Peg Cochran | Hobbies and Why I Took Up Writing

I’ve never really had a hobby. My grandmother was an accomplished needlewoman (would needleperson be more politically correct?), but I never got the hang of crocheting or knitting or embroidery. I don’t scrapbook. As a matter of fact, I haven’t put any pictures in albums since around 1985 (the rest are in those photo boxes you can buy in Hobby Lobby.) I don’t collect things—unless books count…

The one thing I have always liked to do is cook (it followed naturally on the heels of my liking to eat…) And write. So far I have managed to combine my two loves— cooking and writing—in two of my series. Gigi from my Gourmet De- Lite series prepares diet gourmet meals for her clients. In my Cranberry Cove series, Monica makes all the baked goods she and her brother sell at Sassamanash Farm. Both series include recipes. Even in my Lucille series, food comes into play as Lucille is forever cooking for her family.

The stove and I were relative strangers until I got married at 21, and my husband and I had to feed ourselves not being able to afford take-out every night. I started with a “Make it Now, Bake it Later” Cookbook. We discovered one casserole we really liked (now that I think about it…ugh! Canned tomato sauce, cheddar cheese, pasta and creamed corn) so we decided to try another one. Well, with the experience I now have under my belt, I would know better but back then the fact that the recipe called for several slices of WHITE bread and several cans of those teeny tiny shrimp didn’t set off any alarm bells. It should have. Moral of the story: always keep a frozen pizza on hand for culinary disasters.

Then I discovered Julia Child—her show and her cookbooks. Her recipes are pages and pages long, but they are a textbook on how to cook. I started with the simplest dishes (hard boiled eggs anyone?) and worked my way up to actually boning a whole chicken, combining the chopped meat with other ingredients and stuffing it all back into the chicken skin for a really wow dish.

Now that I’m writing along with a full-time job I don’t have as much time to play in the kitchen. But thanks to so many years spent learning the basics, I can chop an onion in no time, whip up a sauce without having it separate and know at a glance whether a recipe is going to be a winner or a big yuck!

What are your hobbies?

About Peg Cochran

Peg Cochran grew up in a New Jersey suburb about 25 miles outside of New York City. After college, she moved to the City where she managed an art gallery owned by the son of the artist Henri Matisse. When her first daughter, Francesca, arrived, the new family moved back to the New Jersey suburbs where her second daughter, Annabelle, was born.

After her husband died, Peg remarried and her new husband took a job in Grand Rapids, MI where they now live (on exile from NJ, she likes to joke). Peg managed to segue from the art world to marketing and is now the manager of marketing communications for a company that provides services to seniors.

Her greatest love though has always been writing-particularly mysteries! She has two cozy mystery series debuting from Berkley Prime Crime-the Gourmet De-Lite series set in Connecticut and featuring Gigi Fitzgerald who provides gourmet diet meals to a select group of clients, and the Sweet Nothings Vintage Lingerie series, written as Meg London, set in Paris, TN with Emma Taylor who finds murder and mayhem in this quiet country town.

As for pets - she has a schizophrenic cat (really) named Frazzle and a Westhighland White Terrier, Reggie, who is desperately in need of losing a few pounds. But you know what they say: If your dog is overweight, it means YOU aren't getting enough exercise!

When she's not writing, Peg can usually be found cooking, which she loves. When asked to bring a dish to a potluck she invariably opts to bring dessert - partly because she loves making sweet dishes and partly because she and her husband always manage to be late so there's no point in putting them in charge of the appetizer

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About BERRIED SERCRETS

It’s cranberry picking time—in an all-new mystery series from the national bestselling author of the Gourmet De-Lite Mysteries…

When Monica Albertson comes to Cranberry Cove—a charming town on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan—to help her half-brother Jeff on his cranberry farm, the last thing she expects to harvest is a dead body.

It seems that Sam Culbert, who ran the farm while Jeff was deployed overseas, had some juicy secrets that soon prove fatal, and Jeff is ripe for the picking as a prime suspect. Forming an uneasy alliance with her high-maintenance stepmother, Monica has her hands full trying to save the farm while searching for a killer. Culbert made plenty of enemies in the quaint small town…but which one was desperate enough to kill?