Pen, Spoon & Dagger

It’s the end of the week and time to clean out the refrigerator. Sometime, in a past life maybe, I must have been hungry because I tend to keep my refrigerator chock-a-block full.  My mother was the original frugal gourmet and passed on the gene. I refuse to throw anything out.  I may end up feeding it to the dog, but I won’t throw out perfectly good food.   It wasn’t until I attended Johnson & Wales one summer that I realized my idiosyncrasy could be a good thing.  During my course, every Friday was dedicated to making restaurant quality (and priced) meals out of leftovers.  Nirvana! A string of chefs unveiled the mysteries of $35 leftovers.  I learned the secrets of crepes, manicotti and quiches, not to mention soups, roulades, pates and terrines – all good ways to use up leftovers.   Over the years, I’ve discussed this philosophy with friends and come up with one basic, undeniable truth: you need to cook good meals to have good leftovers. Not n...

I don't know where you're sitting at the moment, but I'm in a cold, wet house (too early in the year to turn on the heat), watching the rain drizzle down.  Last week we were 4 inches below normal for rainfall, this week we've made up the shortfall and pulled ahead by two inches.  Need I say more. This kind of weather makes me thing of one thing: soup.  So here's my cure for the rainy day blues. Butternut Squash and Apple Soup   (Serves 8 generously)     You can vary the spices any way you like.  If you don't like heat, start with just 1/2 tsp cinnamon and 1/2 tsp cumin with black pepper to taste.   2 Tbs    unsalted butter   1 1/2 cups    sliced leek, white and pale green parts only   1 Tbs    minced garlic   6 cups    peeled and roughly diced butternut squash   3 cups    peeled and roughly diced apples   ...

Sometimes writing can actually  save you time - especially if your primary character is a caterer. Most days, I carve out an hour or two to write, or do research, fitting the time in whenever I can.  Sound familiar?  Good writing takes time, and that's time taken away from everything else we need to do - like laundry, holding down a job to pay the bills, etc.  I don't regret the time, I just wish there were more hours in the day. Generally I look to my life for inspiration for my writing, but this week I'm going the opposite way.  My current WIP has the protagonist faced with catering a huge cocktail party - a senate campaign launch..  The first thing she has to do is decide on a menu, and then prepare the food for 150 hungry people -- all in 24 short hours. As life would have it, I'm planning an open house/cocktail party in celebration of my mother's 90th birthday this month.  Who better to consult than my own character?  The menu is alrea...

I'm never at my best when I'm preoccupied, which happens a lot when I'm focusing more on the plot twists in my mystery than on the ingredients in my recipe. Yesterday evening, I was faced with the dilemma of sitting down and getting a really great idea down on paper, or making dinner.  Hungry mouths tipped the scales.  Not having shopped in several days, I raided the fridge and found left over chicken and a box of shitake mushrooms.  Perfect, chicken crepes it is!  After a short whirr in the blender, the batter went into the fridge to rest while I prepped everything else and made the Mornay sauce, all the while wondering how my antagonist (a young woman) learned to cut the brakelines on a truck. Eventually it was time to make the crepes.  I grabbed the revered family crepe pan -- the one with the special dimples and blue lining my mother hand-carried home from Paris some 50 years ago and set it to heat.  A quick brushing of butter and I was ready to l...

Jessica Faust posted a blog the other day which caught my imagination. If you could have dinner with any 4 authors, who would you choose? She admitted the idea was stolen from her client Jennifer Stanley and her Cozy Chicks blog , and I admit to continuing the "theft." But what a great idea. So here's my question: What four authors dead or alive would you want to have dinner with? And what would you serve? Here are my picks: Jane Austen - not only did she write some of my favourite books, but her skill at characterization -- particularly considering the restrictions placed on women in her day -- is second to none. Julia Child - I'm a foodie, need I say more? Not only is she a female and a pioneer in the culinary world, but her life story is amazing. And maybe, while she's here, she can teach me to make the perfect omelet - a skill I cannot seen to master. JK Rowling - anyone with an imagination like hers has to be an entertaining dinner guest. A ra...

As a dedicated foodie, I seek out not only food related mysteries, but also cookbooks and other novels/memoirs/etc. that focus on food and the culinary arts.  I just finished Nicole Mones' The Last Chinese Chef , and I will never look at Chinese food the same way. What a pleasant read.  Mones weaves a credible romantic plot with incredible insights into the history and philosophy of Chinese food. Food writer Maggie McElroy,  a widowed American food writer, is suddenly confronted with a paternity claim against her late  husband's estate--by a Chinese family claiming their granddaughter has inheritance rights. Maggie travels to Beijing with dual purposes: to write an article about a rising young Chinese-American-Jewish chef, Sam Liang, and to discover the truth of her husband's possible daughter. Along the way she meets much of Sam's family, including his Beijing uncles and the Hangzhou uncle -- a raucous, loving, argumentative bunch of foodies who advise Sam abo...