Judy Alter is the author of the Blue Plate Café Mysteries, the
Kelly O’Connell Mysteries, and the Oak Grove Mysteries. Her fiction and nonfiction about women of the American West has
won numerous awards including a Lifetime Achievement Award from Western Writers
of America.
Now retired, she was for years the director of a small
academic press. She is the mother of four and the grandmother of seven and
lives—and cooks—in a cottage in Fort Worth, Texas with
her Bordoodle, Sophie. Learn more about Judy and her books at her website and
blog.
Following Mom in the
Kitchen—or Gram in the Café
Like Kate, café owner at the center of The Blue Plate
Mysteries, I learned to cook as a young child by following my mom in the
kitchen. She let me make a mess of her kitchen because she knew that was how
I’d learn. She let me follow recipes on my own, with the result I once added
nine tsp. of baking soda to a cake. I had followed the recipe carefully but
wasn’t smart enough to recognize an impossible typo. Mom taught me to
entertain, to clean up the kitchen as I went (a sanity-saving lesson), and to
love being in the kitchen, cooking, experimenting with tastes and textures.
Kate followed her beloved Gram in the café kitchen from her
early years. Gram cooked the
down-home food just right for a café in a small East Texas town—chicken-fried
steak, fried chicken, fried catfish, meatloaf, lots of grits, lots of greens,
meringue pies. Kate learned early to fix those things. But she also learned the
“tricks” of cooking—put chunks of peeled potato in a dish that’s too salty, add
sugar not salt to water when you boil corn, add a bit of vinegar to boiling
water for hard-boiled eggs, add a pinch of sugar to “finish” tomato-based
dishes like spaghetti sauce, rinse a pan with cold water before putting food in
it, always start boiling potatoes in cold water.
When Kate finished high school and headed for Dallas and the
life of a legal assistant and single girl, she took her love of cooking with
her. She moved from down-home to gourmet, growing her own herbs in a pot garden
and achieving success with such complicated dishes as Coquille St. Jacques and
Steak Diane. When Gram’s sudden death (or was it murder?) calls her back to the
town of her childhood and to the café, Kate revives the basic dishes Gram
taught her. She can make sticky buns, and meatloaf with the best of them. At
her twin sister’s urging, she even teaches cooking classes to the local
ladies—Beef Wellington, chicken piccata, chicken enchiladas, quail (all those
hunters in town), and shepherd’s pie. But she doesn’t serve those things at the
café—she sticks to the recipes she learned from Gram.
A typical special on the chalkboard at the Blue Plate Café
may feature meatloaf, Reva’s asparagus, and Louella’s rice. (Note the family
connection of many recipes—says something about the café).
Gram’s Meatloaf
1-1/2 lbs. ground
chuck
1 medium onion,
chopped
1/2 green pepper,
chopped fine (Kate substitutes chopped celery)
2 eggs, slightly
beaten
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. pepper
18 saltine crackers,
crushed
16 oz. tomato sauce
Mix well and put into
loaf pan. Optional: top with an additional 8 oz. of tomato sauce.
Bake at 350° for one
hour. Check and possibly cook for another 15 to 30 minutes.
Reva’s asparagus
2 cup asparagus (Gram
used canned, but you may use one bunch of fresh, trimmed and lightly steamed.)
1 cup sour cream
1/4 cup mayonnaise
2 T. lemon juice
Buttered breadcrumbs
Arrange asparagus in
a single layer in a small rectangular baking dish. Mix sour cream, mayonnaise,
and lemon juice and pour over asparagus. Top with breadcrumbs and bake until
topping is brown and dish is heated through.
Louella’s rice
1 cup Minute Rice
1 cup sour cream
1 cup shredded sharp
cheddar
1 can cream of celery
soup
4 oz. can chopped
chilies
Mix and bake at 350°
for 35-40 minutes.
All Blue Plate Café
Mysteries include a selection of recipes.
Murder at the Blue Plate Café
Small towns are
supposed to be idyllic and peaceful, but when Kate Chambers returns to her
hometown of Wheeler, Texas, she soon learns it is not the comfortable place it
was when she grew up. First there’s Gram’s sudden death, which leaves her
suspicious, and then the death of her married sister’s lover. Kate runs Gram’s
restaurant, the Blue Plate Café, but she must defend her sister against a
murder charge, solve the murders to keep her business open, and figure out
where the café’s profits are going. Even Kate begins to wonder about the twin
sister she has a love-hate relationship with. Gram guides Kate through it all,
though Kate’s never quite sure she’s hearing Gram—and sometimes Gram’s guidance
is really off the wall.
