Today we welcome to the Kitchen the fab Joyce Tremel, whose new Cider House Mystery series releases this Tuesday with the first in the series, Deadly to the Core. Be sure to comment below to be entered in a GIVEAWAY of her brand new book! Take it away, Joyce:
Thanks to Leslie Karst and everyone here for letting me post! It’s been awhile since I’ve had a book containing recipes. My last two books were historical mysteries—lots of headlines but no recipes!
One of the recipes in DEADLY TO THE CORE is for pasta sauce. I serve this all the time and I made it up (pretty much like everything I cook) so the hardest part was writing an actual recipe. In the book I call it Kate’s Homemade Pasta Sauce and here’s the recipe:
Kate's Homemade Pasta Sauce
(serves 4-6)
Ingredients
1 pound lean ground beef
½ cup chopped onion
½ cup chopped green pepper
2 cloves garlic, chopped or pressed (I used the stuff in a jar)
2 large cans crushed tomatoes
1 teaspoon salt
1–2 teaspoons sugar
1 tablespoon Italian seasoning
Directions
Brown beef in skillet.
While mixture is cooking, place other ingredients into a slow cooker.
When beef mixture is brown, add to slow cooker.
Cook on high for four hours, or low for eight hours. Serve with your favorite pasta. (I like the penne with protein from Barilla.)
Serve the pasta with a tossed salad and some garlic bread. Yum!
Don't hesitate to improvise--I do it all the time! Try the sauce with ground sausage, ground turkey or chicken, or with no meat at all. Add your favorite vegetables instead.
Readers: Do you have a go-to recipe you always make? Do you make recipes as is,
or do you improvise? Comment below to be entered in a giveaway of Deadly to the Core (US residents only).
About Deadly to the Core:
After losing her husband in a terrible car crash, thirty-five-year-old Kate is left to pick up the pieces of her life alone. Although she has physically recovered, she worries her spirit never will. But when she learns that she has inherited a fruit orchard in a small town just outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, from her great uncle Stan, she takes this as an opportunity ripe for the picking. Kate knew immediately what to do with it: open a cider house. Her hopeful plans fall far from the tree when she finds the body of the orchard manager, Carl Randolph, leaving her to figure out who is at the core of this murder.
She had been in correspondence with Carl, who had agreed with her brilliant idea of opening a cider house. But not everyone is so quick to buy what she was selling—Uncle Stan’s lawyer, Robert Larabee, paints a less rosy financial outlook of the orchard’s past, present, and future.
Kate discovers that Carl had large, unexplained deposits to his bank account and it becomes clear that either he was blackmailing someone, or someone was paying him to keep quiet. Meanwhile, Kate and her neighbors receive offers to buy their property from a mysterious buyer. And there’s more than meets the eye with the neighboring orchard owner, Daniel Martinez, although Kate can’t quite put her finger on if it’s sweet or sour.
Will she be able to pick out the bad apple among the bunch before it’s too late?
About Joyce:
Joyce Tremel was a police secretary for ten years and more than once envisioned the demise of certain co-workers, but settled on writing as a way to keep herself out of jail. She is the author of the award winning Brewing Trouble mystery series. She also writes the Homefront News Mysteries under the pen name Joyce St. Anthony.
As a history buff, she’s made many visits to the Gettysburg area and discovered the wonderful hard cider made with fruit from the local Adams County orchards. After a brainstorming session wondering “what if,” the Cider House mysteries were born.
