L.A. Lewandowski's Blog: The Culture and Cuisine Club, page 6

Passage to Belize

Today is my husband’s birthday. As a present for him and the family I have written a short memoir-vignette about a trip I took with his mother. Even if you didn’t have the pleasure of knowing Rose Marie I hope you will download it. If you have had the honor and privilege of taking care of an aging parent you will understand this memory. Enjoy

http://www.amazon.com/Passage-Belize-L-Lewandowski-ebook/dp/B00NQEZT1W/

 

Slow Cooker Lamb Shanks

Even busy people need to eat – so why not pull out your slow cooker and eat gourmet? The basis of this recipe comes from a cookbook called Fix-It and Forget-It Cookbook by Dawn J. Ranck and Phyllis Pellman Good. There was not enough liquid so I added 1 1/2 cup of homemade chicken stock. It was a delicious combination of herbs and veggies, but it needed a little fillip. The next time I will try it with red wine instead of white.

Ingredients:

1 medium onion, thinly sliced     2 small carrots, cut in thin strips     1 rib celery, chopped     3 lamb shanks, cracked     1-2 cloves or garlic, split (I had a clove of minced and we used that)     1 1/2 tsp salt     1/4 tsp pepper     1 tsp dried oregano     1 tsp dried thyme     2 bay leaves crumbled   1/2 cup dry white wine     8 ounce can tomato sauce, or 1 can fire roasted diced tomatoes    1 1/2 cup of homemade chicken stock

Method:

Spray inside of cooker casserole with spray oil. Layer the onions, carrots, and celery in the slow cooker. Rub lamb with garlic and season with salt and pepper. Mix remaining ingredients in a separate bowl and pour over the top of the meat. Add the stock. Cover and cook on low for 8-10 hours or on high for 4-6 hours. Skim off some of the fat. Remove meat and veggies and thicken sauce with a bit of sifted flour. Serve over egg noodles or capellini.

No Mayo Mediterranean Chicken Salad

My husband subscribes to Runner’s World and we often find recipes we like that are light and tasty. This recipe has an added bonus – chicken salad made without the fat of mayonnaise. We used orecchiette because I think they’re cute.

Mediterranean Chicken

Chicken packs protein, B vitamins, and immune-boosting zinc. Nitrates in spinach help boost oxygen delivery to muscles.

Choose Your Pasta

5 cups cooked shells, fusilli, or penne

Add the Mix-Ins

2 cups chopped rotisserie chicken (we had made a beer can chicken the day before)

2 cups baby spinach

3/4 cup sliced, marinated artichoke hearts

1/2 cup sliced sun-dried tomatoes

1/4 cup diced feta cheese

1/4 cup chopped kalamata olives

Toss with Dressing

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon red-wine vinegar

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 teaspoons Italian seasoning

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

Finish with Garnish

Toasted pine nuts

I had this for dinner after a tennis match and I found it to be very satisfying. Check out Runner’s World for more great recipes. Enjoy!

Vichyssoise – The Other White Soup

It is ninety-five outside and horribly muggy. I have a freezer full of homemade stock which I make for the variety of soups we love to eat. “It is too darned hot for soup,” my husband said. I don’t like to waste my culinary efforts, and the stock kept calling to me. I got on the Internet, determined to make a creative cold soup, and began to peruse the plethora of recipes for cold potato and leek soup. Finally, I found one that suited my purpose, a luscious recipe from Les Halles, the restaurant Anthony Bourdain runs in the Manhattan.

I adjusted the recipe as I usually do.

Ingredients:

4 tablespoons butter     8 leeks, white part only, cleaned and thinly sliced     2 medium potatoes, cut into small cubes     2 1/2 cups chicken stock (if you’re a vegetarian you can substitute veggie stock)    2 cups heavy cream    4 fresh chives minced, and more left long for garnish     2 shakes of nutmeg     salt and ground white pepper to taste

Method:

Melt butter in a heavy stock pot over medium-low heat. When butter has melted, add leeks and sweat for five to eight minutes. Do not allow the leeks to brown. Add potatoes and cook for a few minutes stirring several times. Stir in the chicken broth and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer and cook for 35 minutes until the potatoes and leeks are very soft. Cool slightly. Carefully, immersion blend the soup. I wore oven mitts on both hands. This mixture is very hot and you will get a severe burn if it hits you. Whisk in cream and nutmeg, and bring heat up to a boil. Immediately reduce to a simmer and cook for five minutes. If you want to thin the soup this is a good time to add a bit more chicken stock. Transfer the soup to a glass or other non metal bowl and chill over an ice bath. Adjust salt and pepper. When cooled to room temperature, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate. This soup can be served cool or very cold. Garnish with chives and enjoy!

Should You Waste Time on Pinterest?

Why should authors care about Pinterest? I considered this question as I stared at the blank Word document. Should I try to convince you that fifteen minutes a day several times per week pinning and interacting on the site could find you new readers for your work? I have always liked a challenge.

The last time I looked I had 1783 followers on the main page of my profile. This isn’t a huge number by Pinterest business standards. I am connected to pinners who have over fifty thousand followers. You must admit that is a big number. How did they gain so many followers? Are they celebrities? No, they are business people who recognized early on the unique draw of this social media site.

For authors, Pinterest provides the opportunity to add a visual aspect to the written one, and attract a new group of readers to your books. You can create a board that contains video and pins of places your characters visit. You can post the recipes they eat. You can use these boards to attract a different set of readers to your work.

Pinterest is like any other social media site. A new user needs to take a little time to understand what works and what doesn’t. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen on author profiles is having only one board, My Books, for example, with the cover of the book repinned every time the book is reviewed or promoted. At a minimum a main profile page should contain three boards so that the first line of boards is filled out. This is visually pleasing.

What type of boards are popular and will help an author’s pins to be repinned? On the main Pinterest page you can search under keywords and categories. Let’s say you are an accomplished photographer. You can create a board, Nature in My Backyard, and post your own photos. If you watermark them with your blog, and include a catchy description in the box underneath, you are on your way to gaining followers. Use no more than two or three hashtags in the description, otherwise it will look messy. I have seen a statistic that says eighty percent of all pins become repins, so make them count!

I wrote previously about pinning etiquette. I no longer “like” before I pin, but I have continued the practice of never taking more than five pins at a time from an individual board. I always follow a beautiful board and have never been concerned with the follower to follow ratio. The flow of pins on a board are a collection of that pinner, and to encourage reciprocity it is crucial to show appreciation and not steal their work. I have had people copy entire boards that I’ve created, and this is poor Pinterest form.

If you want to have a business account on Pinterest rather than a personal profile page, you need to decide what you will call your profile page. Although I have a food and lifestyle blog I decided to keep my name on the page. My thought process is that if I am trying to interest readers in my books, which are my product, they need to interact with me as a pinner and see what I’m interested in. I have a Culture and Cuisine Club board, which is the blog I have kept since 2009. I recently changed the wording next to my photo to direct people to my author page on Facebook. The follow number on Facebook, both my personal page and my author page, has begun to increase and this may be why.

I suggest that you have a photo of yourself on the profile page. A complementary photo of yourself, displayed where you interact with strangers who are potential customers, is part of your author brand. Please don’t leave the photo box with a red pin.

It is important to showcase other pinners while continuing to establish your own brand. I have had great success with this concept. As a proud indie author I established a board, Indie Extravaganza, where I pin many books. I am a reader as well as a writer. I am genuine in my desire to promote quality indie books, and I have met other pinners that way. I also have a group board called The Other Food Group, which features coffee and chocolate, and another called World of Bacon. I no longer join group boards because the Pinterest algorithm places them above my boards on my profile page and I need to manually move them.

One of the more comprehensive articles I’ve found on the ins and outs of Pinterest Business accounts is here. When I read this article I realized that although I was using Pinterest well, I hadn’t scratched the surface. I also have not integrated my blog fully. I have a list of personal to dos that will enhance and drive the platform I’ve already built. Let’s get into a few exciting benefits of creating a Pinterest business account.

Install the Pinterest app on your smartphone. This will help you avoid pin dropping, i.e. pinning all at once. Instagram is a great tool that integrates beautifully with Pinterest. As a business account you can set-up Pin Alert tracking and receive notifications when someone repins from your own or your competitor’s website.

Promotional pins is a benefit I am extremely interested in. Unfortunately, the business side of Pinterest is growing fast and there are times that the site cannot handle the traffic load. I tried to sign up for promotional pins and after filling out the online form could not get into the software. This happened several times. I have just begun to explore the analytics, and once I get a better handle on them I will report back. You can investigate what is offered here.

You can run promotions on Pinterest. They have specific rules on how you can interact with the pinners who enter your contest. The rules remind me of the Goodreads limitations a bit, but there is a great deal of opportunity for creative types. Call your contest a “Pin it to win” contest. You can also create a gallery of your most shared pins, but be sure to mark them as your most pinned pins, not Pinterest in general. They are very protective of their brand and you can find out more information here.

Rich pins are another benefit of having a business account on Pinterest. For example, people have communicated with me to ask for the recipe of something I’ve pinned. If it were my recipe, on my blog, I could enable meta data to share the specific ingredients and method directly under the pin. This would be a convenience to the pinner, but my goal is to get them to my blog. I’ll have to explore this further.

I am not surprised if you are cross-eyed at this point. Pinterest, and particularly a Pinterest business account, provides opportunities to interact with readers in new and exciting ways. To distinguish ourselves we need to think outside the box, and Pinterest is poised to help us do so.

This post was previously run on Indies Unlimited.

You Wish You Had a Mortadella with Provolone on Rye

Mortadella and Provolone on Rye

This is an easy sandwich and one of my favorites. If you have never eaten mortadella, and you like baloney, you’re in for a treat. Mortadella is Italian baloney with a little bit of garlic taste in the meat, but the best part is it also has pistachio nuts and yummy hunks of fat. Not low calorie.

Take three slices of mortadella and heat them in a small frying pan. Toast two slices of good rye bread, I like Publix deli rye. When the bread is lightly toasted, put it on a plate and place one slice of provolone picante on the hot bread. (I like the picante because provolone loses its entire flavor if you take away the salt.) Fold the warm mortadella onto one of the slices of bread, and flip the warm provolone onto the top of the meat. Spread some of your favorite grainy mustard on the top slice and finish your sandwich. Serve with a nice deli pickle. Delish!

 

Review of Sacré Bleu by Christopher Moore

A friend who knows me well handed me the novel Sacré Bleu, A Comedy d’Art. “You’ll love this,” she said. “It has all the themes you’d want in a book.” She couldn’t have been more correct.

Set in Paris during the reign of the Impressionists, Christopher Moore succeeds in bringing to life the artists we have come to admire as geniuses of color and light. Renoir, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet… all are developed with masterful strokes. The reason behind the omission of Degas, one of my favorite Impressionists, as a character in the mystery, is answered by the author in the afterword. I laughed my butt off.

The mystery centers around The Colorman, an ape-like creature who provides the purest tubes of pigment the artists need to mix their paint. Ultramarine, a color of blue precious to the painters, is at the center of the mystery. Why do the painters lose track of time when they use it? Where does their muse disappear to for months on end? Have canvases they remember having painted during the lost time been stolen? And why does The Colorman deny having known Vincent Van Gogh? The misshapen entrepreneur was definitely seen by witnesses in the area shortly before Van Gogh’s death.

The author successfully answers these questions and sweeps the reader into the every day life of the citizens of Montmartre. The smell of freshly baked baguette beckons you into the bakery where a frustrated painter has lost his muse. Where has she gone? Her reappearance, the tart that she is, moves the plot merrily along. If you like a cup full of craziness mixed with your art history, then this book is for you.

I am certain that the author is possessed by a muse; or maybe two. His sense of humor comes through this clever romp with ease. I can highly recommend this book.

Easy Pesto Chicken and Broccoli Farfalle

My son is home from college and that requires a change in my meal planning. He can easily put away half of a pound of pasta. This recipe is fast and includes one of his favorite food groups—bacon! It refrigerates well, and is a tasty leftover.

 Ingredients:

16-ounce box of farfalle pasta   1 head of broccoli cut into florets

8 pieces of bacon fried crispy   1 pound of chicken breasts

6 tablespoons Buitoni pesto                 4-5 tablespoons veggie oil

Parmesan cheese to finish

Method:

Put a pot of salted water on to boil. Heat a sauté pan. Pound chicken, dip in egg and dredge in breadcrumbs. Add oil to pan and fry chicken until crispy. Keep warm. Cook pasta al dente, adding the broccoli to the water the last three minutes. Crumble bacon. Drain the pasta thoroughly and add the pesto. Slice the chicken, or place the meat in the center of the plate. Sprinkle with the bacon and grate a touch of Parmesan over the top. Enjoy!

 

A Gourmet Demise on sale for July Fourth!

Beautiful people are murdered and you don’t know why…

Because I love George Washington I have reduced the price of  A Gourmet Demise: Murder in South Tampa to $.99 through the Fourth of July weekend. Don’t miss out – it’s a great beach read!

Enjoy and travel safely, my friends.[image error]

Spaghetti with Tomato and Bacon

At this time of year Florida roadside stands are bursting with ripe tomatoes and other premium produce. I scanned several Internet sites and added my own twist to this quick and easy recipe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ingredients:

16 ounces spaghetti

2 Tbsp. olive oil

8 slices Applewood smoked bacon, chopped

4 cloves garlic, minced

½ cup reserved pasta water

¼ large white or sweet onion, chopped

½ tsp. red chili pepper flakes (or to taste) 3 shakes

1 14.5-oz can diced tomatoes in juice

8 fresh small tomatoes

¼ cup Rosé wine

Freshly ground black pepper

¼ cup chopped parsley

Freshly grated Parmesan

 

Method:

Put a large pot of water on to boil. While pasta is cooking, cook bacon in a chef’s pan. Cook bacon in olive oil, when it begins to brown add onion and cook for eight minutes. Add garlic. Cook for two minutes. Add fresh tomatoes. Add three shakes of crushed red pepper. Cook two minutes. Add canned tomatoes and ½ cup of pasta water. Bring to a simmer, and add the wine. Cook for about ten minutes until it reduces slightly. Portion pasta in pasta bowls, garnish with parsley and Parmesan cheese.

 

Homage: Yummly