I first met Gumbo Tales author, Sara Roahen, at the One Book One New Orleans launch party and book singing at the Latter Memorial Library. We were both overwhelmed, me by being so close a real, published author, her by the size of the crowd there to meet her. We quickly introduced ourselves, I told her I was excited about reading her book, and that was that.

The next time I saw Roahen, though, she was much more in her element. We sat in the living room of the Uptown house she and her husband, Matt, are renting while they renovate their actual home. Occasional peeps from their brand-new baby echoed down the stairs, followed by Matt's footsteps, and a laptop sat closed on the coffee table. It was a particularly appropriate setting to talk about her book of non-fiction food stories, since all of those things - the husband, the baby, the laptop - have a role in the book's journey from author's first effort to a citywide literacy tool.

Gumbo Tales was published on Mardi Gras Day of 2008, but it had been in the works for much longer. In fact, Roahen's whole life seems to have been leading her to this intersection of food and words. Even though she refused to cook as a child and teenager, Sara described herself as a lifelong "really good eater." She worked in the front of the house in restaurants through high school and college, and her work on the high school paper piqued her interest in writing. After a thoroughly intellectual college experience at St. John's University, Roahen sought solace in the kitchen.

"I was a vegetarian at that time, and I was getting really into learning how to cook my own food," Roahen remembered. "I just needed to get out of my head after [my college] experience, and I wanted to work with my hands, so I started working in restaurant kitchens. I did that for about seven years, and by that time, I was kind of burned out. It's really, really hard labor. I could do it and I enjoyed it, but I didn't have any kind of life. Every minute that I wasn't in the kitchen, I was recovering, so I decided I wasn't cut out for that physically."

Roahen then moved to New Orleans in 1999 with Matt, who had been accepted to Tulane's medical school. He had applied to multiple places, but a summertime trip to New Orleans had Roahen hoping this is where he would go.

"During the time that he was applying and interviewing," Roahen reminisced, "some college friends of ours lived down here and got married down here, and we came to the wedding. That was my first time here ever. It was Labor Day weekend; it was Decadence weekend, and oh my God, I just totally fell in love with this place. I couldn't believe it. I just felt like I had entered another world and that was the world I wanted to live in."

Naturally, it was the food that sealed the deal.

"I've told this story several times," Roahen started, "but I love it because it was my first impression. So I got off the plane - I was living in Wyoming at the time, so I came from the mountains - I get off the plane with my luggage, and I take a cab to the rehearsal dinner, which was at Zachary's, on Maple Street near the Maple Leaf. It's the same people from Lil Dizzy's. I walked in, dinner was already going on, and all of a sudden, a deep-fried porkchop appears in front of me with greens, and I think I had a Sazerac. I was just sold immediately. "I had never heard of deep-frying a porkchop. I couldn't believe that it wasn't a stunt, that this was a thing that people eat casually and don't laugh about, that this was really dinner and it wasn't a joke. I loved it," Roahen finished, with a delighted laugh.

The author had already crossed off kitchen work as a career, and a brief stint with a catering company proved that wasn't the right fit, either. Then, with a bit of luck and good timing, her St. John's University connection came in handy at the Gambit.

"The Gambit ran an ad for a restaurant critic," Roahen explained, "and I had no previous experience. I applied with a mock review of an actual meal that I had had at Dick & Jenny's. Eventually, they didn't find anyone else, and there was my resume sitting on the editor's desk. He had also gone to St. John's, so he was kind of intrigued. He told me after the fact that the reason he called me in to talk to me was because he wanted to meet someone else who had gone to St. John's, but it turned out that we formed a relationship, and I ultimately became the restaurant critic for Gambit for four-and-a-half years."

According to Roahen, the hardest part of being a food critic was finding people to eat with her. Luckily, at that point in time, her sister and brother-in-law were also living in New Orleans.

"They would eat wherever I needed to," Roahen said, "which was awesome, because when you're reviewing restaurants - nobody believes this who hasn't done it before - you've got to eat a lot of food you don't want to eat. You have to go to a lot of places, and it's hard to find a friend who wants to go eat a mediocre po'boy in Kenner, you know? There aren't a lot of people who are going to jump in the car with you for that, and they always would. They were great; they were my little guinea pigs."

If begging for company made being a food critic difficult, the silver lining - other than all the free meals, of course - was the arsenal of notes that didn't make it into her restaurant reviews. She held onto all of them, and it was the bits and pieces that didn't go into print that would become the basis for her Gumbo Tales.

"During those four-and-a-half years, I took all of my notes longhand," Roahen explained. "I didn't even know how to use a computer before I got that job. All my notes from every meal that I've eaten are longhand on legal paper in a filing cabinet. I was taking a lot of notes about other people in the restaurant, or conversations I would overhear, just the quirky things that happen around food in New Orleans that aren't necessarily part of a restaurant critique. When I think about the genesis of the book, I think about that filing cabinet a lot because it was all the stuff that I wasn't using in those notes. I wanted a way to get that out into the world."

Little did she know how much exposure her culinary insights and vignettes would soon get. After all, if you're a New Orleans author whose book focuses almost exclusively on New Orleans food culture, you could assume that your audience might be a fairly particular group of people: New Orleanians who like to eat. Such was the case for Gumbo Tales, until it was chosen by the Young Leadership Council to be this year's One Book One New Orleans read.

"It was surreal, really," Sara said of the moment she found out her book was the top choice. "Especially for a small book like this, it really makes a difference. They buy so many books; they put my book into a second printing right away and that's really significant. My editor was really pleased!"

Each year, a panel of readers take suggestions from the New Orleans community and slowly but surely whittle down the list to a few finalists. When Nghia Huynh, the YLC volunteer in charge of planning One Book, contacted Roahen to let her know her book was in the top five, she was a bit out of it, to say the least.

"I wasn't clued into the process at all," Roahen explained, "partially because I had a really rough pregnancy and was completely checked out of life for most of it. I was hospitalized three times, and it was just crazy. At one point during that, Nghia emailed me and said, 'Your book is in the top five, but we understand that you're pregnant. If your book was chosen, do you think you'd be able to participate at all in the happenings in the fall?' And I said yes, but I didn't even really remember that, because you get used to not thinking you're ever going to get picked for something like that."

Since then, Roahen has gotten to go all over the city to meet and interact with New Orleanians who are reading her book. This year's One Book One New Orleans activities roamed all over the metropolitan area, from St. Bernard to Jefferson Parish, giving her a chance to explore parts of the city that an Uptown girl might not usually visit.

"I am actively excited about how broad it is," Roahen said at the start of the reading season, "where things are happening in the city: in the Seventh Ward at Dooky Chase, in St. Bernard Parish, in Algiers, at Dillard University. That is really thrilling to me. I live Uptown, and I've done a lot of things in this area, but you just sort of get in your own little bubble. I like to leave Uptown, but you have to have an excuse, so I'm really excited about talking to people in other parts of the city."

Writing Gumbo Tales has not only given the author a chance to explore more of New Orleans, but it's cast a new light on her homestate, as well. Through her love and exploration of New Orleans' foodways, Roahen has developed a greater appreciation for the food of Wisconsin.

"When I first started writing about food and cooking, I really thought that I came from a place that didn't have its own food culture," Roahen said. "There's no wow factor up there, and I would have told you I have nothing to say about that, but it turns out that everybody has a food culture. People who only get to eat one bowl of rice a day have a food culture. So that's been an interesting discovery for me, and discovering that happened because I was writing about the food of another place."

Roahen's life after Gumbo Tales and One Book will still be food-centric. She has been working on the Southern Gumbo Trail project for the Southern Foodways Alliance, a non-profit organization that collects oral histories to preserve food cultures. Needless to say, she has heard countless gumbo recipes, gathered opinions on the great okra-file powder debate, and participated in many conversations over which restaurant ladles up the best bowl. The amount of enthusiasm Roahen oozes when discussing the topic almost begs for a sequel.

"The gumbo is the thing I will never get tired of eating, cooking, thinking, or talking about," Roahen says of what her favorite New Orleans food might be. "That was the first chapter that I wrote, that was part of my book proposal, and that was the last chapter that I finished. I worked on it over the course of three years, not constantly writing, but collecting new anecdotes or facts or finding a new gumbo and thinking, 'Oh, I have to mention this!' Really, when I finished the book, I said, 'Okay, I'm done.' I was positive I was done with gumbo for awhile, but since then? I could write another eight chapters about gumbo. The topic is endless!"

New Orleanians who read with their stomachs as well as their hearts should be so lucky.

This year's One Book One New Orleans program will close with a "Dessert with the Author" night tonight at Dillard University's Lawless Memorial Chapel. Roahen will read aloud from Gumbo Tales, and desserts from all over the city will be served. If Hubig's Pies, triple chocolate cake from Lilette, Galatoire's sweet potato cheesecake and Bee Sweet Cupcakes sound good to you, be in the chapel at 7 p.m. Be warned, though: Even after lots of the sweet stuff, Roahen's Gumbo Tales could leave you hungry for more.