Please welcome guest Catherine Bruns! #Thanksgiving #recipe and #giveaway

 

Please welcome today's guest, Catherine Bruns! I'm delighted that Catherine is here to share a tasty Thanksgiving side dish recipe with us... it sounds so delicious and decadent! She is also offering readers a chance to win one of two books. Be sure to scroll down to find out how to enter. 

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Thank you to Kim for inviting me today! It’s been a while since I’ve been a guest at Mystery Lovers Kitchen, and I’m thrilled to be back.

Life is busy for everyone these days. I constantly find that I have too much to do. Between my family, writing three books a year and a day job, there’s never enough time. Add in the holidays and it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

I love Thanksgiving so much that I decided to write a mystery about the holiday. In the Blink of a Pie is the third book in my maple syrup series. Set in Vermont, the series follows Leila Khoury as she comes home to find her father’s killer and take over running his maple syrup farm. In cozy mystery fashion, Leila also manages to uncover a few other murders as well.

 Like Leila’s mother, I enjoy hosting Thanksgiving every year for my family, but because of time constraints, I’m always on the lookout for shortcuts. Since my husband and sons are all meat and potato eaters, one variety of potatoes with the turkey isn’t enough. That’s where my baked potato casserole comes in. It’s super easy, delicious, and definitely a comfort food.

 

BAKED POTATO CASSEROLE

Ingredients

Six medium potatoes, baked or boiled

1/4 cup butter
4 ounces cream cheese, softened
2/3 cup sour cream
1/2 cup of milk or cream (more or less to taste)
2 cups of cheddar cheese, shredded
1 onion, thinly sliced
10 slices of bacon, cooked and crumbled
Salt and pepper to taste

Toppings:

1/2 onion, sliced
2 slices bacon, cooked and crumbled
1/2 cup cheddar cheese 

Instructions

Pre-heat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Mash the warm potatoes with a potato masher. Add butter, cream cheese, and sour cream. While mashing, add the milk/cream a little at a time until it reaches a creamy consistency.

Stir in the remaining ingredients (except toppings) and spread into a two-quart casserole dish. Sprinkle the toppings and bake for 25-30 minutes, or until the cheese is melted and the potatoes are hot.

Note: With my brood, I always double the recipe. If there are any leftovers, they taste even better the next day!

🦃  Click here for a free printable PDF of the recipe!  🦃

 

Sometimes, there’s no one you can crust...

It’s Thanksgiving in Sugar Ridge, Vermont, and Leila Khoury, manager of Sappy Endings Farm, is ready to usher in the holiday season by hosting a pie-baking contest. The day is meticulously planned, from the judging panel to the maple lattes, and Leila can’t wait for the entire town to enjoy some sweet treats.

But when a neighbor drops dead from sampling a poisoned pumpkin pie, it’s not just Leila’s perfect day that’s in jeopardy―her livelihood is now at stake. And after yet another near-fatal incident, she realizes an even more terrifying truth: the killer wasn’t targeting her neighbor, but someone even closer to home! 

Purchase link: IN THE BLINK OF A PIE

Sometimes a commission check come with a price that’s too high to pay…

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 After a hectic summer, real estate agent Cindy York is ready to relax and enjoy the autumn season   with her family. She’s especially looking forward to a second honeymoon vacation with her   husband to celebrate their silver anniversary.

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But business must come before pleasure. When Cindy sends agent Olivia Lamphere in her place to show a house and the woman turns up dead, she promises her husband to stay out of the investigation. After another agent Cindy knows is murdered, she's forced to break that promise. What is the connection between the two women and why is she receiving threatening notes as well?

Can Cindy discover who’s making the deadly deals before she winds up the next victim?

Purchase Link: KILLER COMMISSION 

Catherine is the USA Today bestselling and award-winning author of the Cookies & Chance, Maple Syrup, Italian Chef, and Cindy York mysteries. She wrote her first book, a highly plagiaristic version of Cinderella, when she was eight years old. Catherine lives in upstate New York with her very patient husband, three sons, and several spoiled pets. She’s written over 30 novels and has many more stories waiting to be told. 

Places to find Catherine:

Facebook Author Page - https://bit.ly/2nkm0HN   

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/catherinebrunsbooks/

Get a free ebook when you sign up for Catherine’s newsletter:  https://www.catherinebruns.net/contact

Catherine’s Cozy Readers https://www.facebook.com/groups/241834706420330/ -

 

Book Giveaway! 

Reader, which Thanksgiving side dish is a must for your table?

Comment below and include your email (yourname at yourserver dot com) for a chance to win your choice of either a signed copy of In the Blink of a Pie or my most recent release, Killer Commission. Contest ends Wednesday, November 19, 2025 and is limited to U.S. residents only.

 

Red Wine Honey Cake #Thanksgiving recipe from Molly MacRae

  

Oh, this cake. It smells fantastic. It’s moist without being heavy. The texture is gorgeous. It slices beautifully. The flavor is deep and delicious. And it’s easy, easy, easy to make.

Melissa Clark, whose recipe in the New York Times I adapted, gives measurements for the dry ingredients by weight for greater accuracy. I love weighing ingredients, so I’ve given those measurements here. I’ve included the approximate measurements by volume, too, in case you don’t have a kitchen scale. Although, if you don’t have a kitchen scale, you might add one to your holiday wish list because they’re wonderful.

Clark includes a recipe for macerated plums to pour over the cake. I didn’t make that, because I didn’t have plums and, trust me, the cake shone all on its own. I’m thankful for this recipe this holiday season and I think you will be, too.

 

Red Wine Honey Cake

Adapted from Melissa Clark’s recipe in the New York Times

 

Ingredients

300 grams all-purpose flour (2 1/2 cups), and more for flouring the pan

10 grams baking powder (2 teaspoons)

3 grams baking soda (1/2 teaspoon)

3 grams salt (1/2 teaspoon)

2 grams cinnamon (1 teaspoon)

2 grams cardamom (1 teaspoon)

2 grams ground ginger (1 teaspoon)

3 large eggs

200 grams granulated sugar (1 cup)

1 1/4 cups olive oil

1 cup honey

3/4 cup dry red wine

2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger

 

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. with rack in the middle. Grease and flour a 10-inch springform pan.

In a large bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and spices.

In another large bowl, whisk eggs well. Whisk in sugar, oil, honey, wine, and fresh ginger until well combined.

Whisk in dry ingredients until smooth.

Pour batter into prepared pan.  

Bake until springy to the touch and a cake tester comes out clean, 60-65 minutes. Cool cake in pan on a wire rack for 20 minutes. Unmold cake and let cool completely before cutting.

 

The Boston Globe says Molly MacRae writes “murder with a dose of drollery.” In addition to writing the Haunted Shell Shop Mysteries, she’s the author of the award-winning, national bestselling Haunted Yarn Shop Mysteries and the Highland Bookshop Mysteries. As Margaret Welch, she writes books for Annie’s Fiction and Guideposts. Her short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and she’s a winner of the Sherwood Anderson Award for Short Fiction. Visit Molly on Facebook and Pinterest and connect with her on X or Instagram.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Easy Roasted #Thanksgiving Vegetables @LucyBurdette

Cat with turkey from A DEADLY FEAST

 

LUCY BURDETTE: If you’re hosting Thanksgiving and responsible for the turkey, the gravy, the mashed potatoes, the pumpkin pie, and possibly more, seems to me you deserve a break on the vegetables. This recipe offers exactly that. You can prepare the vegetables a day ahead, and it takes half an hour or less to do the actual cooking. So you can take the turkey out of the oven, crank up the heat to 425 and pop the sheet pan in the oven when it’s almost time for dinner. I added pomegranate seeds for a little pop of color and sheen, but you could also top the vegetables with fried sage leaves.

Ingredients

1 1/2 lb. Brussels sprouts, trimmed and halved

1 whole small butternut squash, peeled and cubed

1 large red onion or 2 medium, peeled and cubed

Olive oil, for drizzling

Salt and pepper, to taste

Sprinkle of chili powder

Pomegranate seeds, removed from the fruit

Lay out a sheet of parchment paper on top of your baking pan. Arrange the vegetables. Drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt, pepper, and a little chili powder, and mix.

Roast for 25-30 minutes at 425 until the vegetables are beginning to brown. Scrape them into a pretty bowl, mix, top with pomegranate seeds and serve!

Or check out some of my other Thanksgiving recipes:

Pumpkin bread pudding 

Pimento Cheddar Scones 

Butternut Squash Pasta with Leeks and Fried Sage 

Cornbread and Sausage Stuffing 

Pumpkin Pie with Chai Spice and Maple Syrup 

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I am so thankful for each and every one of my readers! xoxo Lucy

A DISH TO DIE FOR is now available wherever books are sold!

About A Dish to Die For (#12 in the Key West food critic mystery series):

Peace and quiet are hard to find in bustling Key West, so Hayley Snow, food critic for Key Zest magazine, is taking the afternoon off for a tranquil lunch with a friend outside of town. As they are enjoying the wild beach and the lunch, she realizes that her husband Nathan’s dog, Ziggy, has disappeared. She follows his barking, to find him furiously digging at a shallow grave with a man’s body in it. Davis Jager, a local birdwatcher, identifies him as GG Garcia, a rabble-rousing Key West local and developer. Garcia was famous for over-development on the fragile Keys, womanizing, and refusing to follow city rules—so it’s no wonder he had a few enemies.

 When Davis is attacked in the parking lot of a local restaurant after talking to Hayley and her dear friend, the octogenarian Miss Gloria, Hayley is slowly but surely drawn into the case. Hayley’s mother, Janet, has been hired to cater GG’s memorial service reception at the local Woman’s Club, using recipes from their vintage Key West cookbook—and Hayley and Miss Gloria sign on to work with her, hoping to cook up some clues by observing the mourners.

But the real clues appear when Hayley begins to study the old cookbook, as whispers of old secrets come to life, dragging the past into the present—with murderous results.

Kirkus Reviews said: 

“Key West food critic Hayley Snow proves once again that she understands crime as well as cuisine. A suitably steamy background for a complex tale of murder and deceit.” 

Escape with Dollycas said:

 "All the characters Ms. Burdette has created are strong and gain depth in every new story. When she introduces a new character she gives just enough background and allows that character to evolve over the course of the story and beyond if they return in another book.

The mystery was complex but I was really drawn to the vintage cookbook, notes, and diary aspect of the story even before I realized their relevance. Soon I was totally engrossed by the story. The well-plotted storylines, the descriptions of the fragile Keys, and all the glorious food. Lucy Burdette is a wonderful storyteller and again her talent shines in A Dish to Die For.

I love catching up with these characters. I am always entertained by their daily lives and the drama that always seems to find them. I am excited to see where the author takes her character next."

 A DISH TO DIE FOR is now available wherever books are sold!

Dress Your Potatoes in Mushroom Gravy

My gram made some dang fine gravy.  See my gram was a country girl, from that part of Virginia that seems to skip right over the Carolinas and become Georgia.  She was not squeamish about the gizzards and such.  We all averted our eyes while gram turned the least appealing part of the turkey into the most rich and savory gravy imaginable.

That gravy was the motif of the meal . . . it went on the potatoes (of course), the turkey, the stuffing, and if a little got on the green beans, well all the better.  We even slathered congealed gravy on our leftover turkey sandwiches.  (Hey, I never claimed to come from classy people.  Don't judge.)

Thanksgiving of 1993 was the last time I ate meat.  I'd decided to become a vegetarian a week or so before, but I wanted my gram's gravy one last time.

I expected to mourn gravy, never find a suitable substitute.

Ah, but then I acquired a wonderful cookbook called "Sundays at the Moosewood."  If you're in the market for a vegetarian cookbook, I highly recommend it.  It takes a sort of culinary trip around the world and has provided our family with some of our most beloved dishes.  In the "Great Britain" chapter, you will find a recipe for shepherd's pie.  We made that recipe our own and it became our go-to Thanksgiving meal (a bottom layer of sauteed peas, carrots and cashews, topped with a blanket of mushroom gravy, and then a thick frosting of mashed potatoes).



The whole thing is delish, but it's the mushroom gravy that makes my heart go pitter pat.  Mr. Wendy always requests I make a double batch of the gravy so we have plenty of leftovers.  And once I took a mason jar of the stuff to my gram's for Thanksgiving, and one of my cousins dubbed it "better than grandma's."  (That did not earn him any points with his elders, but I was proud as a peacock for the rest of the meal.)

In any event, this is the recipe for mushroom gravy from "Sundays at the Moosewood."  If you have a vegan or vegetarian at your gathering (or if you're serving beef instead of bird), this may be a great alternative.  Because no one should have to eat naked mashed potatoes.

Cooking Down the 'Shrooms

Mushroom Gravy

2 Tbs. canola oil
3 Tbs. soy sauce
8 - 12 oz. sliced mushrooms (the recipe calls for 8, but I prefer 12)
a pinch of freshly ground black pepper
1 1/2 c. vegetable broth (or the water you used to boil your potatoes)
2 Tbs. cornstarch dissolved in 1/2 c. cold water

Combine the oil, soy sauce, mushrooms, and pepper in a large skillet and cook over medium-high heat until the mushrooms are tender (don't let them cook down too much, because it's nice to have a bit of texture to them).  Add the broth or potato water and bring to a boil.  Slowly stir in the cornstarch mixture, then reduce to a slow boil and continue to cook (stirring often) until the gravy is thick and clear.

Yep, it's that easy.

***  What about you?  Do you make your own gravy or buy it prepared?  Or do you actually prefer your spuds au naturele?  Give me your gravy memories!