Easy Soup for Trying Times

Julia Spencer-Fleming:  Well, it's been quite a week here at Jungle Reds - hurricane, power outages, travel interruptions. Up here in Maine, we got electricity back mid-day Wednesday. Hurrah! Then on Thursday, my husband Ross discovered steaming hot water literaly bubbling out of our hot water heater (thank heavens our 200-year-old house has beaten dirt floor in the cellar.) To stop the machine from parboiling itself, he had to turn off the oil burner, which also, alas, turns off the furnace.

I'm not sure if it was the earthquake or the superstorm that caused the damage, but I do know five days without heat and hot water is a bit too much. We have decamped to a seaside hotel to lick our wounds and take showers. 

In times of trial, we want comforting things, and so today I'm sharing my recipe for peanut butternut squash soup. It's the easiest thing ever to make, delicious and nutritious, and keeps well atop a wood stove when the power's out. When we get home, if my oven doesn't explode, I'm going to make a batch.

One good-sized butternut squash
One onion, diced
Two cans chicken broth (you can substitute vegetable broth if you or your guests are vegetarian.)
1/4 to 1/3 cup natural peanut butter (don't use the pre-blended Jiffy or Peter Pan type)
One can Coconut milk
1/2 tsp cumin
cayenne pepper or hot sauce to taste
two bay leaves.

Peel and chop the butternut squash into cubes. Sautee the squash with the onion until the onion wilts. (You can use butter or oil for the sauteeing. I like to use soy oil - it gives it a bit of a taste.)

Pour in the broth to cover. Boil until the squash is very soft. Take off heat and process it in batches in the food processor until everything is smooth and creamy. (You can also use a masher in the pot if you like a more textured soup.)

 
Stir in the natural peanut butter. You can add more or less as you like - it should taste of peanuts but not not so strongly that you feel like you ought to add grape jelly to the thing. Drop in the bay leaves and let simmer for up to an hour to develop the flavor. I'm not much one for salt, but if you are, go ahead and use your shaker. If the mixture starts to get too think and paste-like, throw some more broth into it.

Remove from heat and stir in the coconut milk and cumin. Add enough cayenne pepper or hot sauce to give it a bite. Serve and share with family or friends. Don't forget to be thankful for having heat and hot water.    
 

Teaching the Detective, a guest blog by Tim O'Mara

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Most people might balk at the idea of a cop-turned special ed teacher, but since my husband is a trail attorney-turned special ed teacher, I perked up my ears when I first heard about Tim O'Mara's Sacrifice Fly. In this debut mystery, a former cop, bounced from the force when his knees blow out, has become a teacher in Brooklyn. He thinks his investigative days are over, until one of his eighth graders stops showing up for class...

Tim was inspired by his own time doing home visits as a Brooklyn teacher, and by his dealings with NYPD Youth Officers as a middle school dean. Today, he proves that detecting isn't just something the law does.

There’s something not quite right with the guy sitting across the table from me.

He knows it. I know it. But he’s not talking.

That’s why they called me. I have a rep for being good at getting guys like this to talk. To open up. If they go silent, it’s my job to pick up on the physical clues. Body language, subtle gestures, something in their eyes.

Right about now, I’m starting to think maybe they called the wrong man. This guy’s as smart as they told me he was. Probably smarter.

I decide to give him a test. A task. Something to do requiring a set of skills unique to the situation: some observable, others less so.
 

He begins easily enough. This guy may be quiet and hard to figure out, but he’s willing to please me. Most of them are. That’s what I count on. The quicker they give me what I want, the quicker they’re rid of me. That’s what they think, anyway.

I watch him for a while. I ease up out of my seat and walk to the back of the room. There’s usually not much to see from back here, but I give it a shot. I notice his back’s nice and straight. The head goes up and down more than it should, but that could just be a physical tick.

I move around to the side. Not in front of him, just enough to give me an angle to observe as he continues to work on what I’ve assigned. The head is still going up and down every three to five seconds. Too much. I look at his hands, his shoulders, his face.

And there it is. In the eyes. Poker players call it a “tell.” I call it squinting.

“You wear glasses?” I ask.

“No,” he says, careful to avoid my gaze, still plodding through the job.

“When’s the last time you had your eyes checked?”

He shrugs, and mumbles to the paper. “I don’t know. A few years ago?”

That’s too long, I think. Especially for a seventh grader.

I take a seat across the table from his parents. They’re nervous: part of them wants to hear what I have to say. The other part does not. That’s the way it is in my business. I teach special ed.

“It’s a vision thing,” I say and watch as they both let out a sigh of relief. I slide a piece of paper across the table. “Call these guys. They’re good at what they do.”

A few days pass and I get a phone call. Turns out I was right. The kid’s vision is twenty/twenty. The problem is visual tracking. It’s been a problem for a while, but the kid stayed shut, afraid he’d need glasses. He doesn’t. His eyes wander too much when he’s reading, either from the board or a book. The good news? It’s treatable with therapy. His mother tells me he’ll start next week and thanks me for my efforts.

“You’re welcome,” I say and then apologize for cutting the call short. I’ve got another kid waiting outside my room.

Did you have a teacher that inspired you? Brought out the best in you? Did you have a teacher that you swore was telepathic and had eyes in the back of her head? Tell us your about your most memorable educator, and two lucky commentors will win a copy of Sacrifice Fly.

Tim O'Mara has been teaching math and special education in the New York City public schools since 1987. He has written several short stories and is currently writing his second novel, Chin Music, another Raymond Donne mystery acquired by St. Martin's Press. For the past twelve years, he has hosted and produced a bi-weekly reading series of poetry and prose in New York's East Village. You can find out more about Tim and Sacrifice Fly at his website and on his Facebook page.

Cherchez le Crook: a guest blog by Timothy Hallinan

 

 Julia Spencer-Fleming:  We've been talking about superstorm Sandy along with mysteries this week, but today's guest, Timothy Hallinan,  is a little removed from all the drama - he's in Bangkok, where he lives for half the year (the other half he's in LA. I, for one, am jealous.)

Tim is prolific - He's written ten novels, edited two story collections, and he teaches writing. His free online course, FINISH YOUR NOVEL, is a fantastic resource for aspiring authors. But even a seasoned pro might blanch at the prospect of starting a new series by publishing three novels in November, January and June. What's his inspiration? Easy. He likes to hang out with crooks.

Like all crime writers, I love crooks. And they frighten me.

I love them because they're so much fun to write. They make up their own rules. As children they paid no attention to the hopscotch squares chalked on the sidewalk, and as adults they pay no attention to the Ten Commandments and the million lesser laws the Commandments spawned. They bubble and seethe, crablike, with malicious energy. They don't have to be politically correct. They can offend people.

They frighten me because they have a way, unless they're watched very closely, of walking away with my book.

Our heroes have to behave, at least until we've pushed them to extremis. Even then, most of the time they can't get any fun from damage they do. That might lose the reader's sympathy. Our crooks, on the other hand, can win at chess by sweeping the pieces off the board and then shooting the person sitting opposite, shrugging it off as a striking variation on the Sicilian Opening.

We've seen this taken to unfortunate extremes lately, especially in the serial-killer genre, with sadism and murder serving as straight lines for Schwarzenegger-style wisecracks. I think this is dishonest writing and actually violates the writer's agreement to take the reader's intelligence seriously. On the other hand, some of these books sell quite well, so what do I know?

But I understand the appeal of that energy. I have to admit that I'll be digging away at a book, trying to figure out where in the world I'm tunneling to (I don't outline and generally have very little idea what's going to happen until it actually does) and all of a sudden the crook tears open the page and climbs through the hole, and I experience a burst of electricity. Crooks and villains seem to bring their worlds with them, while I feel as though I have to work to fill in the worlds of my more sympathetic characters. In the fifth Poke Rafferty book, The FearArtist, we don't get anywhere near the villain of the piece until page 141, if you don't count a four-line exchange of dialogue in the second or third chapter.

All the villain, Haskell Murphy, does in his first close-up is get off a plane, climb into the back of a car, and be driven to his house, and within the four or five pages that drive took, I learned so much about him that I had to rewrite the first part of the book. That's energy. It felt like I'd been digging away at the story with a tablespoon, and all of a sudden I was holding a jackhammer. Murphy even brought a whole new character with him, his daughter, whom he calls Treasure, and she changed not only the ending of the book, but also the book I'm writing right now.

But, as much fun as he was to write, I couldn't give Murphy the book. It's a series, and most readers expect the really important series characters to be alive at the end of the book. If I'd given Murphy his head, it would have been Armageddon.

So I'm dealing with it. I'm dealing with it by writing a new series with a hero who's also a crook, a burglar named Junior Bender who moonlights as a private eye for other crooks. When a crook gets ripped off, he or she is not going to call the cops. They're going to call Junior.

I wrote the first two Junior books, Crashed and Little Elvises, as ebooks, but pretty much the moment I finished the third, The Fame Thief, they suddenly got picked up for everything – publishing (Soho), film (Lionsgate), and audio (Blackstone). So the fun I had writing them is apparently detectible on the page.

Right now I'm writing the sixth Poke Rafferty book and the fourth Junior Bender (all of the first three will be published by June) and I'm hoping that the energy will average out between the two series. As much as I love writing the Pokes, they're less fun (read: harder work) than the Juniors. Almost everyone in the Juniors is crooked to one degree or another, and they've all got that energy. Writing them is like playing with matches—the old matches that would strike on anything. I never know when the page is going to catch on fire.

Crooks. What would we do without them?

 

What are your favorite crooks, creeps and villains, dear readers?  Let us know, and you may win one of two copies of the first Junior Bender mystery, Crashed, or a copy of the latest Bangkok thriller, The Fear Artist.

Timothy Hallinan is the Edgar- and Macavity-nominated author of the Poke Rafferty Bangkok Thrillers, the Simeon Grist Mysteries, and, now, the Junior Bender Mysteries, to be published beginning this November by Soho Crime.  Hallinan also edited the ebook SHAKEN: STORIES FOR JAPAN, which raised money for Japanese tsunami relief, and and MAKING STORY: TWENTY-ONE WRITERS ON HOW THEY PLOT, the first in a series of TWENTY-ONE WRITERS books for aspiring novelists.  Tim blogs at The Blog Cabin. You can follow him on Twitter as @TimHallinan and friend him on Facebook.