#COOKING WITH CLORIS--MYSTERY AUTHOR MARIAN ALLEN SERVES UP BUMBLEBEE STEW AND A NEW SERIES

Marian Allen writes science fiction, fantasy, mystery, humor, horror, mainstream, and anything else she can wrestle into fixed form. She blogs daily at Marian Allen, Author Lady ():Learn more about Marian and her books at her blog where she has daily topics: Monday with nail art, Tuesday on food, One-Liner Wednesday, Thursday Doors, Fridays For Future, and Sunday Snapshot. Her cats take turns blogging for her on Caturday … er … Saturday.

Bar Sinister is the first of a projected series called the Spadena Street Mysteries. Spadena Street is a two-block Storybook Style neighborhood with a past as corporate housing for privileged employees of a now-defunct factory. Some of its mysteries are connected to that past, some are connected to the characters of the people who lived there or live there now. Some are connected only by the networks of the current residents. Some just are.

Juss has a hobby: She collects people. Or, as her foster mother and lapsed hippie, Doris, puts it, “She’s a people junkie.” It’s Juss’s nostalgia for community involvement that leads her to her profession, and it’s the same nostalgia that fuels her impulse to stick her nose into other people’s business. At the same time, the bitter memory of “tourists” from outside the commune coming around to rubberneck and judge makes her resistant to her neighbors’ attempts at friendliness. It takes a neighbor coming to her for help (sub-plot!) to open Juss to the perfectly collectible people right on her own block.

That neighbor, Chickapoo Tomaneck, brings Juss and Doris a chocolate lava cake, although that’s not the recipe I’m sharing today. Doris is a firm believer in the medicinal value of dark chocolate and wine, but she preferred me to share something more nutritious. She also wanted me to tell you that Bumblebee Stew is great with shrimp in it. Or chicken. Or pork belly.

This recipe wasn’t in the book, but Juss and Doris love to garden and cook. They would have made this from scratch, not out of nasty old cans. Nasty old cans is what I use.

Bumblebee Stew

Ingredients:

olive oil

chili powder

cumin

onion powder

garlic powder

salt

flour

can black beans, undrained

can corn, undrained

can chopped tomatoes with green chilies, undrained

cilantro

semi-sweet chocolate

Heat the oil and toast the spices. Stir in the flour, adding more oil, if necessary. Add the vegetables, cilantro, and chocolate and heat until thickened. 

Serve over rice.

Bar Sinister

A Spadena Street Mystery, Book 1

Juss -- Injustice H. Chocolate (named and raised by hippies) -- questions the usefulness of her Life Coach work and hires a secretary to prove its importance. Prim and efficient Kerry Dashingly can hardly wait to tell his wife that his latest secretary temp job is in a miniature castle in a neighborhood of Disneyesque architecture. Kerry hasn't even begun when he gets a call from his hapless cousin, Abby: A man she openly hated is dead, and the police found unspecified evidence in the back of her car. Juss immediate attaches herself to the problem, determined to help, even if it kills her.

Buy Links

paperback 

ebook 

#COOKING WITH CLORIS--GUEST AUTHOR TERRY SHAMES AND VEGETABLE-BEEF STEW RECIPE

Award-winning author Terry Shames writes the bestselling Samuel Craddock series, set in small-town Texas. A Killing at Cotton Hill won the Macavity for Best First Mystery, 2013. The Last Death of Jack Harbin was a Macavity finalist for Best Mystery, 2014, and was named a top ten mystery of 2014 by Library Journal. Mystery People named Shames one of the top five Texas mystery writers of 2015. Her fifth Craddock mystery, The Necessary Murder of Nonie Blake is an RT Bookreviews Top Pick.  Learn more about Terry and her books at her website. 

In The Necessary Murder of Nonie Blake, book five of the Samuel Craddock mystery series, Samuel’s good friend and neighbor Jenny Sandstone has promised to cook a meal for a friend. As anyone who has read any of the books knows, Jenny is no cook. She throws herself on Samuel’s mercy, begging him to teach her how to cook just one decent dish. His advice is to make beef stew. One Saturday morning they set off for the Quick Mart to buy the ingredients. Once in the store, Samuel starts with the basics:

“We call this a shopping cart. We use it to contain our purchases. For times when you are making only a few purchases, you can use those fine plastic shopping baskets stacked over there.” I point.
           
She laughs. “Don’t be a smart aleck.”
           
We stop first at the meat section. I select a package of stew meat and toss it into the cart.

“How do you know how much to buy?” she says.

“For two people, you buy about a pound of meat if you want leftovers, less if you don’t.”

She looks at the packet of meat as if it might leap up and smack her in the face. “You’ve got a little bit more than a pound there.”

This may be harder than I thought. I explain that it isn’t an exact science. “If you have a recipe, you can fudge here and there. The way I make beef stew doesn’t need a recipe.”

He takes her through the store and instructs her to buy an onion, a bell pepper, carrots, potatoes, a can of tomatoes, and a can of beef broth. It doesn’t get anymore basic than that. Seeing all the ingredients, Jenny almost chickens out, but Samuel won’t let her. Back home, she is quiet and grim. “I’d rather prosecute an axe murderer than do this again,” she says.

As the reader might imagine, Samuel ends up doing most of the work, which is a lot harder than usual because he has to answer a bunch of questions like “How come you peel the potatoes and carrots, but not the bell pepper?” He also has to go back to his house to get a few herbs and a clove of garlic. But eventually it’s done, and he leaves her with the final instruction to call him if she has more problems.

I liked writing this funny interlude as a respite from the grim nature of the book. Here’s the recipe that I got from my mother a loooong time ago:

Vegetable-Beef Stew

1 pound stew meat

2 tablespoons cooking oil

1 pint water

1 pint beef broth

1 cup carrots, sliced

2 cups potatoes, in chunks

1 chopped onion

1 clove garlic, chopped

1 16-oz can tomatoes

1 tsp thyme

salt and pepper to taste

In large pot, brown beef in oil. Add water and broth and simmer for one hour. Add all other ingredients and cook another half hour. You may also add 1 cup green beans or 1/2 cup peas.

If you’ve never read any of the Samuel Craddock mysteries, the first book in the series, A Killing at Cotton Hill, will be a Kindle Daily Deal tomorrow only for $2.99. 

The Necessary Murder of Nonie Blake

Nonie Blake is back home from a mental institution where she has spent the last twenty years, and people in Jarrett Creek are worried. Maybe too worried, for within a week of her return, Nonie is murdered.

Chief Samuel Craddock thinks the only possible suspects are members of her tight-lipped family. Ever since Nonie tried to kill her sister when she was fourteen and was sent away to the institution, the family has kept to itself.

Clues are scarce and Craddock is stumped. So he checks with therapists at the mental hospital to see whether they can add anything useful to his investigation. But he discovers that she has not been there for ten years. Now Craddock has to find out where Nonie has been all this time.

Soon Craddock finds himself dealing not only with murder, but layers of deception and secrets, and in the midst of it all—a new deputy, one Maria Trevino, sent by the sheriff to beef up security in the small Texas town.

Buy Links

paperback 

ebook