Omega's Apple correspondent Robert Gray recently caught up with Annick "The Morbid Chef" Giroux, author of the new heavy metal cookbook Hellbent For Cooking. An excerpt is available below.

Q: Could you talk me through the selection process you underwent in deciding which groups to approach and request recipes from? Given the fact you were relatively unknown at the time, was it difficult to be taken seriously when requesting recipes from groups through email, MySpace or post?

Giroux: "The group selection was very important to me, as it was one of my ultimate goals to introduce people to good metal – which is not necessarily always featured in mainstream magazines. At the very beginning, I looked into my collection and wrote down the names of my favourite bands. That yielded a good amount, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss on any, so I actually went country by country on the online metal encyclopaedia (metal-archives.com) and wrote down my favourite bands’ names, websites and contract info in an Excel spread sheet. That alone took about three weeks – but it made me discover tons of new and obscure metal bands. I contacted and sent out four hundred individually written letters (by e-mail, MySpace or snail mail) and ended up with more than a hundred recipes. Of course, it was very very hard to be taken seriously at the beginning, but when I got Ian to back me up, it went much smoother as he and his publishing company was already well known in the metal scene."

Q: In an interview with AOL’s Noisecreep, you said that metalheads are “not culinary degenerates by any means”. Do you feel that’s a perception the general, non-metal loving public hold, and that your book goes to some lengths to combat that perception?

Giroux: "Oh yeah, a lot of the general public see metalheads as pizza eatin’ and beer gurgling subhumans. Although they got the beer (and sometimes subhuman) parts right, we are mostly a well-educated crowd who enjoys the finer things in life like good metal, good food, and nice artwork. The book clearly reflects this lifestyle, and I think it achieved it. At least, some people have told me that the book broke all the stereotypes they had for metal. Cool."

Go to this location for the complete interview.