When I first came across www.robin-ellis.net, I was immediately entranced….

Mainly, I guess, because Robin loves cooking and his passion for real, good food comes over with every post on his blog.

I was so impressed that I resolved to review the site for your benefit at the soonest opportunity!

However, I then discovered that not only had Robin written a book (it’s already on my Christmas Pressie list!) but also…

He is a world famous actor!

And, as well as his many other thespian conquests, he played what, to my mind anyway, was the leading role in the very first episode of possibly the finest television comedy series ever broadcast!

Delicious Dishes for Diabetics – The Mediterranean diet is now recognised as one of the healthiest in the world. Robin Ellis shows how by simply following such guidelines as eating plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables, cooking with olive oil not butter, seasoning food with herbs and spices rather than salt, avoiding red meat, excluding foods such as white potatoes, white rice and white bread, by limiting dairy products and eating fish or shellfish at least twice a week, those with type 2 diabetes can help to improve their blood sugar levels and enjoy wonderful tasty dishes every day of the week. His recipe collection includes such favourites as Chicken Breast with Lemon and Caper Sauce, North African Lamb with Apricots and Bulgar Wheat, Simple Sea Bass, Pot Roasted Pork with Dried Mushrooms and Juniper Berries, Spaghetti in Walnut Sauce, to name just a few.

For more information, or if you wish to purchase…

As it’s been way too long since I’ve had my grubby little hands on a real live author (and actor, to boot!), I decided there was only one polite thing to do!

A famous (or should that, by now, be infamous) A Taste of Garlic Interview…..

But, before we go on to that, I feel it only fair to warn you that what follows contains scenes of gratuitous nudity (well, only one scene really but our budget doesn’t stretch to much!) and a video clip that will make you laugh until you pee your panties!

And, for any English women who, shall we say, have left their teenage days behind….

I can reveal that Robin Ellis is also the man you may well have lusted over in your younger years!

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When I reviewed Marilyn Z. Tomlins’ blog on the 20th of September 2010 I mentioned that she has written a book.

I  found that she had also written about a nice recipe for Espadon (swordfish) which is in a post that also details fish fed on the urine of pregnant women!

I remember wondering, at the time, how the recipe for that one goes?

First find a pregnant woman, take your fish in one hand and then tickle the pregnant woman until she pees?

But it’s the book that I’m more interested in at the moment.

It’s rather interesting because instead of writing about jacking in the job, selling the kids, packing the TV in the back of the Volvo to start a new life in rural France, Marilyn has written a book all about the French WW2 serial killer, Dr. Marcel Petiot

The book’s title is DIE IN PARIS.

A spring night in Paris. The most beautiful city in the world is dark and silent. Uncertainty devils the air. As does normality: War time normality. The Nazi flag flutters from the Eiffel Tower. The Parisians are huddled indoors. Suddenly the night’s stillness is shattered by sirens and excited voices. For days foul smoke has been pouring from the chimney of an uninhabited house close to the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. Police and fire fighters are racing to the house to break down the bolted door. They make a spine-chilling discovery. The remains of countless human beings are being incinerated in a furnace in the basement. In a pit in an outhouse quicklime consumes still more bodies. Neighbors say they hear banging, pleading, sobbing and cries for help come from inside the house deep at night.

They say a shabbily-dressed man on a green bike pulling a cart behind him comes to the house, always at dawn, or dusk.

The house belongs to Dr. Marcel Petiot – a good-looking, charming, caring, family physician who lives elsewhere in the city with his wife and teenage son.

Is he the shabbily-dressed man on the green bike?

If so, what has he to say about the bodies?

For more information, or if you wish to purchase…

I decided to find out more about Dr. Petiot and his biographer.

And what better way to do that than one of our famous A Taste of Garlic Interviews?

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On Saturday I mentioned www.EdibleIdioms.com, a site that I had come across that had tickled my fancy.

I felt that the author of www.EdibleIdioms.com might, in fact, be rather an interesting person.

It turns out she is!

I found out that Kimberley Lovato is a freelance writer and author who just recently landed in San Francisco, after six years in Europe.

Her travel and lifestyle writing has appeared in loads of posh publications.  For more details you ought to take a look at her website, the cunningly named www.kimberleylovato.com

Kimberley also has a very interesting blog at www.abroadinbelgium.com which, being set in Belgium rather than France won’t be reviewed here, I’m sad to say.

But, more importantly, Kimberley has written a book!

WALNUT WINE AND TRUFFLE GROVES is a culinary travel book that invites readers to pull up a chair and visit the Dordogne the way it should be visited…one bite at a time. Join author Kimberley Lovato and Chef Laura Schmalhorst as they navigate the back roads, as well as the menus and markets, with newfound excitement and a fork and knife! Through interviews with local home cooks and chefs, visits to local farms and historic sites, market tours and wineries, readers will discover the true jewels in France’s culinary crown as well as discover the country’s most beautiful and less trod-upon provinces.

Over 40 recipes dot the pages, and 80 + photos from photographer Lou Lesko bring this historic and gourmet region of France to life in a book that will have you catching the next flight to the Dordogne, or at least enjoying the journey from your own kitchen table.

For more information, or if you wish to purchase…

As it’s been quite a while since I’ve had my grubby little hands on a real live author, I decided there was only one polite thing to do!

A famous (or should that, by now, be infamous) A Taste of Garlic Interview…..

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Michael Briant is the man largely responsible for my spending most Saturday evenings of my younger days (from the age of 11 to about 21) hiding behind the sofa, most Saturday nights sleeping with the lights on and most Sunday mornings getting spanked for wetting the bed the night before!

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Born in Scotland, celebrated chick-lit author, Jenny Colgan studied at Edinburgh University before working for six years in the health service.

During this time she moonlighted as a stand-up comic.

On her website Jenny explains that “I live mostly in France, which sounds show-offy but if you saw our house you would realise it really isn’t.

My husband Andrew is a marine engineer and works a lot round here, and we have three children.

Wallace is four and likes calamari, trampolining and making loud announcements about just how he will run the world when he is Spiderman; Michael-Francis is nearly two and likes singing lalala, tucking bears under his arms and peering dubiously at new food, and Delphie is brand new and likes sleeping and the way the sun moves across the tree leaves.”

Fair enough! On to the important stuff…..

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Award-winning fashion and beauty writer, Karen Wheeler is a former Fashion Editor of The Mail on Sunday.

She has also worked as a freelance and regular contributor to the FT’s How To Spend It magazine for over a decade. She’s won the prestigious Jasmine Literary Award for writing about perfume three times and generally specialises in fashion, beauty and luxury goods trends.

And, for some reason, she left her perfectly good job and moved to France were she is currently working on her second book…. Tout Allure.

Tout Sweet

Her first book, Tout Sweet, chronicles the life of a fashion editor who has hung up her Manolos to live in rural France.  You can read some of the stupendous reviews of it here… (click on image for Amazon). During her career she has interviewed many of fashion’s top names including Karl Lagerfeld, Giorgio Armani and Calvin Klein and her work has appeared in The Daily Mail, The Sunday Times Style, ES, YOU and numerous international luxury goods magazines. Inb other words, she is probably one of the poshest people we have yet to interview for A Taste of Garlic (and probably will be until Anjelina Jolie, Carla Bruni or Charlotte Rampling get round to answering their emails!) And now, she is being interviewed, on your behalf, for A Taste of Garlic!  Lucky girl!  Lucky you!  And, I hope, lucky me!

John Dummer is probably best known for being the drummer for Darts (also writing ‘Can’t Get Enough Of Your Love’, ‘How Many Nights’ and the truly wonderful ‘Late Last Night’.)

For those youngsters amongst the readership of aTasteOfGarlic, Darts was a nine-strong, energetic doo-wop group whose brand of visual excitement and tight harmonies earned them rave reviews wherever they played.

They had a string of chart hits in the late seventies and early eighties and were one of the hardest working bands of that period.

John left Darts in 1980 and, with his wife Helen, moved to France.

After a few years there and a few years in Portugal,  they moved back to France in 1999 to renovate a 300-year-old farm in Aquitaine near a spa town called Dax.

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Carol Drinkwater is the  actress who, for many, is best known for her award winning role as Helen Herriot in the television series… All Creatures Great and Small.

Carol is, however, also a successful author who had written many books including the wonderfully interesting Olive Farm series.

All of these are available from all good bookshops or from the Amazon widget below.

Carol has her own website at http://www.caroldrinkwater.com where you can keep up with the latest news, browse the galleries of gorgeous photos and try out some of Carol’s recipes.

As soon as Carol agreed to the interview, I didn’t waste a moment. Bearing in mind the weather report I harnessed the huskies to my sleigh, borrowed an extra thick vest from a local author and put on a pair of my thickest woolie undies.

And, suitably prepared, I set off for Provence.

Unfortunately, the snow didn’t arrive and so I had to resort to sending the interview off by email.

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Joanne Harris is the internationally acclaimed author of… Chocolat, Blackberry Wine, Five Quarters of the Orange, Coastliners, The French Kitchen, The French Market and a handful of other books.

Her books are available from all good bookshops, or from the carousel Amazon bookshop thingy, somewhere on this page.

She has a very nice web site at the cunningly named… The Joanne Harris Website and is the poshest author we’ve interviewed so far at A Taste of Garlic (and probably will be for a long time – unless Peter Mayle ever gets round to answering his email.)

I was very surprised to find out that Joanne Harris doesn’t live in France.

I assumed that anyone who wrote so beautifully about France must be a resident.  But, then again, even though she has a French mother, Joanne was born in Yorkshire and, as we all know, Yorkshire lasses can be a bit proud of their place of birth.

I decided to ignore the Yorkshire bit and ask Joanne Harris for an interview anyway.

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Stephen Clarke is the world-renowned author of A Year in the Merde, Merde Actually, Merde Happens, Dial M for Merde and Talk to the Snail.

He narrowly missed out on this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature but is a sure bet for next year’s award.

He has been romantically linked to Vanessa Paradis, Emmanuelle Béart, Ludivine Sagnier and (rather generously, in my mind), Charlotte Rampling.

And, he has very  kindly agreed to put down his pen and answer a few simple questions (another world exclusive for A Taste of Garlic – another one in the eye for you, Hello magazine!)

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George East (who is to be found at George East in France – Online) very kindly consented to doing an interview for  A Taste of Garlic and, because it was raining hard, didn’t insist on my traipsing up to the outer regions of wild and windy Finistère (where I believe baby eating is the norm and strangers from other parts of Brittany are routinely kidnapped and sexually assaulted with a courgette before being marinated in cider – or is that Peckham that I’m thinking about?)

So, we did the interview by email instead.

Before I could even start by asking George if he was sitting comfortably he insisted in saying…

“Yo Keef. What a brilliantly good and funny site. Can I add it to my recommends in the new Brittany book, which will be out next year? Are we linked with your site/s, and if not can we be?”

Well,  that was nice, wasn’t it?

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