Excerpt from book:

Skinny Bitch Gets Hitched

1

How to handle a hungry crowd on a forty-minute waiting list for a table at Clementine’s No Crap Café? Have Matteo, the smoking-hot Italian maître d’, hand out sample plates of bruschetta brushed with rosemary-infused olive oil and topped with thinly sliced, lightly sautéed eggplant and tomato, along with shot glasses of my frozen white-grape smoothie. Hell yeah, it worked.

The kitchen was running an unusual twenty minutes behind on this busy Friday night. As owner and executive chef of the two-month-old vegan restaurant, I needed to be out there doing damage control in the lounge and among the tables, schmoozing it up, asking how the gnocchi was, if table six liked the Argentinean wine the waiter had recommended, and assuring tables three and seven that their entrées would be out in five minutes and dessert was on the house. Instead I was on sauté with my sous chef, Alanna, who wasn’t bringing it tonight. Alanna was usually A-game all the time. But tonight, she was forgetting ingredients, leaving the refrigerator open, knocking baskets of garlic to the floor, and snapping at everyone.

First of all, snapping at the staff was my job—not that I did much of that. I ran my restaurant the way I’d always wanted a kitchen to run. On teamwork. High morale. And precision timing. If I told you what went on in some of the kitchens I’d worked in when I was coming up from trainee to salads to line cook to sauté to sous chef, you’d swear I was exaggerating. A face pushed down into a bowl of cucumber soup because it went from just-chilled to room temperature before the waiter could pick it up. Being called a string of nasty swear words for slicing a portobello mushroom a hair too thin for a burger. Forgetting to salt the water before the pasta went in to boil? You don’t want to know what became of that guy. So just trust me. A few executive chefs I’d worked under would make a drill sergeant wet his tighty-whities.

“Plate that now, Alanna,” I said, maybe a little harshly, but she was staring into a sizzling pan of fusilli with the roasted-red-pepper sauce I’d just worked on, and it was starting to singe, as were her two other pans of yellow squash, zucchini, and eggplant for the seared-vegetable napoleons.

She blinked and shot me a “Yes, chef” with the gravitas of a saluting soldier, quickly plating the fusilli and stacking the vegetables—a little sloppily, but the napoleon still looked delicious and she had to make three more. As she hastily moved one plate over to make room for the others, the plate of fusilli clattered to the floor so loudly that my typically unflappable vegetable chef, Gunnar, glanced up, and he rarely glanced up.

“Fucking fuck, Alanna. I almost sliced off my thumb,” Gunnar shouted from across the room, a yellow squash in one hand and a sharp knife in the other. He ran his hand under the sink at his station and slapped on a Band-Aid.

“Sorry,” Alanna called to him, then went back to staring at the sautéing vegetables.

“Focus!” I shouted to everyone. I glanced at Alanna, beside me at the next station. “You okay?” I whispered. “What’s going on?”

“Fine. I’m fine. I’m plating.” She blew an escaped red ringlet of hair out of her face and quickly stacked the other three napoleons along the stainless steel counter and restarted the fusilli. At this point on the wait scale, I’d have to comp table six’s check. “Up!” she shouted, and a waiter In this second charming novel in the bestselling Skinny Bitch series surrounding the “clever and…mouth-watering story of a vegan chef with big dreams” (San Francisco Book Review), Clem Cooper juggles running her restaurant with planning the wedding to her carnivorous fiancé.

For the second time in just a few short months, Clementine Cooper’s professional reputation hinges on one restaurant review. Clementine’s No Crap Café is poised to score the Holy Grail of publicity—a mention in the New York Times Sunday travel section—if Clem’s veggietastic lasagna can bowl over the food critic.

Clem has no time for distractions. Or surprises. But when her meat-eating millionaire boyfriend Zach Jeffries shocks her with a sweet and romantic marriage proposal, of course she says yes! Now, she has to plan the most important menu of her life while fending off her domineering future mother-in-law’s extravagant plans for the wedding.

As if there wasn’t enough on her plate, Clem decides to open a second restaurant on her parents’ farm—Clem’s No Crap Outpost—against Zach’s advice. Just when she needs his support the most, Zach grows distant. The only person who really seems to understand is Clem’s friend and biggest competition, the cute vegan chef Alexander Orr. Putting out fires in the kitchen is easy—but in her relationship? Suddenly, her time with Alexander feels…hotter…than usual, and Clem starts to wonder if the charming carnivore she’s engaged to is really the man she should spend her life with.