Farewell and My Best Recipe on MLK by Maya Corrigan

This is my final post as a member of the Kitchen. Six years ago you welcomed me into this special group. I've enjoyed becoming friends with all of you online and meeting many of you in person at mystery events. We've been on panels together, shared meals, and cheered one another's successes. I've also gotten to know MLK's wonderful readers through their comments. 

This post is a brief retrospective on my time in MLK, not a recipe post, though I do include a link to the best recipe I shared on MLK. When I joined the group, I didn’t know how to take good photos while cooking. Though my photos improved a bit over six years, I still can't take pictures as enticing as other MLKers can...Looking at you, Cleo. I’m just grateful that my phone never fell into a bowl of batter or a pot of soup.

Because of my photo-phobia, I appreciated the opportunity to deviate from the standard recipe posts to write about food history in my 2021 Potluck Monday posts. In each post, I explored the origin of a particular food and I included links to recipes on MLK for that food. If you missed those posts, here are links to some harrowing histories of food: Chocolate Candy's Deadly Past, Candy Corn Calamities, The Dark History of Gingerbread.

The book I'm currently writing isn't a culinary cozy. It's a suspense novel based on history and with crucial food scenes. When it comes out, I hope I can return to MLK as a guest.

In closing I'd like to highlight the hardest dish I ever made, though it has only five ingredients. It’s also the most delicious dessert I've ever eaten. Tarte Tatin, shown in the photo at the top of the post, is the best recipe I posted in the last six years.

Though I've cooked all my adult life, being part of MLK has expanded my culinary horizons. Yourand  recipe posts have introduced me to new ingredients and taught me new ways of cooking familiar foods.  And I really love the AROUND THE KITCHEN TABLE conversations.

💕Thank you, MLK writers and readers! 💕

READERS: What's the hardest dish you've ever prepared?

📚

Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mystery series. It features a young cafe manager and her young-at-heart grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. Each book has five suspects, five clues, and Granddad’s five-ingredient recipes. Maya has taught college courses in writing, literature, and detective fiction. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords.

Visit her website for book news, mystery history and trivia, and easy recipes. Sign up for her newsletter there. She gives away a free book to one subscriber each time she sends out a newsletter. Follow her on Facebook.

A PARFAIT CRIME: Five-Ingredient Mystery #9

Set in a quaint Chesapeake Bay town, the latest novel in Maya Corrigan’s Five-Ingredient Mysteries brings back café manager Val Deniston and her recipe columnist grandfather – a sleuthing duo that shares a house, a love of food and cooking, and a knack for catching killers.

At the site of a fatal blaze, Val’s boyfriend, a firefighter trainee, is shocked to learn the victim is known to him, a woman named Jane who belonged to the local Agatha Christie book club—and was rehearsing alongside Val’s grandfather for an upcoming Christie play being staged for charity. Just as shocking are the skeletal remains of a man found in Jane’s freezer. Who is he and who put him on ice?

After Val is chosen to replace Jane in the play, the cast gathers at Granddad’s house to get to work—and enjoy his five-ingredient parfaits—but all anyone can focus on is the bizarre real-life mystery. When it’s revealed that Jane’s death was due to something other than smoke inhalation, Val and Granddad retrace the victim’s final days. As they dig into her past life, their inquiry leads them to a fancy new spa in town—where they discover that Jane wasn’t the only one who had a skeleton in the cooler.

Read an excerpt and see where to buy A Parfait Crime.  

Praise for A Parfait Crime

📚