement savings to temporarily replace my salary, began a daily yoga practice, remembered how to breathe deeply, and walked into a bookstore for the first time in years. Thats where I discovered Outlander and its creator, Diana Gabaldon.

Since then, the Frasers have accompanied me on every step of this less-than-conventional path that Howard and I chose; our spontaneous move to Pender Island in the Salish Sea between Vancouver and Victoria; the years of menial jobs we worked to build a life here; the unexpected death of my father; and my journey to a weeklong silent retreat in Maine, where, sitting on a rise in the middle of an empty meadow, staring at fields of grass under a sun mid-sky, the missing piece finally slotted into place.

Outlander and its sequels also came with me three short weeks after I got home from Maine, when I moved back to Vancouver and in with my mother to finally attend culinary school almost twenty years after filling out my original application.

Claire and Jamie were also most certainly walking beside me a couple of years later, when a certain tray of rolls with pigeon and truffles from Madame Jeannes popped into my head while hiking in the woods with the dog. By the time I got home I had a recipe half written in my head, and an idea for a food-related interview with Diana. I emailed that interview, and a request to use the pigeon roll excerpt from Voyager, off to her Canadian publicist that afternoon. Dianas very generous response the next day was the birth of Outlander Kitchen.

Life got even more interesting in 2013 when the STARZ channel announced a TV adaptation of the Outlander series. After I made a trip down to San Diego Comic-Con and posted a series of five suggested