Summer Cranberry Sauce #Recipe from Maya Corrigan

I love cranberries and usually buy bags of them in December to freeze for use long after the holidays. Last year, though, I didn't buy enough cranberries to last until summer. When I had leftover chicken recently, I craved cranberry sauce and tried a recipe that jazzes up canned cranberries so the sauce tastes homemade.The recipe, originally by Ina Garten, appeared in a New York Times article.

I call this "summer cranberry sauce" because in the fall and winter, I would definitely use fresh cranberries to make sauce. 

Ingredients

1 14-ounce can whole berry cranberry sauce 
½ Granny Smith apple, peeled and grated
¼ cup chopped pecans (or walnuts)
¼ cup raisins
½ teaspoon grated orange zest
3 tablespoons freshly squeezed orange juice

When I went to make the sauce, I discovered that the oranges I'd bought a few days before had been eaten. I didn't have time to run to the store before dinner, so I improvised by using 2 tablespoons of orange marmalade, which has orange zest in it, and 1 tablespoon of orange liqueur, Grand Marnier. I added a bit of lemon juice because I thought the mixture was on the sweet side. 

Warm the cranberry sauce over low to medium heat in a small saucepan. Add the grated apple and the orange juice and zest to the pan. Bring the sauce to a boil, lower the heat, and simmer the cranberry mix for 15 minutes, stirring every few minutes.

Take the pan off the heat and stir in the nuts and raisins. Move the sauce to a bowl and chill it. Serve it cold or at room temperature. 

Cranberry sauce goes well with summer's fresh produce.

The next time I make this recipe, I'll try chopping the apple instead of grating it. I'll also make sure I have an orange on hand. 

Visit my post about cranberry history and trivia. You'll also find links there to cranberry recipes by the Mystery Lovers' Kitchen crew. 

READERS: What's your favorite way to make or eat cranberries?

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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

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BUTTERNUT SQUASH SOUP @KorinaMossAuthor

KORINA MOSS: The good things about this soup: it's easy, it's tasty, it's healthy, it can be made ahead of time, and the leftovers can be frozen, giving you more easy, tasty, healthy meals! 

Ingredients:

1/2 TBL olive oil + 1 tsp (or butter)

20 oz pkg butternut squash, already chopped & peeled (makes it easy)

1/4 cup white or yellow onion

2 garlic cloves

1 tsp real maple syrup

2 TBL applesauce

nutmeg & cinnamon to taste

1 cup (approximately) vegetable broth

optional: sunflower seeds

Directions:

Put squash in bowl and drizzle with 1 TBL olive oil. Mix to coat.

Place coated squash on parchment paper on a baking sheet. 

Roast at 400°F for 30 minutes.

Put back into the bowl and roughly mash. Spoon into blender. (You don't have to mash it first, I just find it's easier on the blender.)

Chop onion and garlic

Warm 1 tsp oil and/or butter in soup pot, add onions and garlic and gently cook. 

Put cooked onions and garlic into the blender with the squash. 

Add syrup, applesauce, nutmeg, and cinnamon.

Add some of the vegetable broth and blend, continuing until the soup is the consistency you want. 

Taste and adjust syrup, applesauce, nutmeg, and cinnamon as needed.

Pour back into soup pot and heat.

Spoon into bowls. Sprinkle with sunflower seeds if desired. Refrigerate or freeze leftovers. Enjoy! 

Do you like soups in the summer? 

The fifth book in my Cheese Shop Mystery series, FONDUE OR DIE, releases on October 22nd and is available for preorder. 

KORINA MOSS is the author of the Cheese Shop cozy mystery series set in Sonoma Valley, including the Agatha Award winner of the Best First Novel, Cheddar Off Dead, and a finalist for Best Contemporary Novel, Case of the Bleus. Her books have been featured in USA Today, PARADE Magazine, Woman’s World Magazine, AARP Magazine, and Fresh Fiction. You can follow Korina on Facebook or Instagram. For more information or to sign up for her free monthly newsletter, visit her website at korinamossauthor.com 

Light & Easy Garlic Tomato Linguini @KorinaMossAuthor

KORINA MOSS: The last two weeks have been super busy for me. After I returned from my road trip to Maryland for Malice Domestic, it was time to move my son out of his college dorm. Then we went in search of proper clothes & supplies for his two-week field study course in Acadia, Maine, which is less than a week away. Also keeping up with my own writing and work has left cooking on the back burner. (See what I did there?) I have a strong feeling I'm not the only one with a very busy schedule. So I decided to share what I made this past week: a quick garlic tomato pasta dish that was satisfying and light enough to have even in the heat of the summer. This is a single serving, so as always, the quantity and ingredients can be modified. I'm listing what I used. 

Ingredients: 

Whole wheat linguini

2 sundried tomatoes
5 cherry tomatoes
2 cloves of garlic, peeled

1 TBL Olive oil
1 TBL sundried tomato oil 
Parmesan cheese

Directions:

Bring a pot of water to boil and cook pasta according to package directions.

Chop sundried tomatoes and garlic. 

Cut cherry tomatoes in half or thirds.

When pasta is done or almost done:

In a pan (or use the same pot as your pasta while it’s in the colander), heat olive oil and sundried tomato oil. (You can also add or substitute with butter.)

On low, heat the garlic, sundried tomatoes, and cherry tomatoes for a minute or two while moving them around in the pan occasionally until the garlic becomes fragrant. 

Add the cooked and drained linguini and mix it in with the olive oil mixture.

Transfer it to serving bowls. Add parmesan cheese. Enjoy!

FONDUE OR DIE is available for preorder! 

All books in my Cheese Shop Mystery series are available everywhere books are sold. 

KORINA MOSS is the author of the Cheese Shop cozy mystery series set in the Sonoma Valley, including the Agatha Award winner of the Best First Novel, Cheddar Off Dead, and the nominee for Best Contemporary Novel, Case of the Bleus. Her books have been featured in PARADE Magazine, Woman’s World Magazine, AARP Magazine, and Fresh Fiction. 

For the past several years, Korina has been on her own Eat, Pray, Love journey, which seems to have stalled at the Eat phase. When not writing or sampling new cheeses (a perk of the job), she can be found with a new favorite cozy, doing jigsaw puzzles, or discovering new travel destinations. She has an affinity (some might say addiction) to coffee mugs, loves cats, and can't pass up a new notebook or journal with all those fresh, empty pages. Please visit her website for more information at korinamossauthor.com. 

Hot Wine Punch #recipe by Maya Corrigan

I love curling up with a book and a hot drink when it's cold outside. Most of the time, that drink is tea, but occasionally I like something stronger. This wine punch fits the bill. While punch is usually served to large gatherings, this punch is easily made for one person or a small group. The recipe for a a larger group is included in Bake Offed, my 8th Five-Ingredient Mystery. 

Bake Offed takes place at a mystery fan festival, where café manager, Val, and her grandfather are volunteers. Granddad promotes his Codger Cook recipe column and website to the mystery fans by creating a dinner menu based on the Clue board game. The dishes are named for the suspects in the game. Each dish has five or fewer ingredients. 

When I was testing recipes to include in the book, I had no trouble coming up with ones that had Green, Mustard, White, and Plum in their titles. A Peacocktail was an obvious recipe to include. Cocktail-making isn't one of my skills, so I asked my Millennial nephew to invent a blue cocktail, which he enjoyed doing and held multiple tastings until it was just right. That left Scarlet as the only suspect without a dish named after her. Then I came across a recipe called Hot Scarlet Wine Punch in a 20-year-old cookbook. I simplified the recipe by cutting down on the number of ingredients and on the amounts. I've never tried a punch that I liked as much as this one. Here is a single-serving recipe for Hot Miss Scarlet Punch.  

Adapted from a recipe in Better Homes and Gardens 500 Five-Ingredient Recipes, 2002.

Ingredients

3 ounces cranberry juice cocktail
1½ teaspoons brown sugar
1 clove (or a scant 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves)
1 cinnamon stick (or a scant 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon)
2.5 ounces dry white wine

Heat the first four ingredients in a small saucepan. Bring the mix to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for five minutes uncovered. Remove the clove and cinnamon stick. If you've used ground spices you can leave them in the punch. Add the wine and heat the mixture. Serve in a glass or a punch cup.

Do you like sampling punch at a party? 

If tea is your preferred hot drink, what kind to you like? 

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Val and Granddad attend a mystery fan fest that features a bake-off between contestants playing the roles of cooks to fictional sleuths. As Nero Wolfe’s gourmet chef, Granddad competes against Sherlock Holmes's landlady Mrs. Hudson, played by Cynthia Sweet. Granddad blames her for ripping off the five-ingredient theme of his Codger Cook newspaper column to use in her own recipe column and cookbook. When she’s found dead in her hotel room with a whistling teakettle next to her, he and Val sort through the festival-goers to find the one with the biggest beef against Ms. Not-So-Sweet.

Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mysteries featuring café manger Val and her live-wire grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. Maya lives in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. Before writing crime fiction, she taught American literature, writing, and detective fiction at Northern Virginia Community College and Georgetown University. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords.

• Visit my website for easy recipes, mystery history and trivia, and a culinary mystery story. 
• Sign up for my newsletter. One subscriber wins a free book each time I send a newsletter.
• Follow me on Facebook.

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Pecan Pie Easy #Recipe by Maya Corrigan

Pecan pie is often too sweet for my tastes, but since I'm fond of pies and pecans, I usually eat a piece, not a slice but a sliver. A month ago when a friend came to dinner and brought a homemade pecan pie, I asked for a sliver. Once I tasted it, though, I ate a slice in addition to the silver. It had just the right amount of sweetness. I'm sharing my friend's recipe today. It uses less sugar than most pecan pie recipes. Many people believe there's no such thing as pecan pie that's too sweet, but if you're not in that group, you might like this version. 

Ingredients

1/2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons butter, softened

2 eggs, lightly beaten

2 tablespoons flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup light corn syrup

1 1/2 cups coarsely chopped pecans

1 8-inch pie shell, unbaked 

Note: A prepared shell also works. My store-bought pecan pie crust ended up a bit toasty. Next time I'll follow the directions and start with an unbaked pie shell. 

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees

Mix the first seven ingredients, everything except the pecans and pie shell. Beat the mixture well and then stir in the pecans.

Pour the mixture into the pie shell. I added five whole pecans on top as a decoration. Next time I make this pie, I'll add more whole pecans on top.

Bake 30-40 minutes or until the filling is set.

Remove the pie from the oven and let it cool before serving.

Serve with ice cream or whipped cream. 

Yield: 6-8 slices

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Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mysteries featuring café manger Val and her live-wire grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. Maya lives in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. Before writing crime fiction, she taught American literature, writing, and detective fiction at Northern Virginia Community College and Georgetown University. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords.

Visit my website for easy recipes, mystery history and trivia, and a free culinary mystery story.

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Guest Author Elizabeth Craig with Mother's Day Recipe & #Giveaway @elizabethscraig

Click to learn more.

Please join me in giving a warm welcome back to Elizabeth Craig (aka Riley Adams), a talented author of multiple bestselling mystery series, a busy mother of two and a dedicated blogger who has offered online fellowship to the writing community for years.

(Elizabeth's Twitter feed is a marvel, and I encourage you all to follow her!)

Elizabeth is also a beloved alumna of Mystery Lovers' Kitchen, and we're thrilled that she's returned for a visit, especially on this particular Sunday so I can wish her a very...

Happy Mother's Day! xoxo

~ Cleo 

Hi everyone! And a special hi to all the mothers out there on this Mother’s Day installment of Mystery Lovers' Kitchen. Thanks so much to the gang here for hosting me . . . I enjoy coming back for visits!

Hope you’re all enjoying your spring so far. Life has been busy for me recently—my husband and I moved (just in-state, but wow! I’d forgotten how frantic moving makes you) and I’ve had books come out all through the process. Two books came out during my great I-Must-Reduce-the-Number-of-Things-in-This-House phase (Frictional Characters and A Dash of Murder) and one book came out last month in the We’re-Staying-in-an-Airbnb-to-House-Hunt phase (A Notion to Murder). Yes, all three active series are represented in those releases, ha. I must have lost what’s left of my mind.

On the upside, I was most concerned about my elderly cat, Mr. Smoke, and my somewhat neurotic corgi, Finn, making the move.

Mr. Smoke

I fretted over it quite a bit and took myself and my reluctant animals to the veterinarian to buy a concoction that might help them with any anxiety they might experience. 

As you can see, however, there was no need to dose them up. What a relief! They were real troopers. 

Finn

So, as mentioned, it’s been busy. I have the feeling y'all might possibly be, too. The month of May always seems to be that way. I thought I’d revisit an oldie-but-goodie recipe that first "aired" here in 2013. It’s simple and tasty—two important traits of a recipe for a busy mom or a busy person, period. 

If you can’t find specialized chutney in your store and just have the plain variety, you can quickly mix up a small can (8 oz.) of crushed pineapple and a regular jar of chutney (no special type, just run-of-the mill.) You’ll end up with the same, delicious, fruity taste.

EASY CHUTNEY CHICKEN

Ingredients:

1 chicken fryer (or a comparable number of chicken breasts)

1 teaspoon salt

¼ cup regular mustard

2/3 cup apple-cranberry chutney (or peach chutney, or whatever-suits-your-fancy chutney)

½ cup chopped pecans (optional)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Sprinkle the chicken with salt and place in a shallow casserole dish.

Mix all the other ingredients and cover the chicken with them.

Bake at 350 F., uncovered, for an hour and fifteen minutes.

Bestselling cozy mystery author Elizabeth Spann Craig is a library-loving, avid mystery reader. A pet-owning Southerner, her four series are full of cats, corgis, and cheese grits. The mother of two, she lives with her husband, a fun-loving corgi, and a shy fluffball of a cat. Follow Elizabeth and learn more about her books by visiting her website at  ElizabethSpannCraig.com

How are things for all of you? Do you find late-spring a busy time, too? Made or are considering making any moves lately? And are your pets low-key and laid-back or a little edgier?

Giveaway!

Today, Elizabeth is giving away an e-book copy of the first book in her charming Southern Quilting mystery series...

QUILT OR INNOCENCE?

(Click here to learn more.)

To be entered in Elizabeth's drawing,

leave a comment for her on this post

with your email address.

Congrats to the winner:

"jarjm"