Day 4: Bacon and Biscuits

Feeling hungry? Sarah Prineas is doling out some viritual biscuits and bacon for breakfast along with the reasoning behind her fattening yummy obsession.

So…biscuits? Bacon?

Yes, there's a whole biscuit subplot running through the three MAGIC THIEF books. Biscuits dripping with butter, and biscuits with bacon, and biscuits with cheese and jam, and stale biscuits dunked in tea, and biscuits used as bait to catch a dragon…

In the appendices at the back of book one, there are even two biscuit recipes. One you'd want to make, the other you'd want to make and then feed to your dog (if you didn't like your dog).

There is a reason for the biscuit plot. Before he gets involved in magical doings, my protagonist, Conn, was a "gutterboy"—a street kid who made his living picking pockets and locks in the Twilight, the bad part of town. Because he hasn't always gotten enough to eat, he's a little obsessed on the subject of food.

Unlike Benet, the biscuit-baking bodyguard/housekeeper from the book, I am not much of a chef. The Pillsbury dough-boy makes the biscuits at my house. But I do know how to cook bacon.

There is an art to it, if you have the patience. You want the bacon nice and crispy, but not burnt, and once the bacon grease gets hot, burnt can happen very fast. I learned how to cook bacon from a friend. What you do is, get a cast-iron pan. Open the bacon package. Throw the bacon in, all in one lump. Cook on very low heat for, like, an hour. Drain it on a paper towel. Save the bacon grease to put on the dog's biscuits.

On the day I signed the book contract with HarperCollins, can you guess what the Prineas family had for dinner?

Now that we've stirred up some some unrelenting cravings in you, make sure to swing by tomorrow when Sarah talks about a book that gave her a whole new perspective on editors.