#COOKING WITH CLORIS--BANANA-CHOCOLATE CHIP MUFFINS

I love my bananas nice and firm, just as they turn from unripe to ripe. The trouble is, I usually wind up with a few that are too ripe for my palate if the bunch isn't consumed quickly enough--no matter how small a bunch I purchase. So I'm constantly peeling and freezing bananas to use in baking. And that's why I'm constantly coming up with new recipes for banana baked goods!

Banana-Chocolate Chip Muffins

Makes 12

Ingredients:

1-1/2 cups all purpose flour

2/3 cup sugar

1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup unsalted butter

2 lg. ripe bananas (over-ripe is fine!)

1 lg. egg

1/4 cup whole milk

3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Spray 12-cup muffin tin with baking spray.

Whisk together the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Set aside.

Melt butter in microwave.

Mash bananas in a medium bowl. Blend in butter, milk, and egg.

Stir banana mixture into dry ingredients, mixing by hand until just blended. Stir in chocolate chips.

Divide batter evenly in muffin tins.

Bake 30-32 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center of muffins comes out with melted chocolate but no crumbs or batter attached. Allow to cool on rack before removing muffins from tin.

#CRAFTS WITH ANASTASIA--CROSS STITCHED PATCHWORK AMERICANA STAR

Patchwork American Star

Memorial Day is next week. Why not go patriotic with this quick-to-stitch flag star? Worked on 14-ct. perforated paper, it measures 2-5/8” x 2-5/8”, a perfect size for a broach.

Following the Color Key, cross stitch with two strands floss. Backstitch with one strand DMC 311 Navy Blue-MD (Anchor 148).

When stitching is complete, trim the paper to one hole all around the finished stitching. Using jewelry glue, attach a pin backing to the back.

BOOK CLUB FRIDAY--AUTHOR CAROLA DUNN ON AUTHOR INSPIRATION

Carola Dunn is the author of twenty-three Daisy Dalrymple mysteries, set in 1920s England; four Cornish mysteries, set in Cornwall around 1970; and more than thirty Regencies. Born in England, she set off around the world after university and made it halfway before returning to the US, where she has lived ever since. Today she joins us to talk about the inspiration for her plots. Learn more about Carola and her books at her website.

Whence plot ideas?

Many of my plot ideas spring from nowhere, or at least, I was too busy writing to bother to trace them back to their origins. But quite a few I still remember years, even decades, later exactly what sparked them. More than once it was a place.

Having picked the setting of The Corpse at the Crystal Palace (US paperback August 27th 2019), because it sounded intriguing, I started to research. One surprising fact struck me: the original Palace, erected in 1851 in Hyde Park, had the first ever public ladies' loo in London. No lady, it was thought, would want to be seen entering such a convenience where anyone who saw her knew on what embarrassing errand she was bound. I instantly decided to murder someone in the ladies room, and to make it more intriguing, the victim was to be a man dressed as a woman. The plot revolved around not only who killed him, but what on earth he was doing there in a Nanny's uniform.

The Tower of London (The Bloody Tower, 2007), with its sinister history, is another place capable of inspiring any number of plots. Its semi-isolated population, including the Lieutenant Governor and his family, the Keeper of the Jewels, the Yeomen of the Guard, and the garrison of Guardsmen with their colonel must be a breeding-ground for all sorts of disagreements, quite apart from the greed engendered by the presence of the Crown Jewels. On a visit to refresh childhood memories, a steep stone outdoor stairway enclosed by high walls struck me as an invitation to shove someone down it. I just had to choose the shover and the shovee and add fog rising from the river...

A very different place, Rocky Valley, a narrow inlet on the coast of northern Cornwall, was the inspiration for Valley of the Shadow (my third Cornish mystery). The steep cliffs on either side offer no way for a swimmer to climb out, but what if Eleanor and co. found a half-drowned man floating there...The cliffs thereabouts are riddled with caves, the haunts of smugglers for centuries, so what would they have been smuggling in the 1970s--not silk stockings, for sure. People? It took a lot of research to find out who and from where were the most likely group of refugees to be desperate to enter Britain.

Research for one book often leads to a plot for another. I came across a mention of the so-called "superfluous women," the over a million British women who were unlikely ever to find a husband because so many young men were slaughtered in WWI. An irresistible subject that formed the background of Superfluous Women (2015), the twenty-first Daisy mystery, in which three young women decide to form a household and find a nasty surprise in the house they acquire.

A great idea for a title can be a starting point. For instance, Styx and Stones (1999) obviously has to be a poison-pen story.  Sometimes leisure reading is the spur: Reading three Regencies each entitled The Fortune Hunter suggested to me to write one about two covert fortune-hunters falling in love with each other (The Fortune Hunters, 1991). And Murder on the Orient Express is entirely responsible for my Murder on the Flying Scotsman (1997), which I made as different as possible from Christie's famous book!

The Corpse at the Crystal Palace

A Daisy Dalrymple Mystery, Book 23

A casual outing to the Crystal Palace in London takes a mysterious and murderous turn in The Corpse at the Crystal Palace, the latest mystery in Carola Dunn’s beloved Daisy Dalrymple series.

April 1928: Daisy Dalrymple Fletcher is visited in London by her young cousins. On the list of must-see sites is the Crystal Palace. Discovering that her children's nanny, Nanny Gilpin, has never seen the Palace, Daisy decides to make a day of it—bringing her cousins, her 3-year-old twins, her step-daughter Belinda, the nurserymaid, and Nanny Gilpin. Yet this ordinary outing goes wrong when Mrs. Gilpin goes off to the ladies’ room and fails to return. When Daisy goes to look for her, she doesn't find her nanny but instead the body of another woman dressed in a nanny's uniform.

Meanwhile, Belinda and the cousins spot Mrs. Gilpin chasing after yet another nanny. Intrigued, they trail the two through the vast Crystal Palace and into the park. After briefly losing sight of their quarry, they stumble across Mrs. Gilpin lying unconscious in a small lake inhabited by huge concrete dinosaurs.

When she comes to, Mrs. Gilpin can't remember what happened after leaving the twins in the nurserymaid's care. Daisy's husband, Detective Chief Inspector Alec Fletcher of Scotland Yard, finds himself embroiled in the investigation of the murdered nanny. Worried about her children's own injured nanny, Daisy is determined to help. First she has to discover the identity of the third nanny, the presumed murderer, and to do so, Daisy must uncover why the amnesic Mrs. Gilpin deserted her charges to follow the missing third nanny.

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#ROMANCE AUTHOR JANICE SEAGRAVES ON THE INSPIRATION BEHIND HER LATEST NOVEL

Janice Seagraves grew up with a deep love of science fiction and adventure stories. Always the consummate artist, she traded in her paintbrush for a laptop to write breathless romance novels that takes you out of this world. Today she stops by to tell us the inspiration behind her latest novel. Learn more about Janice and her books at her website.

The Dream That Inspired Alien Heart

Hi, I’m romance author Janice Seagraves, and today is my birthday. So happy birthday to me!

How did I get the idea for Alien Heart? It all started with a dream.

I dreamed of a redheaded woman. Let’s call her Audrey. In my dream, someone knocked on Audrey’s door. She opened her door to a white-haired handsome man. An alien. Does anyone remember the 1982 TV series, The Phoenix? The alien looked like the star of that show, Judson Scott. Let’s call him Keefe.

Keefe told Audrey he liked her show. (What show? I had no clue.)

The next morning, Audrey woke up in a cabin in the woods, and heard the noise of someone in the shower. When that person walked out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his hips, it was the same person who had knocked on her door. Keefe, the white-haired alien. And he explained to her that they were mated, and she was pregnant with his child. She, of course, was not happy. He made her breakfast, which she could barely eat. Later that same morning, Keefe had a visitor. Another alien who looked like him.

While they were visiting, Audrey sneaked out and climbed down to the creek that ran behind the cabin. She ran splashing through the water, but the alien and his friend called to her to stop and ran after her. The aliens leap from boulder to boulder like grasshoppers. Audrey looked back, then fell and hurt her knee. Keefe took her to the clinic, where she was treated by the aliens’ doctor. She was told she’s locked in, there were no phones, and no escaping the Compound.

That one dream launched the story of the Arcons coming to Earth and gaining mates.

Except I changed a few things.

Audrey became the host of The Ms Fixit Show. Teaching people how to make or fix things. I was called Miss Fixit because I made things out of wood or fixed things. I figured if it was good enough for me, than it was good enough for my female character.

Keefe got his name because it was close to Kiefer Sutherland’s name, and he played a vampire with light blond hair in Lost Boys. And because of Kiefer, the Arcons gained vampire fangs.

The Arcons remained tall and thin. Over six-foot tall. Some of the Arcons were more muscular than others. Those males are in the military class. But all are male.

I like to turn my stories on their head, so instead of a male dominated society like ours, the Arcons came from a female oriented society, and their females had all tragically perished on the trip from their planet to ours.

And because their females had all died, they needed human women for mates.

And to stay with my theme of turning things on its head: since our society holds the armed forces in high regard, their society does not. The military in their society is a place to send overly aggressive males to teach them discipline.

I decided Keefe needed a brother who was military, but he was ashamed of him. Enter Blade, who has a dark sense of humor. The two can barely tolerate each other. So, what was the glue I used to keep the brothers Keefe and Blade together? I gave them a little brother named Paz, who isn’t grown yet. Because the brothers were the last of their family, they had to raise Paz together.

And just for fun, I made the Arcons smell great and their kisses taste like candy!

Click here to watch the video. 

Alien Heart

Divorcee and single mom, hardworking Audrey Westberry is the host of a cable TV show called Miz Fixit.

Romance was the last thing on Audrey’s mind when two handsome extraterrestrials join the audience of her show.

Soon Audrey finds out a single word “mated” has different meaning when you are born a galaxy away. After a wonderful night of passion, Audrey finds herself far from home, impregnated and her life turned upside down. Will she ever be able to leave the alien compound, see her son again, or get home in time to film the fall season of her Miz Fixit show?

But what's a girl to do with two aliens that smell like candy, and their kisses taste like it, too?

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#MYSTERY AUTHOR C.A. NEWSOME TURNS REAL-LIFE INTO FICTION

C. A. Newsome is an author and artist living in Cincinnati with a one-eyed, zombie swamp monster named Gypsy Foo la Beenz. They can be found most mornings at the Mount Airy Dog Park, digging up clues to Carol’s next mystery. Learn more about C.A. and her books at her website.

Northside, where I live, has more dogs than children. The real-life dogs around me are central to my stories: dogs who vomit on the rug, commit more escapes than Houdini, and eat furniture instead of waiting politely at home for an invitation to run on the beach we don’t have.

My plots are born of the odd juxtapositions of life in my mid-gentrification, artsy-urban neighborhood: funky events, a rotating slate of shoestring storefronts, eccentric characters, historic architecture, and more urban forest than anywhere outside of Central Park. I start with two or three evocative and unrelated ideas, massage them with a sense of the absurd, then subject the result with repeated applications of “what if.”

Two, maybe three years before I ever considered that I could or even wanted to write a novel (which is a story in of itself and explains the selection of my first murder victim), I was sitting at a picnic table at the Mount Airy Dog Park with my crew of morning regulars. The dog park is on a ridge overlooking the parking lot, and we keep our eyes on the lot to get advance warning of incoming dogs that might not be friendly. Non-dog people also use the lot for drug deals, work breaks (authorized or not), and to conduct illicit affairs.

Determining the purpose of each unknown vehicle entering the lot became a habit, then a game. I said to my oldest dog park friend, “Someone needs to write a mystery series about dog parkers who solve crimes because they watch everyone around them.”

The idea lingered until I caught up with it. Then it unfolded: how people who go to dog parks develop relationships with people they know nothing about, how the schedule you keep with your dog will toss you in with people you might have little in common with, how easy it would be to become friends with someone dangerous and not know it.

Midway through this process, a woman committed suicide in her van in the parking lot. My friends found her the next morning instead of me since I was running late. I arrived to find the park blocked off with barricades and yellow tape. The park buzzed with speculation for weeks, and A Shot in the Bark was born.

A Shot in the Bark

A Lia Anderson Dog Park Mystery, Book 1

A grieving artist, a smitten detective, a devious killer: You never know who you'll meet at the dog park.

When the apparent suicide of Lia’s deadbeat boyfriend draws the attention of Detective Peter Dourson, he decides to adopt the dead man’s dog to infiltrate the tight group he’s certain conceals Luthor Morrissey’s killer. As his investigation uncovers secrets, a grieving Lia fights her growing attraction to the laid-back detective. Meanwhile, Luthor's killer lurks, desperate to stay ahead of the investigation—no matter who has to die…

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#COOKING WITH CLORIS--GUEST MYSTERY AUTHOR TERRY SHAMES WHIPS UP TEX-MEX CORNBREAD

Multi-award winning mystery author Terry Shames writes the Samuel Craddock series, set in small town Texas. Along with her numerous other awards, Terry has been named one of the top five Texas mystery authors. Today she joins us to talk about the eighth book in her series and share a recipe for Tex-Mex cornbread. Learn more about Terry and her books at her website.

I once attended a talk by writer Joan Didion, in which she advised writers to put “everything you know” into every book. She said that you might feel like you should keep something back for another book. But she said that when you started to write your next book you had another whole book’s worth of things to say. When I write the Samuel Craddock books, that’s the approach I take. I fling everything I know into the plot and the characters. I think that’s the way to make it seem real. Life has a lot of undercurrents, and so should the books we write. There’s always more when you’re ready for the next one! 

I wrote a few books before I realized that almost every book I had written had come from a real life event. Sometimes it’s things I experienced, sometimes things I witnessed, and sometimes things I heard about.

A Killing at Cotton Hill had art at the center of it. When I was a child, I saw a picture my uncle had painted and thought it was wonderful that someone I knew had painted a real picture. I’m also passionate about contemporary art, and wanted to include an element of that in the book. It turned out that Samuel Craddock has a wonderful contemporary art collection!

In high school I knew a boy who went off to war and was badly wounded. I never saw him again, but his story haunted me and I wanted to write a book that was something of an homage. The Last Death of Jack Harbin featured a war veteran who had been gravely wounded.

The idea for Dead Broke in Jarrett Creek was born when a town near where I live went bankrupt. As a side note, I wanted to make Samuel Craddock the chief of police again, so he wasn’t just on the sidelines solving crimes. When the town went broke, they couldn’t afford to pay a full-time cop, so Craddock was the natural heir to the title of Chief.

Years ago, my mother had confessed to me that someone she knew thought her son had killed his first wife. What a delicious idea for a murder mystery! In A Deadly Affair at Bobtail Ridge, it became a great back story.

Lies and secrets always make good stories, and in The Necessary Murder of Nonie Blake, they led to misery for a family. The main character, Nonie, was based on someone I actually knew who not only kept secrets, but lied about them.

Easily the most “real” of my books was the prequel, An Unsettling Crime for Samuel Craddock. For this book, I took liberties with an actual murder that occurred in the town that Jarrett Creek is based on. When I decided to use the real case, I looked it up and found that a year earlier, the man convicted of the crime had been freed by the Innocence Project. It made my story feel even more urgent to me. It was important that Chief Craddock find out what really happened in order to avoid in my fiction real life fate.

A Reckoning in the Back Country was my hardest book to write, not only because it was based on something I know to be real in Texas—dogfighting—but because the victim was someone I wanted to kill in real life! A doctor botched my shoulder replacement in real life, so I decided to kill him in my book. The problem was that I made him so awful in the first draft, that I realized no one would care whether his killer was found!

Which brings me to my latest, A Risky Undertaking for Loretta Singletary. This is probably the first book I have written that did not come from real life. It grew out of my wanting to put one of my recurring characters, Loretta, in danger. Loretta loves to cook, and brings baked goods to all her friends. When she fails to do so for several days, they realize something is amiss. It turns out that Loretta was looking for someone to date on an online dating site, and got herself into trouble. After writing the previous book, I enjoyed this one because it’s full of humor.

In honor of Loretta, I’m bringing you the recipe for:

Tex-Mex Cornbread

Ingredients: 

2 eggs

2 cups buttermilk

2 cups cornmeal (Yellow or white, fine, or medium grind)*

2 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. soda

1 tsp. salt

16-oz. can hominy (white or yellow), drained

1 small can Rotel Tomatoes with Green Chiles, drained (I have tried other salsa-type mixtures, but nothing is as good as Rotel)

2 T bacon drippings

Note: If you like it spicy, add a minced Jalapeño pepper.

Preheat oven to 475 degrees.

Beat eggs in medium bowl, add buttermilk and stir. Mix dry ingredients together and stir into buttermilk mixture. Add hominy and Rotel tomatoes. Stir in bacon drippings.

Pour into well-greased 10-cast iron skillet. Bake 25-30 minutes. Check halfway, and if too brown, cover loosely with foil.

*I used medium grind. It falls apart more easily, but I like the texture.

Warning: This recipe is not good for you!

A Risky Undertaking for Loretta Singletary

A Samuel Craddock Mystery, Book 8

A FAVORITE SERIES CHARACTER FINDS HERSELF IN HARM'S WAY.

After using an online dating site for senior citizens, town favorite Loretta Singletary--maker of cinnamon rolls and arbiter of town gossip--goes missing. Chief Samuel Craddock's old friend Loretta Singletary--a mainstay of the Jarrett Creek community--has undergone a transformation, with a new hairstyle and modern clothes. He thinks nothing of it until she disappears. Only then does he find out she has been meeting men through an online dating site for small-town participants. When a woman in the neighboring town of Bobtail turns up dead after meeting someone through the same dating site, Craddock becomes alarmed. Will Craddock be able to find Loretta before she suffers the same fate? Finding out what happened to Loretta forces him to investigate an online world he is unfamiliar with, and one which brings more than a few surprises.

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#CRAFTS WITH ANASTASIA--DIAMOND PAINTING

Author Lois Winston, she who writes the series about me, recently asked her newsletter subscribers for ideas for the craft to be featured in Handmade Ho-Ho Homicide, the next Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery, which will be available in the fall. One subscriber, Jessica Johnson, suggested diamond painting. I’d never heard of diamond painting, so I hopped over to Google to find out about this new craft craze.

The image above is not a photo of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. It’s a diamond painting kit of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, which uses tiny rhinestones, not actual diamonds. If it did, the kit would cost quite a bit more than $13.99! But diamond painting is a much cooler name than rhinestone painting. 

Diamond painting is being described as a cross between paint-by-number and counted cross stitch, but as I watched the video, I realized it was the grownup version of Perler bead fusing. If you or your kids are of a certain age, you probably crafted with Perler beads at one time. Years ago someone discovered that Perler beads could be used for more than stringing necklaces and bracelets. You could arrange them in molds and fuse them together with an iron to form shapes and pictures. Check out the video.

Perler beads don’t sparkle, though. So another classic craft might also spring to mind is Lite-Brites. However, there’s really no way to make Lite-Brite designs permanent, at least none that I know.

Back to diamond painting, it really isn’t a craft that will work in Handmade Ho-Ho Homicide because there would be no way to include the patterns. One of the limits to including crafts in ebooks and trade paperbacks is that the crafts featured don’t require patterns or charts. How would you cut a pattern out of an ebook? But diamond painting was such an interesting spin on some old crafts from back in the day that it deserved a blog post.