COOKING WITH CLORIS -- SLOW COOKED MAPLE RIBS

The other day I found a great sale on pork ribs at the supermarket, so I asked Cloris to come up with a slow cooker recipe that would take little prep time. As a bonus, this recipe isn’t a gazillion calories per serving the way many rib recipes are because it contains little in the way of high caloric ingredients. -- AP

SLOW COOKED MAPLE RIBS
Ingredients:
non-stick olive oil cooking spray
2-1/2 lbs. country style pork ribs
2 tablespoons maple syrup
2 tablespoons tomato sauce
3 tablespoons dried minced onions
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ginger
1 teaspoon garlic powder

Spray inside of slow cooker with non-stick spray. Cut ribs apart and place in cooker. Mix together all other ingredients. Pour over ribs. Cover and cook on low with 8 hrs.

Easy, right? Took me no time at all to prepare before leaving for work. When I came home, I made some fast-cooking brown rice and steamed broccoli. Voila! Dinner. It was delicious! Think you’ll give it a try? Post a comment, and you could win the book being given away this week by our Book Club Friday guest author. -- AP

CRAFTS WITH ANASTASIA-- PEARL COTTON EASTER EGG

Today’s Easter egg craft helps you use up all those scraps of pearl cotton leftover from needlework projects. Don’t have any pearl cotton? Use embroidery floss or yarn.

PEARL COTTON EASTER EGG

Materials:
1-7/8” x 2-1/2” Styrofoam egg
#3 pearl cotton in various colors
tacky glue

This is about as easy a craft as you can get. Simply apply glue to the egg. Then wrap lengths of pearl cotton around the egg. Begin at the center of the egg and work outwards toward the top and bottom of the egg. For ease in working, poke a piece of heavy gauge wire or thin dowel to the bottom of the egg and hold the wire or dowel as you glue on the pearl cotton.


Post a comment, and you could win the book being given away this week by our Book Club Friday guest author. -- AP

BOOK CLUB FRIDAY -- GUEST AUTHOR PAT DALE

Mystery and suspense author Pat Dale is our Book Club Friday guest today. After a career as a professional musician and educator, Pat turned to the pen to craft more than a dozen novels and novellas. She uses musical rhythms and values to write what some might call poetic prose. Learn more about Pat at her website.

Pat is offering a copy of her romantic suspense, A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND to one of our readers, but this is a different sort of contest. Read on to learn how to enter. -- AP

How do writers come up with such wild ideas?

Sometimes I embarrass myself with the things my characters do. I’m really a nice person; I mean, really. Have I ever murdered someone? No. Have I ever engaged in kinky sex? Uh, no, not that I would ever tell about. You can take that as another no. LOL

Have I ever wanted to commit murder? You bet! Have I ever had sexual fantasies that exceed what I’m willing to do? Oh yeah! Did I have to follow those desires to write about them? No way, Hosea.

And there’s your answer in a nutshell. Imagination, dreams, fantasies all come into play in my writing. As an author, I exercise ‘creator’ power over my characters and they will do what I write them to do. Oh, they complain loud and long at times, and I listen well. Usually, if a character whispers in my ear that I’ve taken them too far, I have. Most successful authors, in my opinion, pay close attention to the limits they set for their main characters.

I’ve joked that fiction writing is the only arena where a practitioner can be a certified loon and get paid for it, only partially in jest. To date, I’ve killed off 32 characters in just 7 of my novels. To be fair, there are five other books where nobody dies, so that would make it 32 for 12. Sounds bloodthirsty, doesn’t it? But, of those deaths, only 15 are violent and two thirds of them are bad guys doing bad things before they face justice.

Now for the kinky sex stuff… Nah, I’m not getting into that. Hee Hee Hee! Besides, what is kinky to one is run of the mill to another. Suffice it to say I approach sex scenes in my books on tiptoe. I’m not opposed to writing a pretty explicit scene if the genre calls for it, but I will not write my characters into lurid scenes for the voyeuristic thrill of it.

How about writing my heroine into a scene where she must do something that is totally against her mores? Now that can lead to amazingly successful dramatic character arcs. And character arcs are what keep a reader reading. Oh, many will call it something else. Character maturation, re-shaping, or what you will; following a main character’s growth from where she begins the story to her eventual triumph or failure at the climax is what rivets one to the pages as they fly by. Now that’s what good writing is all about, and why a good author needs lots of imagination as well as a willingness to go out on a limb from time to time, insisting the character does as she’s written to do.

My take on it. What’s yours?

My latest romantic suspense novel SLEEPING WITH HER ENEMY is being released today (April 8, 2011) by Muse Publishing. A short blurb:

Anika Henry, RN, has lost her husband to war and her son to a hit and run driver. Looking for some reason to keep moving forward, she loses herself in her work in the children’s ward of the hospital in Ft. Collins, Colorado. When Ana meets Dan Morrison by way of his sick daughter Sherry, life seems to beckon to her. Dan had lost his wife to cancer two years earlier.

They bond, Sherry takes to Ana, and fledgling romance blossoms for the adults. After Ana discovers a car that shows all the signs of being the one that killed her boy, she blows the whistle on Dan and her future turns as dark as a buried coal mine at midnight. Will Dan be found innocent? If he is, will he ever have anything to do with Ana again?

You’ll want to read SLEEPING WITH HER ENEMY to find the answers to those and other questions. I promise a fun read and worthwhile characters to get to know along the way. Also, you’ll meet Ana’s dog Molly, modeled after my own German Shorthair, the Unsinkable Brown Molly.

I want to give someone a copy of one of my previously released romantic suspense novels, A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND, available in trade paperback or eBook from Whimsical Publishing. So I’m having a contest and the winner will receive a copy of the book in electronic format, set up for your eReader. To enter, all you have to do is send your guess as to how many characters die in my next book release, DANCE WITH THE DEVIL, a romantic family saga to be published by Muse Publishing in July.

Hint: more than one, less than nine.

First correct guess wins the book! And everybody who enters will receive by email a free chapter of a new romantic comedy I’m finishing as we speak. Through subsequent months, all chapters of THE LAST COWBOY IN TEXAS will be given away for free. It’s the funniest thing I’ve done to date.

Send your guess to: patdale@charter.net and you could be the winner. Good luck, and happy reading!

Thanks for stopping by today, Pat. -- AP

TRAVEL WITH SERENA -- GUEST TRAVEL WRITER DR. KELLE Z RILEY

Our intrepid guest travel blogger, Kelle Z Riley, is back again today with more tales from her early travels to Paris. Do you think she’ll get any sightseeing in this time? Read on to find out. -- AP

Kelle's kitties didn't want her to leave.

PARIS, PART 2

Hello fellow travelers!  I’m back after a month off to take care of some nagging health issues.  No doubt it was from a bug I caught while traveling.  So save yourselves the trouble of antibiotics and cough remedies and spend your travel time vicariously with me. . .  Last time we spoke (in Feb.) I told you of my first trip to Paris—where I saw some of the local industry rather than lots of tourist sites.

The second time I visited Paris—in winter—I stayed in a charming hotel in the heart of the city.  By charming, I mean small.  The room was as wide as a king sized bed and just a little longer!  My twin-sized bed lay so close to the window that I could reach out from under the covers and open or close the window to adjust the room temperature.  Since the room was boiling hot, it was delightful to be able to crack open the window and feel cool winter air swirl over the top of my down comforter.  Even the noise of the crowded streets four floors below seemed soothing.

Two feet from the foot of my bed and up one step was the bathroom.  If you dropped something in the shower, you had to get out and stand on the bath mat to retrieve it.  No kidding.  No bending to shave your legs allowed in this shower!  But there was plenty of warm water, so I had no worries.  The real beauty of the bathroom was a floor to ceiling window which could be opened just wide  enough to let me squeeze out onto a balcony.  The streets of Paris are narrow, winding, and intersect other streets at unusual angles.  Form my perch I could see a panorama of shops, pedestrians and vehicles of all kinds (from taxis to bicycles).  Every city has a special energy and I felt it keenly on that tiny balcony.

During this trip, I had some free time.  Two hours of it, to be exact.  In my 2 free hours, I went shopping (to purchase a souvenir suitcase to replace the one broken on the earlier legs of my journey).  Of course I also bought a beret and a scarf and some warm, fuzzy gloves.  The challenge (and a source of adventure) lay in the fact that I had no idea what the currency exchange rate was.  I was using Euros, but during that time the Euro and the U.S. dollar were not even close to the same in terms of spending power.  It is always scary to go to an ATM half a world from home and withdraw cash—you never know till you get home how much you’ve dented your bank account.  Ditto for credit card purchases.  But when you desperately NEED a suitcase on wheels—c’est la vie!

While my tourist activities were still severely limited (saw l’Arc de Triomphe from yet another cab window), I nevertheless learned some important aspects of French culture.  That is to say, I learned about the luxury of croissants, pain au chocolate (a flakey croissant-like bread with a bar of rich chocolate in the middle), and café au lait.  Warning: once you’ve had a croissant in Paris, you’ll never be satisfied with one anywhere else in the world!

The rest of the trip was dedicated to work and cab rides back to the airport where my sparkling new suitcase was properly broken in and began earning it’s travel legs.  We (my bag and I) went on to Germany, Amsterdam and finally home to the U.S., but that is a story for another blog.

I left Paris wishing I’d had more time and longing to return to the city.  As always, I hoped that the next trip would bring a chance to see the wonderful tourist sites that have inspired travelers for decades.  Cross your fingers. . .

I’ll see you next month!

Kelle

HEALTHY LIVING WITH JANICE--PAINLESS TRICKS FOR CUTTING CALORIES

Did you make a New Year’s resolution to lose weight? It’s the most common resolution people make at the beginning of a new year. It’s also the most common that resolution long given up by this time of year. Health editor Janice Kerr is here today with some tips for helping you get back on track and shed those unwanted pounds. -- AP

Thanks, Anastasia! Losing weight is hard. There probably isn’t anyone reading this blog who hasn’t been on the weight loss merry-go-round and fallen off too many times. One of the reasons we can’t stick to our diets is that we set the bar too high. And we expect results too quickly. The best weight loss -- the kind that stays off -- are the pounds that are shed gradually.

So here’s a trick to try: lower your expectations, and you may find you actually shed more weight and keep it off. Instead of cutting 500 - 1000 calories a day, try cutting 100 - 300. You’re less likely to feel as though you’re starving yourself and will be less tempted to cheat.

A pound of body fat is approximately 3500 calories. If you cut 500 calories a day from your diet, you’ll lose about a pound a week. But cutting 500 calories a day is hard for many people. That’s why their diets fail. Cutting 250 calories a day is a lot easier. It will take you twice as long to lose that pound, but isn’t it better to lose a pound every two weeks than not at all?

Here are a few examples of how you can cut 100 - 200 calories without feeling any pain:

• Leave the pizza crust on your plate.
• 
  
• Make your morning eggs with egg whites only.
• 
  
• Eat one slice of toast instead of two with those morning eggs.
• 
  
• Make your sandwiches from bagel thins instead of whole bagels.
• 
  
• Leave the slice of cheese off your sandwich or burger.
• 
  
• Use mustard instead of mayonnaise on your sandwiches.
• 
  
• Drink flavored seltzer water instead of soda.
• 
  
• Use salad dressing spritzers instead of drowning your salad in dressing.

Great tips, Janice! This makes dieting sound almost painless. Readers, do you have any dieting tips that have worked for you? Let’s hear them. -- AP

COOKING WITH CLORIS -- APRICOT MOCHA CAKE

If you follow this blog, you know that our food editor Cloris McWerther comes up with the most incredible, to-die-for desserts, especially when she marries chocolate with other ingredients. But we here at American Woman magazine are also conscious of the fact that too many Americans are eating too many grams of sugar and too many calories. So, how do you have your cake and eat it without putting on the pounds. 

This is a topic that Cloris and health editor Janice Kerr have been discussing at some length. As a result, Cloris began experimenting with some of her recipes, cutting down the sugar and replacing some of the flour with whole wheat flour. Below is one of her successes. It contains 1 cup less sugar, replaces 1/4 of the flour with whole wheat flour, and uses skim milk instead of whole milk. We dare you to tell the difference. -- AP

APRICOT MOCHA CAKE
Ingredients:
1/2 cup sugar
3/4 cup flour
1/4 whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 ounce semi-sweet chocolate
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 skim milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/2 dried apricots, diced
1/2 cup brown sugar
4 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa
1 cup cold espresso or coffee

In mixing bowl sift together first 5 ingredients. Set aside. Melt chocolate and butter in microwave. Stir in milk and vanilla. Fold into flour mixture. Pour into greased 9” x 9” pan. Combine brown sugar and cocoa. Sprinkle evenly over batter. Pour espresso or coffee over dry ingredients. Bake at 350 degrees for 40 minutes.

Yum! Now keep in mind we’re not claiming this is a diet dessert, but it’s less guilt-inducing than many of Cloris's creations. And as with so many other things, it’s OK to indulge once in awhile as long as you do so in moderation. From Cloris, Janice, and me, bon appetit! -- AP

CRAFTS WITH ANASTASIA-- POMPOM EASTER EGG

If you craft, you most likely have pompoms leftover from other crafting projects. Today we have another Easter egg project, one that will help you use up some of those leftover pompoms.

POMPOM EASTER EGG

Materials:
1-7/8” x 2-1/2” Styrofoam egg
5mm - 15mm pastel and white pompoms
tacky glue

This is about as easy a craft as you can get. Simply apply glue to the egg. Then glue the pompoms randomly around the egg. Begin at the center of the egg and work outwards toward the top and bottom of the egg. For ease in working, poke a piece of heavy gauge wire or thin dowel to the bottom of the egg and hold the wire or dowel as you glue on the pompoms.