Cooking Up a Culinary Cozy--Guest Post by Judy Alter

by Judy Alter, @JudyAlter

In another life, I’d probably be a chef. I love being a writer, but cooking is my avocation. I like nothing better than to try out a new recipe on company—usually it works fine, though there have been disasters. But I am known as the “foodie” among my friends. Everyone laughed that I made the protagonist in my Kelly O’Connell Mystery series a non-cook who fed her children pizza or took them out for turkey burgers.

I always wanted to write a culinary mystery, but who can match the inimitable Diane Mott Davidson with her sophisticated and tempting recipes? I have a friend who has tried some and reports delicious results. But in my new Blue Plate Café Mystery series I have reached a compromise—a culinary touch to a cozy mystery set in a small town. Only this is not sophisticated cooking; it’s strictly down home.

Two threads from my life are woven into this café-based series: for almost twenty years, my children and I spent lovely weekends with dear friends who owned Arc Ridge Ranch, outside of Ben Wheeler in near East Texas. Sometimes we went to the nearby town of Edom to a café called The Shed for dinner. The Saturday night special was always fried catfish, and they had a mean lemon meringue pie. Breakfasts were equally tempting, and I can still mentally put myself inside that small restaurant.

But the other thread was cooking at the ranch with Reva, or as my children called her Aunt Reva. Reva was a great, down-home cook, a Missouri farm girl transplanted to Texas. She and I were a terrific kitchen team, though mostly I learned from her as we put together huge feasts. We made everything from pot roast and mashed potatoes to barbecued chicken and potato salad. We  tossed salads and created wonderful desserts. Each of us contributed recipes and ideas. If one of the children got lucky and caught a sizeable bass in the lake in front of their house, we cooked that (after Uncle Charles cleaned it).

Arc Ridge Ranch was a B&B with several two-bedroom cabins, complete with kitchens. Reva stocked the fridges for breakfast with orange juice and usually her famous prune bread (secret recipe—she wouldn’t even share it with me). Most guests were on their own for lunch and dinner, but we were family, and those dinners on the front porch, overlooking the lake, stand out as among the happiest, most peaceful moments in my life.

By the time I compiled a cookbook, Cooking My Way Through Life with Kids and Books, Reva had left us, but I had enough of her recipes to include them along with a tribute to our happy days at the ranch. Charles even gave me the treasured prune bread recipe.

Murder at the Blue Plate Café, the brand new first in the series, has a short appendix of recipes, all from Gram who ran the Blue Plate until her death. But Gram’s recipes are really Reva’s—chicken salad, meatloaf, beans, sheet cake (over which we had endless arguments: she called it sheath cake and I maintained it was a sheet cake because it was baked on a jelly roll sheet). Here’s a new one, her recipe for Toffee Bars, sent to me one year so I could serve it at my annual Christmas party:

Toffee Bars
½ lb. (2 sticks) butter
1 c. brown sugar
1 egg yolk
2 c. flour
1 tsp. vanilla
12 oz. semisweet chocolate chips
1 c. chopped pecans
Preheat oven to 350° and grease a 9x13 pan.

Cream butter and sugar. Add the egg yolk and beat. Sift in the flour and then add the vanilla. Spread the batter in the pan—it will be difficult to cover all the corners; you’ll have a thick batter that you will probably have to spread by hand, and then it will be thinly distributed. Bake for 25 minutes.
Take the cake out of the oven, cover it with chocolate chips, and return to the oven for three minutes. When you remove it from the oven this time, smooth the chocolate evenly with the blade of a table knife and sprinkle with nuts. Cool.

Makes about thirty pieces, depending on how you cut them.

About Judy Alter:

An award-winning novelist, Judy Alter is the author of three books in the Kelly O’Connell Mysteries series: Skeleton in a Dead Space, No Neighborhood for Old Women, and Trouble in a Big Box. With Murder at the Blue Plate Café, she moves from inner city Fort Worth to small-town East Texas to create a new set of characters in a setting modeled after a restaurant that was for years one of her family’s favorites.

Contact Judy at j.alter@tcu.edu  or visit her web page at www.judyalter.com.
Blogs: Judy’s Stew http://www.blogspot.com and Potluck with Judy http://potluckwithjudy.blogspot.com.

Murder at the Blue Plate Café:

When twin sisters Kate and Donna inherit their grandmother’s restaurant, the Blue Plate Cafe, in Wheeler, Texas, there’s immediate conflict. Donna wants to sell and use her money to establish a B&B; Kate wants to keep the cafe. Thirty-two-year-old Kate leaves a Dallas career as a paralegal and a married lover to move back to Wheeler and run the café, while Donna plans her B&B and complicates her life by having an affair with her sole investor. Kate soon learns that Wheeler is not the idyllic small town she thought it was fourteen years ago. The mayor, a woman, is power-mad and listens to no one, and the chief of the police department, newly come from Dallas, doesn’t understand small-town ways. Kate’s suspicion about her grandmother’s sudden death deepens when the mayor of Wheeler becomes seriously ill after eating food from the café, delivered by Donna’s husband.  When Donna’s investor is shot, she is arrested. Kate must defend her sister and solve the murders to keep her business open, but even Kate begins to wonder about the sister she has a love-hate relationship with. Gram guides Kate through it all, though Kate’s never quite sure she’s hearing Gram—and sometimes Gram’s guidance is really off the wall.

Read an excerpt here: http://www.judyalter.com
Amazon/KIndle: http://tinyurl.com/aakef9d
Turquoise Morning Press: http://tinyurl.com/agueko9
Available for most e-readers at Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/286301
Print available from your local bookseller, Amazon or Turquoise Morning Press

What Hat am I wearing today? by Judy Alter

I have many hats—one a cloche with a fan of feathers for when I write mystery (don’t you think it makes me look mysterious?), a sunbonnet for western fiction, a fedora for nonfiction, a gimme cap for young-adult works, and, of course, a toque for cookbooks and other food writing. I used to have a mortarboard for my career in academic publishing, but I’ve turned that in.

Some people ask me how I can wear so many hats, but the answer, to me, is simple. It’s all writing in one form or another, and I am a writer. I cannot do math and probably couldn’t pass high school algebra. But I can work problems out in words—it’s what I do best and what gives me satisfaction. I like to take an idea or subject and figure out how to put it into words so that other people will read about it.

When I wrote historical fiction about women and young girls of the American West, I had to imagine myself in the nineteenth century West, though I doubt Libby Custer or Jessie Benton Frémont ever wore a sunbonnet. Still I had to know what they did wear—like weights in the hem of their skirts to keep them from blowing in the wind. And I had to think about what it would be like for Libby to ride across the plains on a reckless horse, or for Lucille Mulhall, the first Wild West cowgirl, to rope several horses, or for Etta Place to take part in a bank robbery and the hard ride of a getaway. It was a wild and exciting ride for a bookish girl like me who never was comfortable on a horse.

Young adult nonfiction was probably the greatest challenge to working out problems in words. I wrote for several companies that published for school libraries. The company would assign me a topic, and I’d research and write, usually about 5,000 words. I have written books on everything from vaccines and surgery to passenger ships, various state histories, biographies of several presidents. Probably the hardest one I ever did was on international women’s right.

Wearing a toque was no problem. I actually have one that I’ve worn to several book signings, but food writing comes easily to me because I love to cook and to eat new food. I did have to learn the mechanics—the proper presentation of a recipe, for instance. And copyright regulations (ingredients of a recipe cannot be copyrighted but directions can).

Mystery has been the hardest hat to keep on my head—that cloche wanted to slip off. I wrote my first mystery, if you want to call it that, almost 50 years ago. It was a knock-off of Nancy Drew that I wrote in the car while my then-husband drove us across country. It was, quite frankly, awful. Around 2000 I wrote a mystery I thought was pretty good and gave it to an agent—naïf that I was I didn’t realize that it mattered that cozies were not her field. I may go back and revisit that one someday.

I am forever grateful to Susan Wittig Albert for telling me to join Sisters in Crime. Then I joined the Guppies and Agent Quest and soon learned what an insider’s game looking for an agent was and how many people submitted countless queries without success. I was, I discovered, not only a newbie but a small guppie in a very large pond. I read listservs, I read blogs, I took online courses, and I learned so much it’s hard to hold it all in my brain. And members of Sisters in Crime and all its sub-groups are incredibly supportive of newbies.

My goal was to publish a mystery, and after seven or so rewrites and six years, Skeleton in a Dead Space launched from Turquoise Morning Press on August 29. I really like that cloche with a feather and intend to wear it for quite a while.

Thanks so much for guest blogging today, Judy! And for giving me some encouragement about trying new genres!

Judy Alter of Fort Worth, Texas, is the author of about sixty books for children and adults. Her main interest has been the experiences of women in the American West, and she’s written six adult novels with that theme and seven young-adult novels, as well as countless children's books, mostly done for libraries on the American West and a variety of other subjects.

Judy is also the author of a memoir/cookbook, a collection of short stories, young-adult biographies of figures from Texas history, and two books studying the work of Texas author Elmer Kelton. Recently retired after 30 years with Texas Christian University Press, 20 of them as director, she is now devoting her attention to writing mysteries and, still and forever, writing about Texas. You can find Judy at her blog and website.