Ginger Lemon Thins from Barbara Ross #giveaway

LUCY BURDETTE: Today we’re delighted to welcome friend Barbara Ross to our kitchen, with her new Maine Clambake mystery, HIDDEN BENEATH. She’s sharing a favorite family cookie recipe—and a giveaway of the new book! Welcome Barb!

BARBARA ROSS: Thanks for inviting me today, Lucy! In Hidden Beneath, a neighbor serves these cookies to my sleuth Julia and her mother Jacqueline when they visit the Portland, Maine condo of a deceased friend of Jacqueline’s. The cookies turn out to be all Julia gets for lunch and she puts away quite a few of them. Good thing they’re delicious.

Many people know that my husband, Bill Carito, develops the recipes for the Maine Clambake Mysteries. However, despite my persistent encouragement, Bill has never had an interest in baking. For baked goods, I turn to my other main resource, a book of handwritten recipe cards my mother’s mother gave to me for Christmas 1984, three months before she died. In the real world, this recipe comes from that book.

Ingredients

2/3 cup butter, softened

2 teaspoons grated lemon rind

1 teaspoon ginger

½ teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 egg

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 cup sugar

2 cups flour

parchment paper

Instructions

Mix butter, lemon rind, ginger, baking soda, salt, and vanilla.

Beat egg, lemon juice, and sugar until fluffy. Add to above.

Stir in flour until well mixed.

Refrigerate for four hours.

Shape into 3/4-inch balls. Place 1½ inches apart on parchment paper on cookie sheet.

Flatten to 1/8-inch thickness with the bottom of a glass covered with a damp cloth. Dip bottom of glass and cloth in water if dough sticks.

Bake at 400 degrees for 6 to 8 minutes, until edges are golden brown.

Do you have a family favorite cookie recipe? Leave a comment to be entered in Barbara's giveaway drawing!

About Hidden Beneath

Serving up mouthwatering shellfish, the Snowden Family Clambake has become a beloved institution in Busman’s Harbor, Maine. But when new clues rise to the surface five years after the disappearance of Julia Snowden’ s mother’s friend, the family business shifts to sleuthing .

Julia and her mother, Jacqueline, have come to the exclusive summer colony of Chipmunk Island to attend a memorial service for Jacqueline’s old friend Ginny, who’s been officially declared dead half a decade after she went out for her daily swim in the harbor and was never seen again. But something seems fishy at the service—especially with the ladies of the Wednesday Club. As Julia and Jacqueline begin looking into Ginny’s cold case, a present-day murder stirs the pot, and mother and daughter must dive into the deep end to get to the bottom of both mysteries . . .

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Chapters/Indigo

Guest Barbara Ross with Vee's Irish Soda Bread #giveaway

MADDIE DAY: I'm delighted to welcome my friend and Wicked Authors blogmate Barbara Ross to the Kitchen today! She has a yummy recipe from her recently released Irish novella in her uber-popular Maine Clambake Mysteries, and she's giving away a copy of the three-novella collection, Irish Coffee Murder. Take it away, Barb.

VEE’S IRISH SODA BREAD and a Giveaway

Thanks Mystery Lovers Kitchen for having me, and thank you Edith/Maddie for hosting. I’m giving away a copy of Irish Coffee Murder to one lucky commenter.

I was thrilled when my publisher, Kensington, asked me to write a novella for the Saint Patrick’s Day collection, Irish Coffee Murder, which also includes stories by Leslie Meier and Lee Hollis. The three of us have participated in four previous collections and my novellas are always third, so I knew there would be a recipe for Irish coffee in the book before most readers got to my contribution. (Especially since Lee Hollis’s series is the Hayley Powell Food and Cocktails Mystery series.) Luckily, I had an appropriate recipe up my sleeve, Marie Kent’s Irish soda bread.

In “Perked Up,” my story in Irish Coffee Murder, I gave the task of making the Irish soda bread to Maine Clambake series regular Vee Snugg. In the real world, the recipe comes from Marie Kent, my husband’s sister’s husband’s late mother (got it?). Though it sounds like a distant relationship, Marie and I attended holiday gatherings, weddings, showers, graduation parties, and funerals together for years, outliers in my husband’s huge Italian-American family. Marie was fiercely proud of her Irish heritage and never understood how she ended up in a family that drank gallons of coffee instead of tea. She is greatly missed.

Ingredients

3 1/3 cups flour

6 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

1/3 cup sugar

½ cup butter, softened

2 eggs, slightly beaten

¾ cup milk

1 cup raisins

Oil for greasing pan

 

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix flour, baking powder, salt and sugar.

Work in butter with your hands until the mixture has the consistency of cornmeal.

Add raisins.

Whisk eggs and milk together, stir into dry mixture to blend.

 

Knead for two minutes.

Pat into a lightly oiled 9-inch cake pan.

Bake approximately one hour until crust is golden and toothpick comes out clean. Makes one loaf.

 

Enjoy! Don’t forget to comment (including your email address so we can reach you) for a chance to win a hardcover copy of Irish Coffee Murder.

About Irish Coffee Murder

You don’t need to be Irish to enjoy St. Patrick’s Day in Maine, where the chilly March weather offers the perfect excuse to curl up with an Irish coffee…But in these St. Patty’s-themed novellas by fan-favorite cozy mystery authors Leslie Meier, Lee Hollis, and Barbara Ross, someone may have spiked this year’s brew with murder!

Buy Links

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Kobo

Your Independent Bookstore

 

Barbara Ross is the author of the Maine Clambake Mysteries. Her books have been nominated for multiple Agatha Awards for Best Contemporary Novel and have won the Maine Literary Award for Crime Fiction. Barbara’s Maine Clambake novellas are included along with stories by Leslie Meier and Lee Hollis in holiday anthologies from Kensington Publishing. She also writes the Jane Darrowfield Mysteries. Barbara and her husband live in Portland, Maine. Visit her website at www.maineclambakemysteries.com

 

 

 

When the Weather Outside is Frightful #recipe #giveaway

Liz, Barb, and Lucy in Key West

A big warm welcome to guest authors Barbara Ross and Liz Mugavero! Be sure to read all the way down for their double giveaway!

BARB AND LIZ: For those of us who live in the northern half of the U.S., we’re coming into the season of cold and snow, ice storms, and howling winds. Some days, it’s better for both man and beast to stay tucked up indoors. Here are two recipes from our latest books, designed to bring comfort to you and to your four-footed friends during the three-dog nights to come.

For the humans—

Jacqueline’s Meat Loaf by Barbara Ross

In the Maine Clambake Mysteries, my protagonist’s mother, Jacqueline Snowden, isn’t much of a cook, but she can manage this simple meat loaf. In Iced Under she cooks it in hopes of enticing her daughter to stay over on a stormy night. In reality, this is the meatloaf my mother made and that I made for my kids a lot when they were growing up, so it feels like home to me.

Ingredients

2 pounds ground beef

1 medium onion, diced

1 1/2 cups dried Italian bread crumbs

1 egg

½ cup ketchup

2 Tablespoons Dijon mustard

Instructions

Combine all ingredients in a bowl and work with your hands until thoroughly mixed. (It’s a cold, messy job, but somebody’s got to do it!) Form the mixture into a loaf. Cook in an oven preheated to 375 degrees for 45 minutes.

Serves 6-8.

For the canines—

Vegetable Beef Crackers

Ingredients

2 cups wheat flour

1 & 1/2 cups white flour

1 Tablespoon chopped parsley

1/2 cup shredded carrots

2 ounces of vegetable beef (or beef only) baby food

1 egg

1 Tablespoon vegetable oil

3/4 cup water

Instructions

-Combine all ingredients in bowl, adding flours last. Mix until well blended.

-On a lightly floured surface, knead dough for about 3 minutes.

-Roll out dough to 1/4" thickness and cut out shapes using mini cookie cutters of your choice.

-Bake on a lightly greased cookie sheet for 25 minutes at 350 degrees.

-Cookies maybe left in oven after baking (while oven cools down) to harden for a more crunchy bite.

Yields about 35 cracker size cookies.

A tasty feast for man and beast!

Barb and Liz will be giving away signed copies of both new books, Iced Under and Custom Baked Murder. Leave a comment with your name and email to be entered in the drawing!

Liz Mugavero is the author of the Agatha Award-nominated Pawsitively Organic Mysteries Kneading to Die, A Biscuit, A Casket, The Icing on the Corpse and Murder Most Finicky. Custom-Baked Murder, the fifth in the series, will be released in December 2016. As you can imagine, her canine and feline rescues demand the best organic food and treats around. She is a member of Sisters in Crime National, Sisters in Crime New England, Mystery Writers of America, and the Cat Writers’ Association. She currently lives in Connecticut.

Barbara Ross is the author of the Maine Clambake Mysteries, including the Agatha-nominated Best Contemporary Novel Clammed Up, as well as Boiled Over, Musseled Out, Fogged Inn, and Iced Under. Her story “Nogged Off” appears in the holiday novella collection Eggnog Murder along with stories by Leslie Meier and Lee Hollis. Barbara blogs with the Wicked Cozy Authors and Maine Crime Writers. In the summer, she writes on her big front porch overlooking the water in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. You can visit her website at http://www.maineclambakemysteries.com