Welcome, Janet Bolin!

Janet Bolin, Daryl Wood Gerber and I go way back. We all joined Sisters in Crime and their Guppy chapter about the same time. For years we were critique partners, which led to us becoming close friends. I'm always sorry that we live so far apart from each other, and now that I've actually seen the hot fudge sauce, I'm really sorry I wasn't close enough to sneak by Janet's house for the tastings!

And now, Janet!

Fudge, Pure and Simple

I confess—I love hot fudge sundaes. Hold the whipped cream, hold the chopped nuts, hold the cherry on top, and give me gobs of hot fudge sliding down a mound of ice cream and (if I’m lucky) stopping frozen in its tracks.

Years ago, friends and I always went to a certain restaurant for special occasions. Others would order sundaes with all the whipped cream and other goodies piled on top. I went for what they called the “Junior Hot Fudge Sundae.” Yes, the amount was small (well, sort of), but the fudge was semi-sweet and luscious, with no creamy or nutty distractions.

After I moved away, that restaurant closed (hmmmmm….)

What’s a fudge-lover to do?

Experiment?

First of all, chocolate is temperamental. It doesn’t look melted sometimes when it is, and overheating it can cause it to separate. And, as they say, microwave ovens vary, so I had adjust the timing and power to get the chocolate to melt just right. Which means you may have to keep trying and tasting…

First, I tried baker’s chocolate, and it nearly always came out grainy and gritty. It tasted fine, and I could pretend those grains were teeny chocolate chips. However, even in the photos I took, it looked a bit wretched.

The simplest recipe I came up with that can be made in only a few minutes while someone else is doing battle with an ice cream scoop and a container of hard ice cream (desperation for chocolate is the mother of invention) can be a bit grainy:

WORLD’S SIMPLEST 

HOT FUDGE SAUCE

Melt one square of unsweetened baker’s chocolate in a small, covered dish in the microwave oven. Stir in two tablespoons of honey. Warm it again, but only slightly, and spoon over the ice cream. Serves two admirably.

My old Joy of Cooking cookbook says that chocolate that hardens on the ice cream will “enrapture” children. The first time I tried the above recipe, basically half chocolate and half honey, I put the honey in the dish with the chocolate before I melted the chocolate. The honey boiled. The fudge sauce turned into crunchy chocolate candy. I liked it, but no one became enraptured.

Finally, after many experiments and taste tests (poor me), I gave up on baker’s chocolate and used unsweetened powdered cocoa instead, and the recipe turned out well the first time—yay! A keeper, it’s semi-sweet like the sauce I remembered from those Junior Hot Fudge Sundaes from long ago, and it only takes a few minutes:

EASY SEMI-SWEET 

HOT FUDGE SAUCE

In a microwaveable dish, combine:

½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
¼ cup granulated sugar
6 tablespoons of cold water—added two at a time and stirred after each addition

Stir to create a thickish paste.

Add:

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

Cover the dish and heat in your microwave oven for approximately 2 minutes on a medium/low to medium setting.

Stir to completely melt the butter and blend it into the paste (which will now resemble a sauce!)

Cool slightly.

Stir in ½ teaspoon vanilla.

If necessary, reheat (gently) before drizzling the sauce on ice cream.


Hints: The rules for making fudge sauce are similar to the rules for making candy. For best results, make your sauce on a non-humid, non-rainy day. Cooking the sauce longer makes it (or the candy) harder. Don’t beat the sauce. Stir it gently to prevent it from becoming sugary. But don’t worry if it does separate. It will still taste good…

Make it in small batches—each time you reheat the sauce, you risk causing it to separate or turn into something resembling chocolate chips (which, as I said, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.)

With all that talk about whipped cream, nuts, and cherries on top, you probably think I’m a purist when it comes to hot fudge sundaes. Actually, hot fudge tastes just fine over the usual vanilla ice cream, but also over chocolate, mint chip, or orange sherbet. I’ve never tried hot fudge sauce over ginger ice cream. Just the thought makes me swoon…

Oh, and a brownie underneath it all might be nice.

In Janet Bolin’s Threadville Mysteries, Willow Vanderling teaches machine embroidery and helps solve mysteries in a village of textile arts shops. The first novel in the series, Dire Threads, was nominated for an Agatha for Best First Mystery and for the Bony Blithe. The second Threadville Mystery, Threaded for Trouble, is on the shortlist for the Bony Blithe. The third book in the series, Thread and Buried, which involves sleuthing on the way to and from an ice cream stand, will be on store shelves June 4 and can be pre-ordered from your favorite bookstore or from these booksellers. Two more Threadville Mysteries are in the works.

Janet lives on the shore of Lake Erie with two rascally dogs who resemble Sally-Forth and Tally-Ho in the Threadville Mystery series.

Visit Janet at Threadville Mysteries, on facebook and twitter.

Welcome guest, Janet Bolin!

Please welcome our good friend and guest blogger, Janet Bolin, whose very entertaining mystery series: THREADVILLE MYSTERIES, set in the fictional town of Threadville, are some of the most delightful mysteries I've read.


The second in the series, THREADED FOR TROUBLE, debuted this month.  Read an excerpt from her stories by clicking this LINK.  Enjoy!


Take it away, Janet.




My father made every square inch of our garden produce. We had asparagus, rhubarb, red raspberries, peas, and leaf lettuce in the spring, carrots, tomatoes and green beans all summer, and more red raspberries, pears, apples, and Concord grapes in the late summer and into fall. Day after day, my mother filled canning jars with stewed tomatoes, beans, tomato juice, grape juice apple butter, pickles, jams and jellies, and something horrible (everyone else loved it, don’t ask me why) called piccalilli made from ground-up green tomatoes.

These (except for the piccalilli) would be great all winter.

However, in the summer, I found all this cooking ghastly. We didn’t have air conditioning. I went outside and played under trees and dined on popsicles made out of grape juice. It was a tough life . . .

I did, eventually, help with the canning. And I graduated from grape juice to my mother’s iced coffee. As I recall, this is how she made it (except she liked her coffee a lot weaker than I do):

MOTHER'S ICED COFFEE:


Brew strong, dark coffee and stir in cocoa powder and sugar to taste. Freeze into a slush in your freezer. This can be done quickly in a largish pan containing only a thin layer of coffee. Or you might prefer the convenience of an ice cream maker. Spoon slush into a glass, filling it most of the way. Top up with milk. Grate nutmeg over it and serve with a straw.

* * *

Janet's first novel, DIRE THREADS, was nominated for an Agatha Award for Best First novel, and was also nominated for the Bloody Words Light Mystery Award (the Bony Blithe.) THREADVILLE MYSTERIES are available in stores everywhere.

 Visit Janet at facebook and twitter.

And then there was the time she put sugar in her salt shaker ...

Please welcome our good friend and guest blogger, Janet Bolin, whose very entertaining first mystery, Dire Threads, will debut on June 7th. Janet's trademark sense of humor shows in the story behind this unusual but delicious recipe! Have fun reading and cooking and discovering her family secrets.

Thanks for letting me appear on one of my favorite blogs!

My mother liked salt. When she cooked, I could taste very little except salt. She added salt to fruit and to cakes and cookies, and she strongly objected to sweetness if she thought something should taste salty.

To her, tomatoes were supposed to be salty, never sweet. She canned tomato juice from tomatoes my father grew. My aunts—my father had four sisters, none of them married, who lived together—canned tomato juice from tomatoes they grew, too.

In the canning process, my mother salted her tomato juice . My aunts sugared theirs.

Thanksgiving dinner was always at my aunts’ house.

As we milled around in the living room before the meal, my aunts proudly handed us each a small glass of their lovely, slightly sweet tomato juice.

My outspoken mother didn’t want to hurt my aunts’ feelings, so she made faces that she thought they might not notice. Before her horrified grimaces became really, really obvious, one of us kids would sidle up to her, chug our own glass of tomato juice, trade glasses with her, and talk to her about something, anything, else until her I-just-might-gag-right-this-very-minute expression finally subsided.

I can just imagine the faces she would have made about the dessert that another friend’s mother fed to her kids. This mother cubed cheddar cheese, poured maple syrup over it, and served it in bowls to be eaten with spoons. I was leery—cheddar is a bit salty, after all, and maple syrup is sweet, but I liked it.

All that cheese and syrup seemed a little decadent, though. I like cheese crêpes and I like pancakes with syrup, so I created a compromise—adding grated cheese to pancakes. First, I tried medium cheddar. Although nice in crêpes, the cheddar was too salty (!) with the syrup. Next, I tried grated part-skimmed mozzarella, you know, the kind sold in bags at the grocery store (grating mozzarella isn’t exactly easy or fun.)

The pancakes came out with a creamy yet slightly nutty (not surprising, since I also added walnuts) tang. And of course, I poured gobs of maple syrup over them.

They’re almost a dessert, but since they’re chock full of eggs and cheese, I call them lunch. Or brunch.

MOZZARELLA AND WALNUT PANCAKES

Makes about a dozen saucer-sized pancakes.

1. Beat lightly in a largish bowl:

2 cups skimmed milk

4 tablespoons walnut oil

3 large eggs

2. In a separate bowl, put:

2 cups pastry flour

4 teaspoons baking powder

Stir with a fork to sift (or use a sifter if you really must)

3. Stir into flour mixture:

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

2 cups grated part-skimmed mozzarella cheese

4. Pour flour mixture into liquids and stir until flour is damp.

5. Cook by large spoonfuls on hot griddle or frying pan. When bubbles form on top, turn and brown the other side.

6. Don’t forget the maple syrup. And maybe a pat or two of butter.

7. Warning: if you eat many of these pancakes, allow time for an afternoon snooze. But that’s always true with pancakes, right?

Janet Bolin writes the Threadville mystery series_{, about a sleuth who teaches machine embroidery and helps catch murderers in a village of textile shops (and suspects!)}

DIRE THREADS, Berkley Prime Crime, June 7, 2011

Visit Janet at
www.ThreadvilleMysteries.com