LESLIE BUDEWITZ: I’m sure my blog sisters will agree: Once you start cooking seriously and writing books that include recipes, you develop Recipe Eyes. Any recipe anywhere may catch your attention. The last recipe I posted,
Crispy Gnocchi with Burst Tomatoes and Mozzarella, is one example. Another is this salad, which I spotted in
Rural Montanan, a monthly magazine sent to customers of the electric co-ops around the state.
Curious place to see recipes, right? Every issue, readers are invited to submit recipes on a theme. That month, it was blueberries. The contributors aren’t professional cookbook or recipe writers, and sometimes the instructions are a bit scant – to be fair, that may be attributable to the editor, shortening descriptions for publication, and to squeeze more contributions in each issue. For this salad, I spotted ingredients in the photo that weren’t listed in the recipe, and I added a couple of my own.
Call it collaborative recipe writing. Call it pretty darned tasty.
Make your own honey-roasted pecans or buy them ready to eat.
PS: I finally figured out how to embed a PDF of the recipe so you can print it easily. Scroll down to the 💕 for the link.
Green Salad with Feta, Peaches, and Blueberries
For the honey-roasted pecans:
½ cup honey-roasted pecans
OR
1 cup pecan halves, or halves and pieces
1/2 tablespoon honey, or more if needed
flake salt
Heat oven to 350 degrees. In a pie plate or other small baking dish, toss the pecans and honey until well coated. Roast 10-12 minutes, or until well caramelized. Remove from oven and sprinkle with the flake salt.
Remember that nuts will continue to brown as they cool. Store extras in a sealed container. Or just eat ’em.
For the dressing:
2 teaspoons Dijon-style mustard
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons orange juice
kosher salt and fresh ground pepper, to taste
Whisk together in a small bowl or shake well in a sealed jar.
For the salad:
6-8 ounces fresh greens, washed and cut or torn
½ pint fresh blueberries, washed and stemmed
1 peach, diced
½ English or seedless cucumber, diced
½ cup crumbled feta, or more to taste
1 tablespoon fresh basil, chopped
Place the greens in your serving bowl. Combine remaining ingredients in a medium bowl, than add to the greens. Add the dressing and top with the honey-roasted pecans.
Enjoy!
TO ERR IS CUMIN:A Spice Shop Mystery (Seventh St. Books, out now in paper, ebook, and audio)
From the cover:
One person’s treasure is another’s trash. . .
Pepper Reece, owner of the Spice Shop in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, wants nothing more than to live a quiet life for a change, running her shop and working with customers eager to spice up their cooking. But when she finds an envelope stuffed with cash in a ratty old wingback left on the curb, she sets out to track down the owner.
Pepper soon concludes that the chair and its stash may belong to young Talia Cook, new in town and nowhere to be seen. Boz Bosworth, an unemployed chef Pepper’s tangled with in the past, shows up looking for the young woman, but Pepper refuses to help him search. When Boz is found floating in the Ship Canal, only a few blocks from Talia’s apartment, free furniture no longer seems like such a bargain.
On the hunt for Talia, Pepper discovers a web of connections threatening to ensnare her best customer. The more she probes, the harder it gets to tell who’s part of an unsavory scheme of corruption—and who might be the next victim.
Between her quest for an elusive herb, helping her parents remodel their new house, and setting up the Spice Shop’s first cooking class, Pepper’s got a full plate. Dogged by a sense of obligation to find the rightful owner of the hidden treasure, she keeps on showing up and asking questions.
One mistake, and she could find herself cashing out. . .
Available at
Amazon *
Barnes & Noble *
Books-A-Million *
Bookshop.org * And your local booksellers!
And coming in September:
Take a step back in time with All God's Sparrows and Other Stories: A Stagecoach Mary Fields Collection of historical short mysteries, featuring the Agatha-Award winning "All God's Sparrows" and other stories imagining the life of real-life historical figure Mary Fields, born into slavery in 1832, during the last thirty years of her life, in Montana. Coming September 17, 2024 from Beyond the Page Publishing; available for preorder now wherever you buy books.
Leslie Budewitz is the author of the Spice Shop Mysteries set in Seattle's Pike Place Market, and the Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries, set in NW Montana. As Alicia Beckman, she writes moody, standalone suspense, most recently Blind Faith. She is the winner of Agatha Awards in three categories: Best Nonfiction (2011), Best First Novel (2013), and Best Short Story (2018). Her latest book is Between a Wok and a Dead Place, the 7th Spice Shop mystery. Watch for To Err is Cumin, the 8th Spice Shop Mystery, in July 2024 and All God's Sparrows and Other Stories: A Stagecoach Mary Fields Collection, in September 2024.
A past president of Sisters in Crime and national board member of Mystery Writers of America, Leslie lives in northwest Montana with her husband, a musician and doctor of natural medicine, and their cat, an avid bird-watcher.
Swing by Leslie's website and join the mailing list for her seasonal newsletter. And join her on Facebook where she shares book news and giveaways from her writer friends, and talks about food, mysteries, and the things that inspire her.
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