For the latest episode of Eating the Fantastic, I broke away from Balticon for lunch with Fran Wilde at a restaurant extremely close by, and in doing so ended up replicating for you an aspect of con-going I’d yet to bring to you before—the fact we sometimes get so busy at these events that it’s impossible to squeeze in a leisurely meal.

And so this is an Eating the Fantastic first—an episode recorded not just during lunch at Family Meal, but also later, back at the con over cookies from Vacarro’s (because there had to be food involved, of course), in a room set aside for kaffeklatches.

Fran is the Nebula Award-winning and Compton Crook Award-winning author of Updraft, plus the host of the Cooking the Books podcast, which has a writers + food focus just like mine.

We talked about what she lost the night she won her Nebula Award, her love for Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang, the power of poetry, why she tries to do one thing a month that scares her, her Cooking the Books podcast, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at the tables—

1) Subscribe at the iTunes store, where you can, if you’d like, also download a few of the first 13 episodes.

2) Use the RSS feed of http://eatingthefantastic.libsyn.com/rss to download episodes to the device of your choice.

3) Or … click and listen via the embed below.

And so you can follow along, here’s what we ate that day.

Chicken Pot Pie Fritters

Biscuits & gravy

Sunny side up eggs, sausage gravy, savory bread pudding “biscuit”

Omelet

With spinach, cheddar, breakfast potatoes

The next episode—currently planned to go live on Monday, August 8—will feature Cecilia Tan, who was also recorded during Balticon. And after that, I’ll share episodes with Resa Nelson, Jeffrey Ford, and F. Brett Cox, all recorded during Readercon. I’m currently scheduling my Worldcon episodes, which will involve lots of BBQ due to the con’s Kansas City location, but I’ll hold off sharing the names of my guests until next time once things have firmed up.

I hope you like this episode enough that you’ll return for those!