Kitchen Diva Angela Shelf Medearis talks about her new book, 'The African-American Kitchen'

When Angela Shelf Medearis got married almost 34 years ago, she was still a college student.

But she was no Kitchen Diva then, back in the day.

"Honey, I could not cook!" Ms. Medearis says by phone from Austin. She didn't know much about cookery but viewed it as a bore and a chore, something to be gotten through as quickly as possible.

Ms. Medearis' older sister, Sandra, was living temporarily in Austin with the newlywed Medearises. The sisters had grown up with a mother who was an excellent cook and baker. So Sandra was frankly dismayed by her baby sister's halfhearted attempts to put something, anything, on the dinner table.

"She would tell me, 'This food is terrible,' " Ms. Medearis recalls. "So I started trying to cook."

The more she learned, the more she liked it.

"I discovered it's an art," Ms. Medearis says, "a form of expression using flavors and colors and smells" - and that aspect appealed to her creative side.

The cooking hobby grew into a self-taught culinary career that took off in 1994. Now Ms. Medearis, a.k.a. the Kitchen Diva, is the author of five cookbooks, including The New African-American Kitchen (Lake Isle Press, $21.95), published in September. She is also regarded as one of Texas' notable authors of children's literature, with 18 titles of fiction and biography published by Scholastic.

This newest work has been "a real labor of love," Ms. Medearis says. She sees The New African-American Kitchen as the most beautifully photographed of her culinary books and also as a natural culmination of years of study.

"It's been like keeping a diary in a way," she says, "a diary of my food journey. This book gave me the luxury of studying and thinking about the history of African-American food and the people who created the recipes.

"That history really appealed to me," Ms. Medearis says. "I want people to realize that many of these ingredients were not used in European culture, and weren't even used in American cooking until the Middle Passage, when Africans came over on the slave ships.

"Even words like yams and okra are words of African origin that have been embraced and absorbed into the American dialect." She uses headnotes in the book to elaborate on her ingredients' historical detail.

Ms. Medearis, in her Kitchen Diva persona, is starting a new syndicated food column and has taped 91 half-hour episodes of a new TV cooking show that she expects will air in 2009. She grew up watching Julia Child and Graham "the Galloping Gourmet" Kerr, but she's found that cooking for TV really is "a lot of work. A half-hour show means a 16- to 18-hour day of work."

Still, she says, she wouldn't mind doing a TV talk show one day. Her next book will be out in February, and it will be a departure for her, a self-help book titled 10 Ingredients for a Joyous Life and a Peaceful Home.

Or, as she describes it: "Life advice with cooking metaphors."

2 tablespoons milk 3 tablespoons Dijon mustard 4 catfish fillets (1/2 pound each) 1 cup ground pecans

Preheat oven to 500 F.

In small bowl, combine milk and mustard. Dip fillets into mustard mixture.

Coat fillets with pecans, shaking off excess.

Place fillets on greased baking sheet and bake 8 to 10 minutes.

Makes 4 servings.

PER SERVING: Calories 528 (66% fat) Fat 39 g (6 g sat) Cholesterol 107 mg Sodium 393 mg Fiber 3 g Carbohydrates 7 g Protein 38 g

SOURCE: The New African-American Kitchen by Angela Shelf Medearis (Lake Isle Press, $21.95)