Author Judy Alter returns today with
a new recipe and a new book in her Blue Plate Murder Mystery series. The series
is set in a small East Texas town with the setting modeled after a restaurant
that was one of her family’s favorites for years. Learn more about Judy and her
books at her website and her Judy’s Stew and Potluck with Judy blogs.
Murder at the Tremont House, the sequel to Murder at the
Blue Plate Café, features a love
triangle, a cooking school, a kidnapping, a broken marriage, and a lot of
adventure before the threads of this mystery are untangled, and Wheeler can go
back to being a peaceful small town. If it ever does. But food is always an
important part of life in Wheeler, and particularly in the life of Kate Chambers,
proprietor of the Blue Plate Café.
The Blue
Plate Café is a typical small-town café—you can find them in East Texas, West
Texas, the Midwest, and such western states as New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona.
They are casual restaurants, usually with a counter and some tables, where
farmers, ranchers, and townfolk come in blue jeans to eat down-home
cooking—hamburgers, fried chicken, chicken-fried steak, meatloaf, mashed
potatoes, turnip greens—all the things you mostly associate with country ways
and food.
When Kate
Chambers inherits the café on the sudden death of her grandmother, Johnny
Chambers or Gram, she continues the menu, including Gram’s wonderful sticky
buns, which usually had a waiting list by the time they were ready in the
morning. She serves humongous breakfasts with eggs, steak, potatoes and
biscuits, and she carries on Gram’s tradition. But gradually she works in some
offerings that Gram didn’t serve—chicken and tuna salads, for instance. And she
begins to make her own potato salad instead of buying pre-made in quantity. She
cultivates fresh greens for dinner salads, and makes her own dressings.
Much as
Kate loves the café and cooking the foods she learned as a child from Gram,
there’s another culinary side to her. She appreciates fine food, so a trip to a
high-end restaurant in Dallas is a treat as is a homemade dish, such as veal
piccata.
When twin
sister Donna, who runs The Tremont House B&B, decides to offer gourmet meals,
Kate sees trouble ahead. She stops by Donna’s one morning to find her in a
tizzy, her kitchen a mess, with every pot and pan dirty. Donna is trying to
make Coquilles St. Jacques. In French, the dish is simply scallops, but in this
country it denotes poached scallops and mushrooms, covered with a rich sauce
made from the poaching liquid, and served with mashed potatoes, preferably
piped around a special shell-shaped dish. It’s not a recipe for the
faint-hearted, but Kate rescues Donna’s disaster and announces she has a fine
dish to serve her husband that night. Donna says, “He doesn’t eat seafood.”
Kate takes the dish home and serves it to one of her beaux.
Inevitably
Donna coerces Kate into conducting a cooking school at the B&B, and Gram,
from beyond, urges Kate to help her sister. Kate decides the challenge is to
fix dishes the women of the town can master and the men will eat. She chooses
Beef Wellington made easy, Chicken piccata (veal being hard to get in a small
town), chicken enchiladas with tomatillo sauce, shepherd’s pie, and quail and
dirty rice. Below is her recipe for quail—she figured ever woman in town knew
how to stuff a jalapeño in a quail, wrap it with bacon, and grill. She’d give
them something different for those quail the hunters brought home. And she
stressed the hunters had to clean the birds, including getting the birdshot out
of them.
Quail with Green Grapes
Ingredients:
one or two
birds per person—use your best judgment.
salt and
pepper
green
grapes
butter
bacon
strips
white wine
Salt and
pepper each bird inside and out. Then stuff cavity with green grapes and 1
Tbsp. butter. Wrap each with a slice of bacon and secure with toothpicks. Put
in baking dish and pour white wine over all. Cover and bake 1-1/2 hours at 325o.
Uncover and brown. Garnish and
serve on warm platter with dirty rice.
Dirty Rice
(Serves 4.
Can be doubled.)
Ingredients:
1/2 cup
long grain rice
2 cup
chickens broth
1/2 cup ground pork
1/2 cup ground pork
1 cup
chicken livers (optional)
2
tablespoons vegetable oil
three
slices bacon, chopped
1/2 onion,
chopped
2 stalks
celery, diced
1 jalapeño,
seeded and chopped (optional)
Cajun
seasoning
Salt and
pepper
Green onions
Cook rice
in 2 cups water and 1 cup chicken broth; remove from heat and let sit 5
minutes. While rice is cooking, mash and finely chop chicken livers—or pureé
quickly in food processor. Put 1 tablespoon vegetable oil in large skillet, add pork and bacon and cook until bacon is crisp.
Put another
tablespoon oil in skillet and add onion, celery, and optional jalapeño. Add minced
liver and cook until pink disappears. Add 1 cup chicken broth and scrape the
bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon. Add 1 tablespoon (or to taste) of Cajun
seasoning. Add salt and pepper as needed. Boil until most of broth disappears.
Add cooked rice and toss. Garnish with green onions.
Murder at The Tremont House
When
free-lance journalist Sara Jo Cavanaugh arrives in Wheeler to do an in-depth
study of Kate’s town for a feature on small-town America, Kate senses she will
be trouble. Sara Jo stays at her sister Donna’s B&B, The Tremont House, and
unwittingly drives a further wedge into Donna’s marriage to Wheeler’s mayor Tom
Bryson. And soon she’s spending way too much time interviewing high school
students, one young athlete in particular. Police chief Rick Samuels ignores
Kate’s instinct, but lawyer David Clinkscales, her former boss from Dallas,
takes it more seriously.
Sara Jo
arouses animosity in Wheeler with the personal, intrusive questions she asks,
and when she is found murdered, the list of suspects is long. But Kate heads
the list, and she must clear her name, with the help of David and Rick. A
second murder confirms that someone is desperate, and now Rick is convinced
Kate is in danger.
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4 comments:
It'a only 7:48 in the morning and I'm now salivating for some quail!
Whoa, Judy, I may try this with Cornish game hens. Quail are California's state bird and hunting them is frowned on by Fish and Game, LOL!
I'll keep an eye out for Murder at Tremont House, sounds like a curl up and read book!
Janie, I used to eat my quail grilled with--gulp--ranch dressing, but this is so much better. Michele, in Texas, people hunt them; much more civilized to buy at a specialty or upscale market--and you don't have to clean them and pick buckshot out. The ones I get are semi-boned. Grapes and wine keep them moist But it would work with Cornish game hens.161 36882496
Sounds like a really fun series to read, Judy. I love cozies and all things food, so this is right up my alley. Will check your books out!
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