On Cookbooks @LucyBurdette

 LUCY BURDETTE: I confess that when I'm making something new, I often search for recipes online at my favorite sites (among them Once Upon a Chef, Feasting at Home, New York Times Cooking) but I also love a good hard copy of a new cookbook. Here are two that I requested (aka bought for myself LOL) for Christmas: 

I’ve also been involved with producing two cookbooks this year. Lucy Burdette’s Kitchen, Recipes and Stories from the Key West Food Critic Mysteries, came out as an ebook this summer, but now it’s out as a hardback (large print!) 

It’s expensive—sorry!—but really lovely, actually exceeded my expectations. If you have leftover gift certificates or some spare change, a true Key West food critic mystery fanatic might love this.

Barnes and Noble

Amazon

My second cookbook project was editing the out-of-print editions of the Key West Woman’s Club Cookbook into a new version. It’s wonderful because it retains the charm of the older books, but has some recipes from current members too. I don't know how much I'll cook from it, but I love it for the history. I’ll keep you posted on where this will be sale, very soon!

The cookbook team, Aundrea Wagner, Ed Swift, Marlene Thorn, and me

Do you still use actual paper cookbooks these days? Which are your favorites?

Lucy Burdette's Kitchen Publishes This Week!

LUCY BURDETTE: Long before I imagined I’d write a foodie mystery, I fell in love with Diane Mott Davidson’s series featuring caterer Goldie Schultz. Davidson didn't just dump descriptions onto her pages, food and cooking were woven into the pages to become part of her story. I always finished a book wishing I could have been friends with caterer Goldy, sitting in her kitchen, tasting her food. She and her detective husband Tom believed that serving good food demonstrated comfort and love. Plus, a lot of good detective work occurred while they cooked and ate.

 With fourteen books so far in my Key West series, each with recipes at the back of the book, I've had to do a lot of cooking to keep up with Hayley. I loved the idea of pulling them all together along with snippets from each book. Luckily for me, Crooked Lane Books agreed and LUCY BURDETTE'S KITCHEN will be out this week! To celebrate, I thought I would share the first recipe with you today: Key lime pie.

Key lime pie is the official dessert of the City of Key West, so naturally it makes frequent appearances in these mysteries. In the first book in the series, An Appetite for Murder, food critic Hayley Snow doesn’t actually make this pie but she becomes a suspect when her boss is murdered by key lime pie. She attempts to prove she couldn’t be the culprit. There are traces of pie found on the knife near the murder victim: She would never bake a bilious green colored confection like that.

The celebrated pie also looms large in the 10th book, The Key Lime Crime, when murder strikes down a pastry chef in a pie-baking contest. The trouble begins at the contest:

Off to the left of the stage, I saw a flash of movement. Before my brain could fully register what was coming, Claudette Parker marched to the display table and picked up the pie from the Key Lime Pie Company, the one that had been touted as extra-creamy, with whipped cream piped joyfully around the edges. She slammed it into David Sloan’s face. The pie tin slid off his nose and chin and clattered on the floor in a puddle of filling. Sloan’s eyes blinked like windshield wipers in heavy snow, working holes in the whipped cream. 

The pie pictured above came from the Old Town Bakery, made with whipped cream rather than meringue. Below is my recipe using meringue, but you can switch that out!

Ingredients for the crust

10 sheets of graham crackers, should measure 1 1/4 cups

5 tablespoons butter, melted

1/4 cup sugar

Whir the graham crackers in a food processor until they make fine crumbs. Mix in the sugar and the butter. Press the mixture using the back of a spoon into your nine or 10 inch pie plate. Nine is probably better as my pie was a little low. Bake the crust at 350 for 10 minutes until it starts to brown. Remove it from the oven and reduce the heat to 325.

Ingredients for the filling

1/2 cup key lime or lime juice, freshly squeezed

Four egg yolks

1 14 ounce can sweetened condensed milk

2 teaspoons grated lime zest

Squeeze the limes until you have 1/2 cup of juice. (4-5 regular limes, more key limes.) Make sure to strain out the seeds. 

Whisk the egg yolks, then whisk in the sweetened condensed milk, lime juice, and lime zest.  

Add the filling to the pie crust and bake for six minutes. Remove from the oven and set this aside while you make your meringue.

Ingredients for the meringue

Four egg whites

1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar

1/2 cup sugar

One half teaspoon vanilla

Using a clean bowl and mixer, beat the egg whites and cream of tartar until they hold soft peaks. Gradually beat in the sugar until the egg whites hold stiff peaks and appear shiny but not dry. Beat in the vanilla. 

Attach the meringue to the hot pie, beginning by adding globs all around the edge of the crust and smoothing them into a circle. (That's the  technical culinary term--add globs.) 

Then add remaining meringue to the center and smooth or shape into peaks as desired. Bake the pie for another 20 minutes. Cool on a rack. Refrigerate until serving.

And now serve yourself a nice piece of pie and start reading...

Lucy Burdette's Kitchen will be out in ebook format on Tuesday (July 23), and December in large print hardcover. I'm still working on convincing them we need the paperback! To celebrate, I'm giving away a dish towel printed with Lucy Burdette's roasted shrimp recipe. Leave a comment to be entered in the drawing!

Reds, have you ever made a recipe from the back of a novel? Which one?

Dinner Anxiety aka Supper Stress @LucyBurdette

 

LUCY BURDETTE: All through last week, I couldn't get settled about making dinner. I had food, I had recipes, but nothing sounded quite right nor did I feel like making it. For the first time in a while, something I made tasted and smelled terrible to me. That only fed the uncertainty. (I suspect that this has to do with how hard I'm working on a draft of Key West food critic #15. All my creative juices are running in that direction.) This is kind of a silly question, but do you ever suffer from dinner anxiety?

This soup was one of the things that turned out well, the result of bits and pieces I had left to use—leeks, carrots, and kale. Apparently, Olive Garden has a popular chicken gnocchi soup though I’ve not tasted it. But I started with that recipe and tweaked it to add more vegetables. It’s a good recipe to use up leftover cooked chicken that you have in the freezer.

Ingredients

3-4 tablespoons butter

4 or so small leeks or two large

3 sticks of celery, sliced

1 cup carrots, diced

2 small garlic cloves or one large, minced

¼ cup all-purpose flour

1 to 2 cups half-and-half or whole milk

4 cups chicken broth

½ teaspoon mustard powder

2 cups diced cooked chicken

12 oz. frozen potato gnocchi

1 cup fresh spinach or kale, roughly chopped

Fresh parsley

½ tsp red pepper flakes, optional but really good

Salt and pepper, to taste




Slice the leeks, the celery, and the carrots. Melt the butter in a large pan and sauté those vegetables for a few minutes until soft. Add the chopped garlic and sauté for a minute or more. Add the 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour and the mustard powder and stir that until beginning to thicken. Slowly add the chicken broth, stirring frequently like a gravy. Sprinkle in black pepper and red pepper.




Simmer for 10 minutes or so, then add the chicken and the gnocchi. Simmer another few minutes until the pasta is cooked through.




Add the milk and the kale and simmer until the kale is soft. (I also added some chopped fresh parsley because I had it in the fridge.)




We found this delicious—I added no salt, but more black pepper. And served with corn bread. Yummy!

What's for dinner at your house, especially when you can't think of a thing? Are you a planner or a pantser when it comes to supper?