Farewell and My Best Recipe on MLK by Maya Corrigan

This is my final post as a member of the Kitchen. Six years ago you welcomed me into this special group. I've enjoyed becoming friends with all of you online and meeting many of you in person at mystery events. We've been on panels together, shared meals, and cheered one another's successes. I've also gotten to know MLK's wonderful readers through their comments. 

This post is a brief retrospective on my time in MLK, not a recipe post, though I do include a link to the best recipe I shared on MLK. When I joined the group, I didn’t know how to take good photos while cooking. Though my photos improved a bit over six years, I still can't take pictures as enticing as other MLKers can...Looking at you, Cleo. I’m just grateful that my phone never fell into a bowl of batter or a pot of soup.

Because of my photo-phobia, I appreciated the opportunity to deviate from the standard recipe posts to write about food history in my 2021 Potluck Monday posts. In each post, I explored the origin of a particular food and I included links to recipes on MLK for that food. If you missed those posts, here are links to some harrowing histories of food: Chocolate Candy's Deadly Past, Candy Corn Calamities, The Dark History of Gingerbread.

The book I'm currently writing isn't a culinary cozy. It's a suspense novel based on history and with crucial food scenes. When it comes out, I hope I can return to MLK as a guest.

In closing I'd like to highlight the hardest dish I ever made, though it has only five ingredients. It’s also the most delicious dessert I've ever eaten. Tarte Tatin, shown in the photo at the top of the post, is the best recipe I posted in the last six years.

Though I've cooked all my adult life, being part of MLK has expanded my culinary horizons. Yourand  recipe posts have introduced me to new ingredients and taught me new ways of cooking familiar foods.  And I really love the AROUND THE KITCHEN TABLE conversations.

💕Thank you, MLK writers and readers! 💕

READERS: What's the hardest dish you've ever prepared?

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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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French Food: Crêpes and Tartes by Maya Corrigan

Savory crêpe (galette) and cider 

Instead of experimenting with recipes at home during June, I spent more than half of the month in France, enjoying meals prepared by others. Today I’m sharing pictures from the trip and links to recipes similar for dishes similar to those we ate in Normandy and Brittany. 

My husband Mike and I took an ocean cruise visiting ports on France’s Atlantic coast. Traveling by land, our daughter Nora joined us in four cities. 

In addition to hosting the Olympics this summer, France has been celebrating the 80th anniversary of D-Day. The gratitude of the French for their liberation was obvious in the cities we visited: Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Brest, St. Malo, Bayeux, and Honfleur. The flags of the Allied countries whose troops assaulted Nazi strongholds on D-Day were flying, not just on government buildings, but also along the streets. Some shops displayed the flags of Canada, the UK, and the US, and others had placards with “Thank You” on them. 

On the beaches where the battles raged, the French have erected monuments and tend cemeteries in memory of those who fought to free them. Parisians have a reputation for being curt with those who don’t speak their language, but visitors receive a warm welcome in Normandy and Brittany. Whenever we paused to check a map or looked even slightly befuddled, people stopped and asked in English if they could help us find our way.

Now for the food!

Crêpes and Cider

Restaurants in Normandy serve lunch between noon to 2 pm only, but crêperies are open from morning to evening. Along with the thin pancakes we call crêpes, French crêperies also offer a savory version. This type of the pancake, made from buckwheat flour, is called a galette. It's served with the cheese, meat, vegetable fillings of your choice. The galettes we ate were huge. When folded in two, they covered half of an oversize dinner plate. 

For details about making pancakes with buckwheat, look at two recipes on this site. Our guest, Ann Claire, recently shared a recipe for a French galette and Leslie Budewitz made buckwheat crepes with a savory and a sweet filling.

The photo from our crêperie meal shows another specialty of the region, hard cider, served in a large coffee cup. Once I tasted French cidre, I became addicted and ordered it with every lunch I ate.     

Fish

Along the coast of France, fish is always on the menu. Mike’s culinary goal in Normandy was a shellfish platter like the one he ate four decades ago in Mont St-Michel. The crab atop his platter was gigantic compared to the blue crab we get from the Chesapeake Bay, but not as meaty. Nora ordered a more modest shellfish plate, while I enjoyed a delicious sea bass filet and didn’t have to contend with shells.

Dessert

We saw tarte Tatin on two restaurant menus and ordered it both times. Our first one was more like a standard fruit tart with slightly cooked apple slices on a pie crust. The second restaurant’s tarte was closer to the classic French dessert. The apples were caramelized and served on a base of puff pastry. 

Check out my recipe for a five-ingredient tarte Tatin. That dessert plays a role in The Tell-Tale Tarte, my 4th Five-Ingredient Mystery,  

My birthday fell on the last night of our cruise. To celebrate we ate delicious lobster dinners in the ship’s specialty restaurant. Then the waiter surprised us placing a 6-inch-square layered birthday cake in front of me. It was yummy with a whipped cream icing, but we could only finish a third of it. Sadly, I couldn't pack the leftover cake, and I don’t have the recipe for it. Still, it was the perfect end to a wonderful trip.

 

Have you ever tried making regional dishes from places where you’ve traveled?

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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

📚

Tarte Tatin #Recipe by Maya Corrigan

In honor of Edgar Allan Poe's birthday this week (Jan 19th), I'm sharing a recipe for tarte Tatin from my 4th Five-Ingredient Mystery, The Tell-Tale Tarte. When my sleuth Val caters a dinner for a book club discussing a novel set in Paris, she serves a French apple tarte. The dessert exposes the truth about a crime, as the tell-tale heart does in Poe's story of that title.

I'd eaten tarte Tatin in a French restaurant, but never made it myself until I had to come up with a recipe to include with my mystery. My first step was to read half a dozen recipes from reliable sources. The recipe I found most helpful was "Foolproof Tarte Tatin" by Julia Moskin, The New York Times, October 22, 2014. Though I use the same ingredients, I changed the recipe to cook the apples before adding the pastry. I also altered the cooking time on top of the stove and in the oven.

In a previous post, I showed how to make a personal tarte Tatin, an easy dessert. The full-sized version of this upside-down apple dessert isn't easy or quick, but it's well worth the effort. It's the most daunting dessert I've ever made because it requires turning a hot cast iron skillet upside-down to release the baked tart onto a platter. 

Have you ever tried making a daunting dish?

Ingredients

6 - 8 large apples, peeled, cored, and quartered (A mix of Granny Smith and Honeycrisp apples works well.)

6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) softened unsalted butter

2/3 cup sugar

1 frozen puff pastry sheet (defrosted according to package instructions)

Equipment: a seasoned 10-inch cast-iron skillet

INSTRUCTIONS

Slice the bottom off each apple to give it a flat base. Peel and quarter the apples lengthwise and remove the cores.

TIP: Cut the apples 1 - 3 days before making the tarte to dry them out. Otherwise, you may end up with too much juice in the tarte. Put the cut apples in a lightly covered bowl in the refrigerator. However, if you don't have time to let the apples dry out, put a piece of foil on the wire rack under the skillet when it goes in the oven to catch any drips. 

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees when ready to cook. The apples cook first on top of the stove and then in the oven. They go into the oven twice, first without the pastry on top, and then with the pastry on.   

Spread the butter on the bottom and sides of the seasoned 10-inch cast-iron skillet and sprinkle the sugar evenly on the bottom.

Arrange the apples vertically in the skillet, standing them on the flat end, in concentric circles. Pack the pieces close together so they support one another. Apples that stick up higher than the pan rim will shrink down as they're cooked.

Cook the apples you've placed in the skillet over medium high heat, 15 - 25 minutes until the juice is bubbling and a deep golden or light brown color.

Put the skillet in the oven and bake the apples for 20 minutes at 400 degrees (F).

Prepare the pastry while apples are baking: roll out defrosted puff pastry on a floured surface until it is 1/8-inch thick. Put a 10-inch plate upside-down on the pastry and use a sharp knife to cut out a circle the size of the skillet's top.

Once the apples are ready, lay the pastry circle over the apples, and tuck it around the apples. cover them with the pastry circle.

Put the skillet in the oven with the pastry on top and bake for 20 minutes at 400 degrees (F).

Remove the pan from the oven, 

The raw pasty on top of the apples 

Bake the tarte at 400 degrees until the pastry is browned, approximately 20 minutes. Check it after 15 minutes to make sure it doesn't get too dark. You want the crust to be a nice golden brown. If it still looks pale after 20 minutes in the oven, bake it a few more minutes.

The pastry after baking

FINAL STAGES

Move the skillet to a rack and cool at least 10 minutes and up to 30 minutes. If the tarte stands longer than 30 minutes after being baked, heat it over low heat for 1 - 2 minutes before turning the skillet over.

Put a cutting board or platter over the skillet. Use potholders to hold the skillet tightly against the board or platter. Turn the skillet upside-down. If apples stick to the skillet, add them to the top. 

Cut the tarte in wedges and serve warm with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream, or just eat it plain.

Serves 8

The top of the tarte Tatin after inverting it

I made this tart in the final hours before The Tell-Tale Tarte book was due to the publisher, so I didn't stop to take a lot of photos. However, the fabulous baker and mystery writer Kim Davis featured this Tarte Tatin recipe on her blog, "Cinnamon and Sugar and a Little Bit of Murder." She also created a video illustrating how to make the Tarte Tatin. 

Five-Ingredient Mystery #4

It’s a cold January in the Chesapeake Bay area, but Cool Down Café manager Val Deniston has plenty to sweat over—like catering a book club event, testing recipes for her Granddad’s cookbook, and catching the author of a deadly tale of murder . . .

The last thing Val needs in her life is an unsolved murder, especially when the victim, an actor famed for impersonating Edgar Allan Poe, happens to be dressed exactly like her Granddad. To keep an eye on Granddad, whose latest job takes him to the home of Rick Usher, a local author inspired by Poe, Val gets herself hired as a cook in Rick’s House of Usher. When she discovers the actor wasn’t the only one doing an impersonation, separating the innocent from the murderous becomes a real-life horror story. But Val must decipher a killer’s M.O . . . or she can forget about finding POE-etic justice.

🍎🍎🍎

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 her website to sign up for her newsletter. One subscriber wins a book each time a newsletter goes out. Check out the easy recipes, mystery history and trivia, and a free culinary mystery story on the website.

What's the most difficult recipe you've ever tried?

Savory Fennel Apple Tarte Tatin - #Thanksgiving #Recipe from @MysteryMacRae

  

This savory version of tarte Tatin is a delicious vegetarian addition for your Thanksgiving feast. The dish is, traditionally, a dessert—a French upside-down apple tart made by covering the bottom of a shallow baking dish with a little butter and lots of sugar, adding apples, and covering the whole with a pastry crust. The butter and all that sugar turn into caramel while the tart bakes. The caramel becomes the topping when tart is inverted onto the serving plate.

This version also has apples, but only a passing nod to the load of sugar in the dessert. The fennel caramelizes into an amazing experience, while the apples and sage become a delicious sauce. Topping the whole with crumble goat cheese, when the tart comes out of the oven, is optional, but it’s a superb touch.

During this season, I’m thankful for family, friends, and food. My boys have cooked
beside me since they were old enough to watch from their highchairs. Here’s my youngest, Ross, helping a few years ago (34 years ago!). He helped with the Savory Tarte Tatin, too, and we wondered where the name tarte Tatin came from.

We turned to our trusty Food Lover’s Companion by Sharon Tyler Herbst and Ron Herbst (a wonderful reference book). They told us the tart was created by a pair of French sisters who lived in the Loire Valley and earned their living making it. Further research found Friends of the Tarte Tatin, a website full of pages of information, including pictures of the sisters—Stéphanie and Caroline—more history of the tart, a recipe, and a bibliography. A fun site!

Savory Fennel Apple Tarte Tatin

Adapted from The Complete Plant-Based Cookbook, by America’s Test Kitchen

 

Ingredients

1 sheet puff pastry, thawed (9 ½ by 9-inch), store-bought sheets are a great convenience

2 tablespoons olive oil, divided

1 tablespoon sugar

½ teaspoon plus one pinch table salt, divided

2 fennel bulbs, stalks discarded (1 bulb cut into 6 wedges, 1 bulb halved, cored, and cut lengthwise into ½-inch-thick slices), look for bulbs that will be about 4 inches tall after trimming

2 Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored, halved, and sliced ½ inch thick

4 teaspoons chopped fresh sage

2 teaspoons sherry vinegar

2 ounces (½ cup) goat cheese, crumbled (optional – although it’s a terrific addition)

 

Directions

375 ℉

Adjust oven rack to middle position. Unfold pastry onto lightly floured board or counter and roll into 11-inch square. With pizza cutter of sharp knife, cut pastry into 11-inch circle. Transfer to parchment-paper lined baking sheet, cover loosely with plastic wrap, and refrigerate while preparing filling.

swirl

Swirl 2 tablespoons oil over bottom of 10-inch nonstick skillet or seasoned cast iron skillet, then sprinkle with sugar and ¼ teaspoon salt.

arrange

Arrange fennel wedges in pinwheel shape, fanning out from center of circle. Fill in gaps with sliced fennel.

cook

Cook, without stirring, over high heat until fennel turns deep golden brown, 7 to 9 minutes (if pan isn’t sizzling after 2 minutes, cook slightly longer.

Off heat, sprinkle with apple, sage, and ¼ teaspoon salt. (Forgot to take a picture at this point - oops.)

be careful - hot skillet!

Carefully transfer chilled dough to skillet, centering over filling. Being careful of hot skillet, gently fold excess dough up against skilled wall all the way around. With a paring knife, pierce dough evenly over surface 10 times.

mm-mmm, chocolate pockets

We took the scraps of puff pastry, made little pockets, and filled them each with 5 or 6 chocolate chips. We baked them on a small baking sheet while the tart baked (about 15 or 20 minutes).

bake until deep golden brown

Bake tart until crust is deep golden brown, about 45 minutes. Transfer skilled to wire rack and let cool 10 minutes.

Run knife around edge of crust to loosen. Using potholders or dish towels, carefully place serving platter on top of skillet, and, holding platter and skillet firmly together, invert tart onto platter. Transfer any fennel that sticks to the tart. Sprinkle with goat cheese. (Also forgot to take a picture with the cheese!)

Happy Thanksgiving, one and all!

Something poisonous is coming March 1, 2022!

About Argyles and Arsenic – book 5 in the Highland Bookshop mysteries

In the latest novel in the Highland Bookshop Mystery Series, a murder at a baronial manor leads to a poisonous game of cat and mouse—with the women of Yon Bonnie Books playing to win.

Available for pre-order in hardback and e-book from your locally owned independent bookstore, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. Or ask your public library to consider ordering it.

The Boston Globe says Molly MacRae writes “murder with a dose of drollery.” 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. Her short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine since 1990 and she’s a winner of the Sherwood Anderson Award for Short Fiction. Visit Molly on Facebook and Pinterest and connect with her on Twitter  or Instagram.

 

 

Personal Tarte Tatin Recipe by Maya Corrigan

After making a full-size tarte Tatin (similar to an apple pie without a top crust), I vowed to order it in a restaurant the next time I craved it. It tasted wonderful, but it was the hardest dessert I’ve ever made. It required turning a cast-iron pan, hot from the oven, upside down to drop the tarte onto a serving dish. Some tense moments there. I recently discovered a recipe for individual tartes Tatin that are a breeze to make. Using puff pastry for the crust, the tarte has only five ingredients.

What's the hardest dish you've ever made? 

Ingredients

1 Honeycrisp or Granny Smith apple, peeled
1 frozen puff pastry sheet, thawed in a refrigerator for a few hours
2 tbsp unsalted butter
¼ cup packed light brown sugar
2 tbsp water

Instructions 

This recipe works best in a 1 cup (8 ounce) ramekin, approximately 3 ¼ inches across and 2 ¼ inches deep. Since I didn’t have ramekins, I used my earthenware sugar bowl to make one tarte. I made the second one in a 12-ounce Pyrex bowl, adding a few extra apple pieces around the cored half-apple. They both worked, though the smaller one was more attractive. 

Preheat oven to 425°F.

Halve the peeled apple lengthwise, and core it with melon baller. 

Unroll the puff pastry. Using the ramekin or bowl as a guide, cut out 2 rounds of pastry, slightly larger than the ramekin or bowl you are using.  

To make the sauce: In a 7-inch heavy skillet heat the butter over moderate heat until foam subsides and stir in brown sugar and water. Add the apple halves and cook them for 3 minutes turning them a few times.

Put the ramekins or bowls on a baking sheet. Put the apple halves, cored sides up, in the bowls. Spoon the sauce evenly over the apples. Top the apples with the pastry rounds, leaving the edges hanging over the sides. 

 

Bake the tarts on the sheet in the middle of the oven for 20 minutes, or until the pastry is puffed and golden brown. 

Cool the tartes on a rack for 5 minutes. 

Working with 1 ramekin/plate at a time, put a plate over the ramekin and turn the tarte upside down onto a plate. Carefully lift off the ramekins. 

Serve the tarts with ice cream.

Recipe adapted from one posted online by Abingdon Manor Inn and Restaurant, Latta, SC. 

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This iconic French dessert plays a role in The Tell-Tale Tarte, my fourth Five-Ingredient Mystery. When café manager Val Deniston serves a tarte Tatin at a book club dinner, the dessert reveals a fraud, embroiling her and her grandfather in a murder investigation centering on deadly serious fans of Edgar Allan Poe.

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 her website to sign up for her newsletter. One subscriber wins a book each time a newsletter goes out. Check out the easy recipes, mystery history and trivia, and a free culinary mystery story on the website.

Five-Ingredient Mysteries in Order

1. By Cook or by Crook: Val and Granddad adjust to a new life spiced with a local murder.
2. Scam Chowder: Granddad is in the soup after a scammer targeting retirees goes face down in his chowder.
3. Final Fondue:  Val, Granddad, and their house guests plumb the dark side of love.
4. The Tell-Tale Tarte: Murder among Poe fans leads to a local “House of Usher” and Poe’s grave.
5. S’more Murders: The Titanic memorial dinner Val caters aboard a yacht has a fatal outcome.
6. Crypt Suzette: Haunted houses and manuscripts offer clues to the killer in a writers’ group.
7. Gingerdead Man: A Christmas Carol ghost commits murder during a Dickens of a holiday festival.

“Granddad is a hoot and his jobs as a food reviewer and part-time detective provide endless possibilities for fun and murder . . . Charming.” —Kirkus Reviews

Plenty of red herrings, mixed motives, and recipes for foodies make for a spirited holiday cozy.”—Kirkus Reviews

What's the most difficult dish you've tried to make?