Min Edwards wears many hats... author, book designer, archaeologist, and
citizen of the most eastern town in the U.S... the edge of America. As a
reader, she doesn’t chain herself to only one genre. She loves, almost equally,
romance, suspense, thrillers, and sci-fi. If a book takes her someplace she’s
never been with a story that makes her heart beat with excitement, then she
considers that an excellent book. She strives for the same excellence in her
own stories. Learn more about Min and her books at her website/blog.
Summer in
Maine
I’m
a transplanted Texan. I lived for thirty years in a golf course community on a
lake just west of Austin, Texas. When I arrived there in 1981, it had a
population of 1500 people. When I left thirty years later the population was
over 10,000, the Austin metropolitan area was close to 2 million, and traffic
was a nightmare. In my community, we had two upscale malls, several
supermarkets including a Whole Foods, a new hospital, and enough restaurants to
please anyone’s palate. Gosh, I miss it.
But,
in 2011 after years of excruciating summer temperatures and rising taxes, I
moved to my small bay-front farm just outside the most eastern town in the US—Lubec,
Maine. And what a change, both personally and culturally! For one thing,
winters are awful but beautiful, autumn is spectacular, spring is called Mud
Season for a good reason, but summer... oh my, it’s like heaven (with huge
mosquitoes and mean horseflies). And everything is green. Our flowers grow
bigger than anywhere else. Even the wildflowers are spectacular. Texas may have
their bluebonnets, but we have lupines in colors from white up through pink and
onward to deep purple. And they’re three feet tall. It’s like alien
bluebonnets!
There
are drawbacks, of course. For one thing, I now live almost 100 miles away from
everything... no hospital, few doctors and no specialists, no shopping except
in the summer months and all but one of our cafes and restaurants are closed
from October through April.
Of
course, there are the excellent things about living up here; the best is the
summer. We have a short growing season, but the vegetables and flowers don’t
let that hold them back. Every Saturday at our Farmers Market down on Water
Street—aptly named as it’s next to the water! —farmers bring in the current
weekly bounty of produce and fruit and of course, baked goods from the hands of
lovely little ladies who’ve kept the church dinners, potlucks, and their family
kitchens humming for years with delicious, Down East delicacies.
I’ve
got to tell you, I’m not much of a cook myself. So, I enjoy Saturdays buying the
ever-changing abundance of fresh produce and already-prepared entrees set out
before me.
My
small farm, though, and it’s a farm in title only... nine plus acres of mostly
woods, wild apple trees, berry bushes, and wildflowers... is beautiful no
matter the season. But summer is the best. Oh, and I have more than six hundred
feet of wild Maine beach all to myself. It’s not a sandy beach, but made up of
small stones rolled and smoothed by the waves. We call this kind of beach a
shingle beach, and it sings when the tide is coming in rough. Yes, we’re the
people who cope with forty-foot tides, which is another story entirely.
I
must say that I don’t take the time to pick much of the fruit, which grows wild
on my land, but I do love the blackberries. What I like about them is their
versatility. I can drop them in a blender with vanilla Greek yogurt, a little
milk, a smidgeon of sugar, and a banana, and out pops a fabulous smoothie.
Actually, I normally cook the blackberries first and run them through a
fine-mesh sieve. I hate the seeds... it makes my smoothies crunchy. Then again
if I have a hankerin’ for dessert, I cook them down, add sugar, sieve out the
seeds, add just a bit of cornstarch to thicken, if necessary, and drop that
into one of those ready-to-bake puff pastry shells—baked first (talk about
versatile) and add a dollop of fresh whipped cream.
But
my favorite blackberry recipe is my Blackberry/Jalapeño Sauce. This is good year-round.
Since I’m still such a Texas girl I even add Jalapeños to my cranberry sauce at
Thanksgiving!
Blackberry/Jalapeño Sauce
Ingredients:
1 cup of fresh blackberries (or
frozen)
1/2 cup 100% cranberry juice
3 T. sugar
3 or more slices Jalapeño pepper (without seeds
unless you want the heat; I use jarred sliced peppers)
1/4 teas. lime juice
1/4 teas. Raye’s Winter Garden Mustard (hey, I’m
shopping local, and Raye’s is made right across the bay from my property)
Cook the blackberries in
cranberry juice until they’re soft. Cool slightly and sieve over a bowl to
remove the seeds. You’ll leave a lot of stuff besides the seeds behind, but
you’ll get a nice smooth slightly thickened juice to work with.
Put the juice back on the stove
and slowly simmer while you add the sugar, pepper slices (chopped fine), the
lime juice, and mustard.
Feel free to adjust the
ingredients; more sugar if you like a sweeter sauce, more peppers or less, a
different mustard, lemon juice if you prefer that to lime.
Trust me, this is great
particularly on pork or chicken... or even as a topping-with-a-kick on vanilla
ice cream.
Precious Stone, a High Tide Romantic Suspense, Book 4
A gift of thanks to a young girl from
the Tsar more than 100 years ago... and now the Russians want it back.
Collee
McCullough, the owner of The Bakery in Stone Bay, Maine, has a perfect life
until early one morning men in suits come calling. She has something someone
dangerous wants. Something that her Russian great-grandmother Natasha took when
she fled Russia in 1913. Too bad great-gran never told her family what she had
or where she left it.
Jake
Elsmore, visiting Stone Bay to sell his mother’s house, walks into The Bakery
for a cup of Earl Grey tea, but gets more. There she is. A sprite in a
flour-dusted apron, stepping out from behind a big burly policeman; a lovely,
fiery-haired fairy toting a shotgun while two men are laying insensate on the
floor of her shop. Looks like that tea will have to wait.
