My Gold Standard Co-Crime Sideline

Many members of the crime-writing community have other sidelines in which they excel. One famous guy grew orchids. Another explored Egyptian antiquities, some excel in the law, politics, music or art.

At least one member of our illustrious CWC Team has become a world class authority on South America and Africa! I'm dying to hear if she plans a motorized trip to Mars!

I often howl at the antics about cooking on Jungle Red Writers—so today I'm sharing with you readers my own culinary experiences.

Pardon my lack of self-effacement in this post, but I couldn't wait any longer to share with you one aspect of my S.C.S.( Superb Culinary Skills!) in … The Gold Standard Cake!

Please don't feel diminished by my superior skills in the art of cake-baking. Feel free to copy my secrets here and share with your significant others, aunts, cousins, office colleagues and neighbors—the knowledge I am about to impart on this page!

You will need a 14 K. gold Mark Cross pen to make your personal copy.

The Gold Standard Jiffy Cake

At your local grocery, buy one box of Jiffy Golden Cake Mix. ( Cost = 95 cents.) www.jiffymix.com Sold by the Chelsea Milling Company, Box 460, Chelsea, MI, 48118-0460. "Quality Value Since 1930."

Dump the contents into a shiny steel bowl. ( Any old bowl will do...) Add one egg, slightly beaten, 1/2 cup of warm tap water, stir for 30 seconds. Then beat by hand for 3-4 minutes. ( About 300 strokes ) Grease cake pan with good quality olive oil or butter. ( Real butter, not Margarine.) Pour batter in pan. Bake in 350* oven for about a tad over 20 minutes.

When the cake is done, feel it with your finger or a cool table knife, then let it cool a bit. Cut yourself a generous slice, get a stiff drink and go watch TV, while you gloat over your labors over the hot stove!

If you so desire, you can add any of the following to the pre-cooked batter: canned peaches, pears or mild fruit; sweet-oriented spices, a big swig of bourbon, Scotch, or Cointreau, nuts, raisins, prunes, chocolate chips, etc.

Whatever strikes your fancy!

When you go to the TV, it is best if you watch a program with my arch-rival Martha Stewart. Today I did this and turned to Madame herself on Ch. 13!

Lo, she was making a gourmet layer cake! Decorated with meringue frosting—would you believe! All the while telling ME the difference between Swiss meringue and Italian meringue. (Lordy, I barely know what an American meringue is!!!)

She looked right at moi and said she was making an "Absolutely divine wedding cake..." in her words... "Very simply." !!! (Ms. S., you and I have vastly different definitions of Simply)

I finished off the crumbs on my paper plate and muttered, "Lady, if you saw THIS, you'd faint right through the screen of my TV!"

So, I rushed back to the kitchen and got another piece of my glorious Jiffy cake!

P.S. No, I've not yet been invited to bake on Ch. 13…or any other food channel… But, hope springs eternal... any day now…

P.P.S. BTW, word has spread of my culinary skills … I've heard from the Princess of Wales, Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton, Jaime Dimon ( who is my neighbor - one block and $39 million away from my building!!!), Jill Biden and Kim Jong-un … to send them my Jiffy Recipe!!!

Oh, yes, Ari Emmanuel of Wm Morris Endeavor has suggested I do a mystery novel based on poisoning by Jiffy Cake... and Grand Central Publishing wants me to create a tear-out folder for all their crime novels for 2015 with my Jiffy Ideas… and the current pub of Fanny Farmer is now coming out with 1,000 and One Delightful Frosting recipes for my Jiffy Cake!

So, there's light at the end of the tunnel, gang.

Here's a Toast to Jiffy Cake!!!

Thelma J. Straw, Culinary Genius in Manhattan

( That's all, folks… aw, shucks...)

Slicing Away at the Holidays

Midnight: Thanksgiving has begun

No matter how many times I remark upon it in October, Thanksgiving always slips up on me. On October 15, I'm sure I can get it all done, and then suddenly Thanksgiving is a week away, the menu is random notes on post-its, no shopping has been done, no cleaning, and I'm thinking, Wait a minute, how did this happen? Every single year.

I continue to believe that despite having a writing career and another career that, combined, make weeks go by in which tiles have come up in the bathroom floor and I haven't noticed, I should be able to display a gift of organization and time-conjuring for which I have hitherto shown absolutely no talent whatsoever. 

Which brings me to last week. 

My husband and I doubled down, and decided on a "bridge too far" menu. We had an excuse after all. Our friend Mariann is a vegetarian, and comes to stay the weekend with us every year. She's inspired us to eat much better, so we want to give her terrific dishes at Thanksgiving, not just the same old "sides" while we eat turkey. This year, we'd outdo ourselves with a half dozen new recipes. Yes, right, new. As in never tried before, and so are guaranteed to 1) fail; or 2) provoke locked-jaw remarks because somebody didn't read the part where it said the dish had to be marinated for 6 hours; or 3) both. 

However, David decided the way to avoid this was to test the new recipes last week. On Friday, it was the potatoes au gratin. Layers of thinly sliced potatoes and onions, drenched in a sauce of cream, rosemary, thyme, sage, and grated Gruyere. Topped with grated Parmesan and baked till bubbly and crispy brown on top. 

I was upstairs in my office that evening, working the other career -- financial editing -- slicing away on some unbaked prose: "Clearly, for the one-year period two years before the observation years, the HPA experiences vary for all three periods."  (In my line of work, when they start with "clearly", get the red pencil out.)

Then from the foot of the stairs, I hear, "Honey, where are the Band-aids?"

And so we ended up in the urgent care clinic where we were seen by a rather dishy-looking doctor in a garnet turban and a nurse who called us in by asking the waiting room chipperly, "So, who's bleeding?" 

The Suspect

 

What do you do when an important digit is out of commission for days? 

You ratchet back (we do not use the phrase "cut back" around here these days). 

We decided on far fewer dishes, and recipes we'd done before. Recipes that either take little time to prepare or can be made up to the point of baking/roasting or adding the dressing the day before.

Stuffing with wild mushrooms (finished product below; it will be reheated today); cauliflower roasted and dusted with cumin and paprika; a spinach salad with pomegranate seeds and blue cheese. 

I made cranberry sauce (shown here at 9am Wednesday morning, simmering for 10 mins with sugar, before cooling and being folded around orange slices and zest). It's so easy. Raises a person's confidence when there's still all that cleaning and table-setting to do. If you make cranberry sauce from scratch, just make sure the oranges are sweet. Save the bitterness for your relatives. 

Uh, yeah, we are doing the potatoes au gratin, too. Hey, it was creamy sauce with cheese. You understood that part, right?

And the assailant was released from custody yesterday as part of a work-release program due to extenuating circumstances (the finger guard had been ignored). 

So, I'm headed to bed.  With visions of store-bought pecan pie dancing in my head. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sheila York & David Nighbert

Copyright 2014

Martha Burned my Turkey

To be clear about this, I roast a turkey very seldom. They are heavy great birds, and I am no spring chicken anymore, to be slinging heavy great birds around the kitchen. Still, the idea of placing a perfectly roasted turkey before my adoring relatives continues to grip me from time to time. I fell for it again this year.

You must understand that I don't particularly like turkey. Harold positively detests it, preferring ham, which I hardly ever cook for him anymore since I'm persuaded that the nitrites will make him sick. But, a fresh turkey, carefully prepared, without that rancid turkey fat taste that one gets from a turkey that was frozen several years ago! That might be fit to eat. So, feeling the turkey itch again, and having invited all my local relatives to Thanksgiving dinner, I turned to the kitchen shelf Harold built some years ago to hold our recipe books, now groaning under the huge collection. Among the magazines I found a copy of the November 2005 issue of Martha Stewart Living, subtitled Thanksgiving 101, with ravishing pictures of pies on the cover. Martha would tell me how to do a turkey.

And so I embarked upon the Martha Stewart turkey adventure.

It began with brining the turkey. Eighteen pounds was about right for eight or nine people, she said. I pre-ordered a fresh Butterball from the Giant. It was quite reasonably priced, I thought, considering that fresh turkeys were scarce this year, according to rumor. Then I prepared the brine according to Martha's recipe. You would think, brine, that's salt water, right? But Martha's brine called for way more sugar than salt, as well as peppercorns, herbs, and a whole lot of chopped vegetables. I think I spent a couple of hours chopping vegetables. You bring the "brine" to a boil and let it cool completely.

Completely, she said. But how cool is that, really? The turkey has to sit in the brine for 24 hours. The clock was ticking. While the "brine" was still lukewarm I unwrapped my Butterball, rinsed it, and patted it dry. The packaging material claimed that the bird had been brined already, but I told myself that their brine could have been nothing like Martha's. I was sure, for instance, that they hadn't put in chopped leeks. I would brine the turkey again. If a little is good a lot is better, my father used to say.

The following morning found me wrestling the bird onto the rack for stuffing and roasting. "Tuck the wings under the body," Martha advised, but this was easier said than done; the turkey seemed to be suffering rigor mortis, and the wings refused to do anything other than stick out awkwardly on either side of the huge puffy breast. Never mind. Once I had draped it all with butter-and-wine-soaked cheesecloth, as Martha recommended, all would be well. But I found that the old package of cheesecloth I was counting on had been used for a nest by little bugs. I threw it out. No cheesecloth, then. I did what my mother had always done, which was to smear butter all over the turkey skin and put it in the oven like that. Naked.

Martha said, begin by roasting the turkey at 425 degrees for 30 minutes. I set the timer and settled down for some much-needed rest with a good Georgette Heyer regency novel, Lady of Quality, whose plot, truth be told, is pretty much like that of Sprig Muslin, but hey. A great read. I was so absorbed in it that I didn't notice the black smoke rolling out of the kitchen door.

When the timer went off I went back into the thick air of the kitchen and opened the oven door, only to see the ends of the turkey's wings burnt off and the skin all blackened and scorched. Horrors. And three more hours before the inside would be cooked.

"Martha!" I cried. "What have you done?" In a panic I turned the oven down to 325, rather than the 350 she recommended, and basted the scorched bird ineffectually. "Nuts to you then," I muttered. After that I ignored all Martha's advice and used my own judgment. Later I turned the oven back up to 350 and basted the turkey some more. When the meat thermometer said it was done I got Harold to take it out of the oven.

I put the turkey platter on the table with the blackest parts away from the family. They were happy with it; they all said they liked their turkey well-cooked. When I had a bite I was happy with it, myself. It didn't taste like turkey. The meat was moist and in fact quite delicious, and tasted enough like ham to please even Harold. But the poor bird looked as if it had been though a terrible fire. I didn't have the heart to put the garnishes around it that Martha had suggested, the crabapples (go find crabapples these days, I was going to use kumquats) or the sage leaves. I'm sorry I didn't think to take a picture of it for you before we ate it all up.

You'll be happy to know that turkey stuffing makes a very tasty breakfast.

© 2013 Kate Gallison

Right Now, Write Now…and Cook Dinner Too

I got an idea the other day, out of the blue. That’s the way they come. One minute you’re trying to get to your exit across three lanes of speeding traffic because that’s how New Jersey highway engineers thought it should be done, and the next, you know how your heroine will catch the killer.

When I got home, I was inspired. I had to, had to sit down and write. But it was my turn to cook dinner and I hadn't been to the store. I was saved because my husband, David, is a writer, too, and he said, sure go on, go write. And I did. But later, I began to think about what a writer does when she comes home inspired but has hungry kids waiting and no one to cook for them. Put off writing for a couple of hours? Or order a pizza stuffed with something only chemically related to real cheese?

I shared this thought with David while slurping down my second helping of his vegetable soup, made magically with whatever he'd found in the crisper and pantry. I asked whether it would be possible for a writer to cook a homemade meal that kids would eat and be out of the kitchen in, say, thirty minutes and headed for the computer? Here, my darlings, mommy cooked real food for you; now I’m taking a plate upstairs, so put on a movie and don’t bother me.

I said, “Not 30 minutes in TV-cooking-show time, where the prep staff cuts everything up while the host is getting hair and eyeliner. I mean 30 minutes in real-person time.”

He said, “Would this include actually reading the recipe first? And getting your equipment together?”

Right. Cooking-show and cookbook estimates never take that into account either.

I said, “What could you give me?”

He leaned over and wiped some soup off my chin. “Thirty-five, forty at the outside.”

And he did it. Twice.

The two recipes he adapted (and appear at the end of this blog) are hearty one-dish meals, with few utensils and simple instructions, and have ingredients relatively easy to find. Most of the ingredients also have a long shelf life and so could be easily on hand in pantry or freezer for the next inspiration emergency. Even the greens and the thyme can keep well for quite awhile in the refrigerator.

If your kids are ravenous teens, hand them a pint of cherry tomatoes and a loaf of bread, too. Tell them to wash the first and toast the second. Welcome to writer side dishes, kid!

Here's the farfalle. And no, I didn't take this picture. I took a picture of a picture. You learn fast how much work it is to make real food look as good as it tastes in a photo. This is from a Martha Stewart cookbook called Fresh Flavor Fast. Good book. But try saying that title three times fast.



The chorizo shot is also grabbed from its source, the February 2013 Bon Appetit. 

My husband, David F. Nighbert, has begun migrating his backlist to e-books on Kindle and Nook. The mysteries (starred Kirkus reviews) Strikezone, Squeezeplay & Shutout are up now. And two SF novels, Timelapse & Clouds of Magellan, will be available soon. I highly recommend all!

This picture of us was taken by friend photog Mariann Moery as guests were arriving for the launch party for Death in Her Face at Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan last fall. (If you look closely, you can spot Annamaria headed for the bar just beyond the man with the green bag strap on his shoulder to the left.)

We tried to create the recipes below as links to printable versions, but it's beyond the reliable skill of this blog tool (or maybe this blogger). But a simple cut and paste into Word will do the trick for you.  

Sheila York

Farfalle with Arugula and White Beans

Ingredients	Utensils
Coarse (kosher) salt and freshly ground pepper	Dutch oven (with lid) big enough for at least 5 qts water
12 oz farfalle (bow-tie) pasta (about 6 cups dry)	Chef’s knife & cutting board
4 Tbsp unsalted butter, cut into 1-Tbsp slices	Colander
4 small to medium garlic cloves, peeled and thinly sliced	Small skillet
1 pound baby arugula	Small plate to cool walnuts
1 can (15.5 oz) cannellini beans, drained and rinsed	Wooden cooking spoon
1/3 cup walnut pieces, toasted, for garnish [Keep toasted walnut pieces on hand. They’re nice additions to simple salads]	Measuring cup with pouring lip

Gather all your ingredients and utensils before starting your food prep.
1.	Start bringing 5 quarts of water to a boil over high heat in large covered Dutch oven. (Pasta is happier if it has plenty of water to swim in.) This is what takes time, so put the pot on your strongest-heat burner and keep it covered till water boils.
2.	While waiting, do your ingredient prep: Peel and slice garlic; rinse and drain beans in colander; cut butter using the 1 Tbsp markers on the wrapping; chop walnuts into pieces if they didn’t come that way.
3.	Toast walnuts. Heat a small heavy skillet over medium heat for a minute. Add walnut pieces. Shake the skillet occasionally to keep walnuts from burning. After 2-3 minutes, transfer walnuts to a plate to cool.
4.	When water boils, add a generous amount of salt (about 4 Tbsp) and the pasta. Bring water back to a boil (cover the pot to make this happen faster). Cook pasta, pot uncovered, stirring occasionally to make sure pasta doesn’t stick together or to the bottom. Cook according to the timing on the package till it is al dente. (You’ll have about 10 mins here to get out your plates and flatware, and finish any ingredient prep) When pasta is done, reserve ½ cup of the pasta water and set it aside. Then drain pasta; leave in colander.
5.	In the now-empty Dutch oven, heat 1 Tbsp of the butter over medium heat, then add the garlic. Cook, stirring, 1-2 mins. Do not brown the garlic.
6.	Add the arugula, handfuls at a time, and stir/toss just till wilted, a couple of minutes.
7.	Add beans, pasta and remaining 3 Tbsp of butter; season with salt and pepper.
8.	Heat, tossing, till butter is melted and beans and pasta are warmed through, about 1 minute. While doing this, add enough of the pasta water slowly to create a thin sauce. You will not need all the water.
9.	Check seasoning; adjust as necessary. Serve in shallow bowls and garnish with the walnuts.

Adapted from Fresh Flavor Fast, copyright 2010 Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia

Chorizo and White Bean Stew

Ingredients	Utensils
2 Tbsp olive oil, divided [‘divided’ means you won’t use it all at once]	Large Dutch oven
1 lb. chorizo (buy it precooked). You can use other spicy, precooked sausages (Italian, andouille, etc.)	Wooden cooking spoon
1 large onion, thinly sliced	Tongs to turn sausage & remove thyme
4 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped	Colander
1 sprig fresh thyme. [How much is a ‘sprig’, you ask? The equivalent of three 3-inch leafy pieces works for us]	Chef’s knife & cutting board
2 cans (each 15.5 oz) cannellini beans, rinsed, drained	Small plate
2 cups low-sodium chicken broth	Measuring cup with pouring lip
5 oz baby spinach (about 10 cups).	Measuring spoons
Kosher salt, freshly ground pepper
Smoked paprika (optional)

Gather all your ingredients and utensils before starting your food prep.
1.	Heat 1 Tbsp of oil in large Dutch oven over medium heat. Add precooked sausage and brown, turning occasionally, 5-8 minutes.
2.	While sausage browns, slice onion; chop garlic; rinse/drain beans in colander.
3.	Transfer sausage to a plate. Leave fat from sausage-browning in the pan. Still over medium heat, add remaining 1 Tbsp oil to same Dutch oven (2 Tbsp might be necessary if the sausage did not leave much fat). When oil/fat is heated, add onion slices, garlic and thyme sprig. Cook, stirring occasionally, till onion is softened, about 5 minutes.
4.	Add beans and broth, and cook 8-10 minutes, crushing a few of the beans with the back of a wooden spoon to slightly thicken the sauce. While this is cooking, slice the chorizo and collect plates and flatware.
5.	Season stew with salt and pepper
6.	Add spinach in handfuls and cook till just wilted, about 2 minutes.
7.	Fold chorizo into the stew; Add a bit of water to thin, if desired.
8.	Remove thyme sprig (if you can find it). Divide stew into bowls, sprinkle with the paprika if you choose, and serve

Adapted from Bon Appetit magazine, February 2013. The original recipe calls for fresh sausage, which would take longer to cook. We’ve been able to find spicy, precooked sausage at our regular grocery store.