Emilie Richards's Blog, page 129

CHUsday and Soup Weather's Here

Tina, who posted a comment on the CHU blog, Bread's Baking in the Oven, is October's CHU giveaway winner with a recipe she tried from The New American Plate Cookbook: Recipes for a Healthy Weight and a Healthy LifeThe New American Plate: Recipes for a Healthy Weight and a Healthy Life.  

The recipe, Roasted Red Pepper and Corn Soup, was a hit at her house.  Tina says "it's a real keeper." 

I've provided a link to the recipe at a blog titled Zen Foodism, where you can read the blogger's personal comments, too.  The cookbook comes from the American Institute for Cancer Research, and  Beth the blogger says the recipes aren't bland but packed with superfoods.  Beth admits she could own a million cookbooks, and it wouldn't be enough.

Ummm. . . sound like anybody we know?

Thanks, Tina, for pointing out a new cookbook that I may need to own someday soon.  Enjoy your Mr. Potato Peeler and autographed novel. 

Since autumn's a great time for soup, I'm sharing two favorite recipes of my own. 

 The first is a vegetarian minestrone that we love at our house.  Vegetarian soups can be suspect, but I promise you won't miss the beef broth in this version. Uncle Bill's Vegetarian Minestrone is simple and quick, and I can almost guarantee you'll be happily surprised.  For variety, try adding sliced cabbage instead of the zucchini, which is harder to find fresh, now that summer has ended.

The second was served to me this summer by a friend in New York.  Lime Soup, by Rebecca Rather and Alison Oresman,  is an absolutely scrumptious version of Tortilla Soup, and I was delighted to find it online at Epicurious.  My friend cuts the amount of lime in the recipe to one cup, and since hers was perfect, that's my plan, too.  Lime Soup is a  full meal in itself.

It's November, and time for new recipes in the giveaway.  I vowed to go through December, so that means you have November and December to pass your comments to me.  Rules are simple:

Make a recipe from a cookbook you haven't used this past year (new or old) or "underused," meaning you've made only a recipe or two from it ever.
Comment on ANY CHU blog and tell us what you made, the name of the cookbook, and how you liked it. 

More precise instructions here. 

This month's winner this month will receive an autographed novel AND Piggy Wiggy Little Whisk, pictured above.   Everyone who has entered at any time during the giveaway will be eligible for the final prize, to be announced.  Remember EVERY new recipe you try and comment on is one entry.  You're not limited to one a month.

Dig Out Your Cookbooks, and Start Your Ovens.

 

 

 

 

Sunday Poetry: The Outdoors Seem Like a Room

Welcome to Sunday Poetry.  If this is your first visit you can read about the purpose and inspiration of my Sunday blogs here.

Last week Northern Virginia had snow on the ground.  Before Halloween.  Unheard of.  Of course it was nothing like the 20 inches some places farther north received.  I remember my first winter in NW Pennsylvania, a 200-inches-of-snow kind of winter.  Florida girl that I was, I couldn't believe that I had to take my children trick-or-treating in boots and long johns.  Long johns, in case you haven't tried this, play havoc with Halloween costumes.

When Snow by David Berman appeared in my mailbox this week, courtesy of Poetry 180, it seemed particularly apt.  After all, winter has begun here, even though we still have leaves on the trees.  The poem made me smile, too.  I never had a younger sibling, but as the mother of four, I remember these endless questions.  Bet many of you do, too.

I love the line: "When it's snowing, the outdoors seem like a room."  What a great image, and it rang true for me immediately.  Snow makes the world a more intimate place, covering so many things we don't need to know or think about.

Remember there are no quizzes here, no right ways to read or contemplate the poem we share.  Absolutely no dissecting allowed.  Just come along for the "read."  What line, word or thought will you carry with you this week?  If you'd like to tell us where the poem took you?  We'll listen.

The Write Way: All Those Things That Happen Before the Book Begins

Galen McGee, peakdefinition.com

This week was a milestone in my career.  I turned in One Mountain Away, which is the first in the Goddesses Anonymous series set in Asheville, North Carolina.   Wherever you live, I'm sure you heard the cheers.

One Mountain Away is scheduled to come out in August of 2012, and while I've yet to see a cover, I hope my publisher will use some of the area's gorgeous scenery, a sample of which you see here, photographed by my favorite photographer (and son) Galen McGee of Peak Definition, in Asheville.

Some books are easier to write than others.  How easy, how hard, never seem to make a difference in the way the book is viewed by readers or reviewers.  Some of the hardest books look effortless.  Nobody engrossed in the novel knows how much the author agonized over the best way to portray a character or present the central conflict.  Other books, which look difficult on the surface, may not have been.  Quite possibly the author went into the book certain she knew exactly what she wanted to say and how she wanted to say it.  And while it's unlikely the author never deviated, it does happen.  Some books just seem to be channeled from above, counterweights to the ones that are eked from the earth below, one miserable word at a time.

One Mountain Away was one of the latter.  I knew so much about the story up front.  I understood characters, motivation, story arc, setting and how it played into my chapters.  I knew what I wanted to tackle and what I wanted to stay away from.   I was missing some crucial bits, though.  The hardest decision was the best way to incorporate back story.

Back story refers to all those things that happened before the reader opened the book.  It's the novelist's job to decide what's important for the reader to know and what isn't.  Next Friday I'll tackle ways to include back story.  But the first order of business is deciding if the information is necessary in the first place.

Sometimes back story's clearly superfluous.  Let's say a woman mistakenly receives a letter meant for a stranger.  She opens it and learns something interesting that she begins to investigate.  What do we need to know about her?  Very little.  Who she was before the story began is relatively unimportant.  The letter has nothing to do with her previous life.  Maybe there's a subplot that needs a touch of back story, an ex-boyfriend trying to win her back, a job she hates, but that's easily explained in a sentence or two before the book moves forward.

But what if back story connects in some important way to the story at hand?  If her investigations take her back to her own past, say she's investigating a hit and run accident; the driver was under the influence, and she comes from a family with substance abuse problems, then yes, her past could be important.  The past might provide motivation to investigate.  Or the case at hand might finally help her deal with her own past.

Or what if she believes the letter was meant for a stranger, only that isn't really true? What if the letter's part of a scheme to involve her in the present situation because of something she's done?

Including back story without annoying the reader who yearns to move forward, is difficult, so it has to be important.  My rule of thumb?   If back story is needed to explain vital aspects of a character's personality (fears, actions, loves, hates, etc.) then include what you must.  If back story enlightens the reader about motivation, include.  If back story sets up important plot points?  Include.

Don't include back story simply because it's interesting or dramatic.  A pinch here and there, perhaps, as it pertains to the story at hand, but that's all.  No matter how interesting you've made it for your own purposes, if back story isn't completely relevant to the present story, it's distracting. 

If you must tell that story, the one I'm advising you not to include, why not simply make the back story your novel?  After all, maybe that's the story you've yearned to tell all along.

CHUsday and the One That Got Away

I hate wasting food.  Which is why my husband and I smiled over burned salmon last week and pretended to smack our lips. 

Truth is, neither of us was willing to throw away a pound of wild caught salmon, even if the glaze, for which I'd held out so much hope, was now a layer of charcoal on top.  "Yum,"  I said, "it reminds me of meals straight off the barbecue."  He, of course, (the man who DOES the barbecuing) couldn't dispute this since right before I burned the salmon, he burned a pot of rice–the residue, of which I'm still trying to get out of my Green Gourmet saucepan.  He knew that one word of criticism, and rice would become the next conversational topic.  Wisely he swallowed salmon and criticism together.

Oh, did I mention the artichokes weren't quite done either, at least his wasn't?  Mine was perfect.  I wonder how that happened?

This all started with an online recipe from Once Upon A Chef, a website I mentioned two weeks ago.  For the month of October I'd suggested here that anyone who wanted to enter the CHU giveaway, could also enter with a new online recipe.  I wanted to be right in sync.

The recipe, Broiled Salmon With Thai Sweet Chili Glaze, not only sounded simple and good, it made use of the Thai sweet chili sauce I'd mistakenly bought for another online recipe, Thai Sesame Noodles, which actually called for spicy chili sauce.  I used the sweet sauce for the noodles anyway, and the result?  Well, it's not a recipe I'll hurry off to make again.  It was surprisingly bland, even though I used sesame oil with hot peppers.  But it's hard to critique a recipe if it's not followed exactly.

In all fairness to Chef, I think this salmon recipe's probably a keeper.  But I learned my lesson.  When broiling fish, never leave the room to watch the news, not even if you've set a timer–which I had. 

Never walk away from the broiler, period.

So why all the cooking errors when we're usually pretty adept in the kitchen?  It's actually pretty simple.  Chalk up my mistakes to 60 hour work weeks in October as I finished One Mountain Away and did my final revisions before sending it off to my editor.

Maybe authors just weeks from deadline shouldn't be allowed in the kitchen.   At the end of the next book, I'll just look up restaurants and not recipes.  The world will be a safer place.

November's here.  Dig out that old cookbook and make a new recipe.  We only have two months left of the giveaway, so get cooking!

Sunday Poetry: Not to be Tampered With

Welcome to Sunday Poetry.  If this is your first visit you can read about the purpose and inspiration of my Sunday blogs here.

I had to smile when The Printer's Error by Aaron Fogel showed up in my mailbox from Poetry 180 this week.  How can any novelist not love this one, particularly a novelist who just returned from a conference that focused on epubbing–which involves no printers at all?  Right now, as I'm completing a manuscript to send to my editor, the poem particularly strikes a chord. 

The Printer's Error also reminds me that this week I received an email from a reader pointing out an error in The Parting Glass, the second of my Whiskey Island duo.  Somehow (chance, protest, God?) the Cleveland Browns football team is noted in the novel as wearing orange and black uniforms.  I lived there for twelve years, and the team is, after all, called the BROWNS.   So how did this happen?  After reading The Printer's Error, I'll mull over the reason, and all the interesting things that could come from it.

Remember there are no quizzes here, no right ways to read or contemplate the poem we share.  Absolutely no dissecting allowed.  Just come along for the "read."  What line, word or thought will you carry with you this week?  If you'd like to tell us where the poem took you?  We'll listen.

Hanging Out On the Beach For Fun and Profit

[image error]Last week's Novelists Inc. conference was fabulous. I came home with so much information, but unfortunately no suntan to go with it.  I was inside the hotel at workshops madly scribbling notes almost the entire time.  When I wasn't, I was investigating Sarasota with friends, which might well turn out to be our Florida home someday.  The photo is my husband and I at the amazing Ringling Museum.  We only saw the outside, but inside beckons for the next trip.

So what did I learn?   And what might you find surprising?  Some teasers:

Tweet (which I do) between 1 and 20 (!) times a day (which I don't.)
YouTube is my friend and a video a week is not too much.  (Not too much for whom?)
Join Linked-In (so people I don't know can connect for reasons I don't yet understand.)
Consider tweeting for a character.  (Can you imagine what Wanda might say?)
"Publishers are the bouncers at the pearly gates." (Mark Coker, epublisher of Smashwords, talking about traditional publishing.)
"Publishers purchase today what was popular yesterday to publish in 18 months."  (Mark again.)
"Amazon is eating publishers for lunch."  (See 5 and 6)
Amazon sells 105 ebooks for every 100 print books. 
Ebook pluses: changeable fonts, portable, compact, convenient sampling and purchasing. (Plus ereaders are getting cheaper.)
Nothing you can do to promote yourself will help unless you write a good book.

It was fun to learn new ways to  find readers and keep my faithful ones happy, too, but everyone there agreed that the last item, writing a good book, has to be the most important.   The trick in coming years, when writers will take more and more of publishing into their own hands, will be to make certain that good books rise, like cream, to the top of the bookselling world.

And speaking of that?  Back to One Mountain Away!

CHUsday with an Ethnic Twist

[image error]My hometown, Gulfport, Florida, has a wonderful Cuban restaurant, Habana Cafe.  Last year when I attended the Novelist's Inc. conference on St. Pete Beach, a group of us visited the restaurant for a delicious, reasonably priced dinner.  I ordered the lechon asada, which is a fabulously roasted pork topped with grilled onions.   I was hooked.

I was sad to miss Habana this weekend when I attended NINC's 2011 conference, but instead, friends took us to the historic Columbia restaurant at St. Armand's Circle in Sarasota, where we ate Cuban food on the covered patio.  Life is good.

When I plotted Sunset Bridge, my July 2011 novel, I gave Maggie, a new character for the series, a former lover who was a Cuban-American cop, and of course, a wonderful cook.  I had a hidden agenda.  I was then required to learn everything about Cuban cooking, not an onerous task. 

My first stop was the Internet, where I happened on Three Guys From Miami, a smile-inducing website with all things Cuban, including sample recipes from two bestselling cookbooks.  Of course if Felo was cooking Cuban, I had to do the same.  I settled on frijoles negros (black beans) and went shopping.  The beans were beyond delicious–although be sure to use 6 cups of water, not 9, unless you want soup. 

The Three Guys recipe is now our go-to.  I can't recommend it highly enough.  We eat these black beans with rice, and although tortillas are not part of Cuban cuisine, we eat them with tortillas, too.   The beans also freeze beautifully.  Last night we had them with roasted vegetables, and the sweet potato in the veggies combined so well with the flavor of the beans, we know we've hit on something we'll look forward to in the future, too.

Visit Three Guys for Cuban culture and cooking.

In the spirit of Cookbook Hoarders United, after discovering one fabulous Cuban recipe, I needed more.  Memories of a Cuban Kitchen was recommended to me by my doctor, a Cuban-American who cooks.  He promised I'd love it, and honestly, talking about food instead of my reason for being in his examining room, was SO much more fun I put it right on my list.  I have my eye on a chicken dish, and I'll report back.

Remember, you still have a week to try a new recipe and enter October's giveaway.   Try something new, tell us about it, and enter for a chance to win an autographed novel and a silly kitchen gadget (Mr. Potato Peeler.)  Also this month, try something new from an Internet recipe site.  That counts, too.

What's your favorite ethnic dish?  Afraid it's beyond your skills?  Come on, choose something simple, give a new recipe a try, and tell us all about it.  Our mouths are watering.

Sunday Poetry: Fingertips Required

Welcome to Sunday Poetry.  If this is your first visit you can read about the purpose and inspiration of my Sunday blogs here.

At a time when jobs, professions and class warfare are very much in the headlines all over the world, and Occupied DC is only fifteen minutes from my front door, Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper seemed particularly appropriate.  I found the story Martin Espada told here both moving and provocative.  I hope you will, as well. So few words and such a powerful statement. 

Remember there are no quizzes here, no right ways to read or contemplate the poem we share.  No dissecting allowed.  Just come along for the "read," and enjoy the experience.    What line, word or thought will you carry with you this week?  If you'd like to tell us where the poem took you?  We'll listen.

Writers on the Beach

I'm at the Novelist's Inc. conference on St. Pete Beach this week, with old friends and new.  I attended last year and learned more in a day than I've learned in all the previous conferences I'd ever attended.  So back I went.

Ever wonder what writer's talk about when we're together? (And I don't mean over umbrella drinks at the bar.)  Here are some of the titles of our workshops.

The Empowered Author: Publishing Math in an Age of Content Abundance.

Transmedia Storytelling.

Copyright 101

Writing in Multiple Genres: Craft and Strategy.

Since NINC requires two published novels before joining,we've left behind topics like "how to write a synopsis" and "building better characters" and moved on to the business of writing.  And, of course, ebooks and self-publishing will be discussed until we can't squeeze another ounce of information out of our speakers and our friends.

I'll be back next Friday, hopefully with great new things to tell you.  Meantime, don't be surprised if I return with a suntan.

CHUsday: What's Your Favorite Food Blog?

I don't know about you, but in addition to a LOT of cookbooks, I also have a LOT of links to cooking blogs and recipe sites.  This month, in hopes that you do, too, if you make a new recipe from an online site, you can comment here or on any Cookbook Hoarders United blog from the past, tell us what you made, where you found it (the link would be great) and how you liked it.  Then you'll be entered in this month's CHU giveaway. 

As usual you can also use a recipe from a cookbook you haven't opened in ages, or a new one you haven't opened at all.  And don't forget Mr. Potato Peeler is this month's silly kitchen utensil for the giveaway.

Tonight for dinner, I plan to try a brand new dish.  Last week I happened by the Thai section at my grocery store and found Thai Kitchen's "Stir Fry Rice Noodles."  I'm a sucker for rice noodles.  They went right into my cart.  At home I looked up the company online and found lots of good recipes for them. including one for Thai Sesame Noodles.   We love sesame and this looked yummy.  When asparagus jumped into my cart the next time I shopped, I knew I was in business.  I can't imagine this won't be delicious.

Company websites are treasure troves of recipes.  If you like to bake, King Arthur Flour has wonderful recipes and so does Bob's Red Mill.  Boboli Pizza has innovative ways to use their pizza shells that also work well if you make your own dough.  Hershey's will feed your sweet tooth.

Recipe collection sites are great, as well.  Allrecipes features recipes from ordinary cooks, and the reviews will tell you if the ones you're interested in really work.  I love to read who did what, why and how they did it.  You can save your choices in your very own recipe box.  Mine is so full that if everyone reading this made one of those recipes a week, in a decade we'd be finished–and on Weight Watchers together. 

Epicurious is similar, except that the professional recipes have been previously published in magazines like Bon Appetit, Gourmet, and Self.  Again you have your own personal recipe box and lots of reviews to read.

My very favorites, though, are recipe blogs.  I love the stories that go with the food.  There are so many that I hesitate to play favorites.  But just to get you started, here are a few I particularly enjoy.

The Perfect Pantry features recipes using 250 ingredients of everyday cooking.  Lydia Walshin writes about and photographs recipes made from her own pantry, and sometimes she'll give us a tour of other people's pantries, too.  Lydia, honey, stay out of mine!  Unfortunately it resembles my desk, disorganized and badly in need of  sorting.

Simply Recipes publishes recipes that the founder Elise Bauer, tests with the help of family and friends.  I like this one because of the casual, friendly style, and the uncomplicated recipes.  Like The Perfect Pantry, Elise's recipes are user-friendly with ingredients you probably already have. 

Once Upon A Chef is another "simple recipe" blog.  Although new recipes are added slowly, they always sound promising.  Plus there are often giveaways.  In late September Jennifer, a former professional chef, gave away muffin tins, a cooling rack, and lots more goodies to go along with a recipe for doughnut muffins.  What's not to like about that?

Baked Perfection was brand new to me until I went looking for a recipe for "Wanda's Wonderful" Elvis Surprise pie, which is featured in Fortunate Harbor.  I thought I'd find something I could tweak, but when I found this one, I knew it was the real thing.  Risa (who turns out to live not too far from me) was happy to let me use the recipe on my new Facebook Welcome Page as a bonus for anyone who "likes" me.  (I feel so Sally Fields every time I say that.)  The Elvis Surprise–known on her site as Chocolate Peanut Butter Banana Pie–is a great treat for anyone brave enough to make it.  And wow, all those other fabulous desserts to try.

What are some of your favorite food sites?  Aren't  you in the mood to try a new recipe this month?  Fall's in the air and the eating's good.  Start your ovens.