It’s the perfect time to try out some new dishes with the holidays just around the corner! Maybe you want to wow your coworkers at the annual office party, or you want to spice up Christmas dinner.

Whatever it is, we’ve got you covered!

Since it’s National Recipe Greetings for the Holidays week, we’re going to post a new recipe each day!

Have a recipe you just can’t keep to yourself? We’d love to hear from you! All recipes will be sent at the end of the week to our newsletter subscribers! Sign up here so you don’t miss out!

A delicious treat for the end of the week!

Rose’s Chocolate Meringue Pie

Chocolate Filling:
2 cups half-n-half
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup cornstarch
1/8 teaspoon salt
1-1/2 tablespoons Hershey’s Unsweetened Cocoa
3 egg yolks (beaten) [save the whites for meringue]
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 tablespoons butter
1 deep dish pie crust, baked according to directions

Instructions:

1. Heat 1-1/2 cups of the half-n-half, but don’t let it boil.
2. While heating half-n-half to a near simmer, mix together dry ingredients: cocoa, cornstarch and salt in a separate bowl.
3. Separate yolks from whites. Set aside whites in large metal or glass bowl to get to room temperature for making the meringue later.
4. Whisk the remaining 1/2 cup of half-n-half with the egg yolks. Whisk the mixed dry ingredients into the egg yolk and half-n-half mixture until smooth. Remove half-n-half from heat and gradually whisk into chocolate/yolk mixture.
5. Once everything is incorporated, place back on heat on medium-high and continue to whisk (so as not to burn the bottom) until the mixture boils. Remove from heat, add butter and vanilla and whisk. Cover with plastic wrap while cooling and make meringue.

Meringue:
3 egg whites
½ teaspoon cream of tartar
4 tablespoons powdered sugar
½ teaspoon vanilla

Instructions:

1. Beat egg whites until frothy. Add cream of tartar and continue beating until soft peaks form. Beat in powdered sugar until stiff peaks form. Add vanilla.
2. Pour chocolate mixture into cool pie crust. Spread meringue over chocolate filling, covering crust edge. Use spoon to create peaks.
3. Bake at 325° in preheated oven for 10-15 minutes, until peaks are browned. Cool for one hour, then refrigerate until serving.

For when the holidays become a little too stressful!

Santa Paws needs treats, too!

Today’s recipe is courtesy of Caro Lamont, former psychologist turned pet therapist, from The Pampered Pets Mysteries Series!

Caro’s PAWS Good Dog Treats

Ingredients:
1/ 2 cup of creamy unsalted peanut butter
1 cup oat flour
1 cup brown rice flour (Caro uses organic)
1 egg
1 tablespoon of honey
1/ 2 cup finely grated carrot (Dogbert loves carrots and so does Abbey)

1. Preheat your oven to 350 ° F.
2. In a big bowl, combine all the ingredients with just enough water to make it the consistency of cookie dough. Optional: You can also add cooked bacon, a bit of grated cheese, or other ingredients for flavor, but don’t add too much or it will mess with the consistency of the dough, and cause your treats to fall apart.
3. Once you’ve got your treat dough all stirred up, put it between pieces of parchment paper and roll it out to about ¼ inch thickness. Then cut the dough with a cookie cutter. You can use whatever shape strikes your fancy. Caro often uses dog bone shapes of different sizes.
4. Next, put them on a regular cookie sheet and bake them between fifteen and twenty minutes or until they’re Golden Retriever brown. Let them cool and then put them in an airtight container.
5. You can store your PAWS Good Dog treats for about a week (or you can freeze them for later use) but keep an eye on them.

There are no preservatives, so watch out for spoilage.
This makes a couple of dozen treats so there’s plenty to go around.
Please share them with your dog.

Enjoy!

You can find more recipes like this in Desperate Housedogs, book 1 in The Pampered Pets Mystery Series! Be sure to check back tomorrow for another dish!

Our first recipe is courtesy of  Bubba Rice, owner and head chef of Bubba Rice Lunch and Catering Diner, from The Mossy Creek Hometown Series.

Roasted Asparagus with Red Pepper & Scallions

Serves 4

Ingredients:
1 bundle of fresh asparagus
1 bundle of fresh scallions or green onions
1/2 cup of diced red bell pepper
3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
Salt & pepper to taste

1. Trim the asparagus and the scallions and dice the red pepper.
2. Place the asparagus spears in a baking dish. Add the scallions on top of the asparagus, then sprinkle the diced red pepper evenly over the top.
3. Drizzle the olive oil evenly over the dish. Add salt and pepper and place in a 375 degree oven for 15—20 minutes.

Enjoy!

You can find more recipes like this in A Day In Mossy Creek, book 5 in The Mossy Creek Hometown Series! Be sure to check back tomorrow for another dish!

Why is there no Grandmother’s Day?

This is a trick question.

Every book I write, including The Crossroads Café, focuses not only on a core romance story but is also about family;  mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, and grandparents. Sometimes the theme may be subtle, sometimes not. Family is the parallel core, regardless.

My mother made me what I am today.

All the good stuff and the bad. Some of it sad, but forgiveness was always a given between us.

She was simple, easy, heartbreaking, wonderful. Ma was normal, flawed, like me, but kinder than I am and more realistic. I miss her every moment of every day. She died in my home nine years ago next December, her bedroom filled with Christmas decorations, with me standing beside the rented hospital bed, yelling for help from the hospice nurse.

I am writing this in a sunroom that is now my office, just outside her bedroom. Fifteen feet from where she lay in that sad, rented bed with its undulating air-pump mattress to prevent bed sores, its pull-up rails to keep her from tumbling out, and the loud, gasp-and-release gush of the oxygen concentrator that fed life into her cigarette-ruined lungs.

A few of her clothes still hang in the room’s closet. I store my yarn in there, and so I often stroke her dresses while searching for a skein or hank. Her soft fleece jacket, her nightgowns. I talk to them. To her.

I want her forgiveness for something. It’s always there, the need to be forgiven by her.

Forgiveness was never an issue with my grandmother, however. Forgiveness was for weaklings. She wanted to mold me into a fire-breathing dragon, the spitting were-cat of Southern womanhood. Just like her.

As a result, I’m a product of a mixed marriage.

Submissive, chain-smoking, hard-drinking, tender-hearted Mama.

Dominant, teetotaler, hard-hearted Grandmother.

I have the fantasies of a Valkyrie mixed with the manners of a furious wildcat shellacked with the veneer of Melanie Wilkes.

Why, bless your heart. And to hell with you.  

There she is. Grandma is peeking around the corner of my mind, whispering to me. Good angel or fallen angel? Both?

She defended me fiercely during my years as a whacky teenager, but would come into my tiny bedroom when I slept too late and throw a pan of sizzling, oven-broiled buttered toast on me.

On the eve of my wedding, she very dramatically (at 85 years old) staggered down her hallway and collapsed loudly against my bedroom door.

“Have your fun and spend your money the way you want to before you get married. After that, you’re stuck.”

No offense to my beloved Husband of lo’ these many years, but she had a point, at least in her experience. She’d given up her career at Western Union in the 1940’s, as a trainer of telegram operators, because my grandfather (who also worked for Western Union) said she must stay home and become a fulltime mother to my Dad.

Dad turned out to be an only child. Go figure.

She put aside her daily downtown Atlanta life, where she rubbed shoulders with Margaret Mitchell, shopped at Rich’s Department Store, and was among the first at Western Union to know that President Roosevelt had died at Warm Springs—top secret messages came through her office on their way to Washington, D.C.—to become a farm wife wearing aprons and canning vegetables.

The anger in her was immense. As a child I watched her gleefully wring chickens by the neck; she patrolled her property with a sawed-off shotgun and challenged neighbors to so much as set foot inside her territory. Before electric or even hand-cranked can openers, she jabbed the wicked blade of a hand-held can opener into quivering tin containers. She pumped the blade around their rims like an oysterman cracking a shell.

She could kill people with that can blade. I’m not sure she hadn’t stabbed a few. Some of her nefarious siblings (from a dirt-poor family of eleven kids) challenged her as long as she lived.

She adored her baby brothers—they could do no wrong, in her mind—the preacher, the polio survivor, the dead war hero, and the youngest brother who joined the navy not long after World War One and eventually settled in sunny California with a bawdy, lovable, California beach babe.

But her sisters? Whoa. It was whispered she’d hauled her indiscreet younger sisters to back-alley abortionists in their teens; she’d even incarcerated one sister in a Catholic “school” for girls. Grandmother didn’t care about religion, not seriously, so she had few prejudices in that regard. To her, Catholic nuns were admirably strict.  She judged them on that merit, alone.

Grandmother didn’t take excuses for an answer. This was the girl who got on a train in 1911 and traveled to the far end of Georgia. She was seventeen years old and had never been outside her own home county before.

She worked her way through a teacher’s college amidst the hot cotton fields of South Georgia, waiting tables in the faculty dining room.

It was a co-ed school. The boys studied farming. Modern agriculture. Grandma became sweethearts with a football player. She posed for a picture on a tennis court, of all things, holding a racket and pretending she would ever willingly smack a ball for fun; besides, the college’s dress code was still rooted in the 1800’s. So there she stood, the farm girl corseted into a dark, full-length dress with puffed seeves. Her brown hair was done up in a high Gibson Girl ’do.

Her expression looked grim.

You’re going to aim a stupid little ball at me? You’ll wish you’d been skinned alive, instead. 

She never doubted herself, never apologized, never backed down. At the end of her life, as she lay in a nursing home at ninety-two, with me holding her hand, I said, “I love you.” I had hardly ever said that to her before. She’d never said it to anyone, me included.

“I love you,” I said.

“I know,” she answered.

Couldn’t pry a return confession out of her. Not even with Death’s scepter as the can opener.

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Are these fakes, or are they mermaid sightings?

by Deborah Smith

For centuries, people all over the world have claimed to see mermaids. Either the beautiful, Hollywood siren type, with flowing hair and bodacious bosoms, but more often an odd, ugly creature with a humanoid head and torso but the lower body of a fish, dolphin or seal.

There have been photos, and drawings, and presentations of weird skeletons found on remote beaches. But until recent  years there weren’t videos.

Now, there are.

The amateur photographer has a shaky grip. The video blurs in and out. Its  focus is on a large rock in the edge of the tide, far below the cliff where the camera owner and his friend stand.

“I don’t think that’s a seal, man.”

“I’m trying to zoom in. Where’s the zoom button? Ouch. There.”

The image closes in. A large, dark form with tail flukes like a dolphin’s is stretched out on the rock.

“Where’s the Zoology on this? That is NOT a seal, man!”

Suddenly, the creature twists toward the camera, looking directly at the two young guys on the cliff. It has a pale area where a face and torso would be. The details show little more, perhaps a hint of dark eyes?

The mysterious being whips around, propels itself over the edge of the rock using what are clearly a pair of human-like arms, and splashes into the surf.

A hoax? Great use of computer wizardy, with actors pretending to be two hikers who just happen to capture video of a mermaid sunning herself in an isolated spot along the coast of Israel?

Regardless, it will send goosebumps down your spine.

http://www.animalplanet.com/tv-shows/mermaids/videos/mermaid-sighting-in-kiryat-yam/

And then there’s this video:

Two men sit in a deep-sea observation capsule several thousand feet below the ocean surface in the frigid  waters off the coast of Greenland. They’re marine experts who routinely go to those depths as they use sonar to map the ocean floor for oil and gas exploration.

But they’ve also grown curious about marine sounds they can’t identify. An ordinary listener would say the high-pitched whistles and piercing shrieks are just the songs of whales. But these two men have heard every kind of whale song there is, and this is very different.

They sit in the blue-black light of the tiny pod. A main camera films them and the view in front of the pod, which has big windows that allow the occupants to see almost entirely around them and above them. The pod’s headlights beam ghostly white light into the sheer darkness.

As they listen intently to the unknown song, one researcher points a small video camera  upward, hoping the mystery creature will swim past, above the pod. His back is turned to the pod’s front window and the white glow of its lights.

Suddenly, a ghost-white hand slaps the window, inches from his body. The loud thump can be heard. For a split second the hand splays on the surface.

A palm, four fingers and thumb. Human. But webbed.

The researchers jump in fear. They pivot toward the hand. It pulls away with a swishing motion. The creature—or human being—disappears below the pod, out of sight.

When they watch the video from the front-view camera, pausing it to study the image frame by frame, they see a pale, sunken face with distinctly human features, slender shoulders and arms.

The visitor gazes back at them before it swooshes away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ROaTfBILM8

An elaborate hoax for a television special on mermaids?

Most likely.

Because, as all of us who believe in merfolk will tell you, they’re far too smart to be caught on tape.

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    ASHEVILLE – THE SETTING OF THE CROSSROADS CAFE NOVELLAS

by: Deborah Smith

My Inspiration . . .

He was a little guy, thin inside baggy thrift-store clothes, grubby-looking, with ear-flaps flapping on his cap as he walk-loped up theAshevillesidewalk toward my husband and me. It was nine a.m. on an autumn Saturday, bright and sunny and blue-skied, and we were headed up and down the hilly city streets toward eggs and soy sausage at Tupelo Honey’s.

We could see his lips moving as he came closer, but we couldn’t hear what he was saying and, even if we could read lips, we couldn’t see his. He held a ratty Teddy Bear in front of his face. A big one. We weren’t sure how he saw around it.

He never paused, never glanced our way, never stopped whispering to his bear. He and his secret friend passed by us and continued up the hill, two pals communing inside the mysteries of their minds.

Just another moment in theNorth Carolinacity where the favorite t-shirt slogans include “Why be normal?” and “It’s not weird, it’sAsheville.”

Of course every city has its share of citizens who live in alternate realities. But here, in this artsy-bohemian  informal capital of westernNorth Carolina(the mountain side of the state) “alternate”   is  square one  on the yellow brick road to everywhere.

“There’s the nun,”  someone says, as a guy in a habit flies by on a tall bicycle, hairy knees pumping as he dodges pedestrians and halloooos at the street performers. The flying bicycle nun can only mean one thing: the purple LaZoom comedy tour bus is coming.  It rolls by, a comedy routine in motion, the passengers wearing bizarre hats.

Hardly anyone gives it an astonished look.

Over inPritchardParkpeople are smoking roll-your-owns and playing chess at the granite chess tables; on Friday evenings dozens of drummers show up with djembes and rattles, bongos and small drums. The drumming is loud and primitive and exciting.  A lot of very bad stomp-dancing commences, mostly by white people, though the crowd is always diverse.   Kids run in circles, laughing.  Young women in peasant skirts roll their waist-bands down and  belly dance.

Hank enjoys that part. Go figure.

On my latest birthday I decided I wanted my ears pierced. Hank and I can’t agree that I should  get a tattoo – I keep working on that plan, but the ear piercings are the first baby steps toward my Wild Cronehood Transition, so far.

I come from the kind of southern family where one hole in each ear was the maximum; and that was only acceptable after about 1975 (among the Methodists;) not until the late 1980’s among the Southern Baptists.  I was raised among a wild branch of semi-Methodists, so Daddy pierced my ears early,in the late 1960’s, using a large sewing needle and a tray of ice cubes to numb the lobes.

It was great family entertainment. Sister, mother, and grandma gathered to watch. No one fainted, and a good time was had by all.

So I came from a streak of rebellion. I got a second set of piercings in my lobes some years ago. Wild stuff. Made family reunions a little tense. Look at her. Four holes!

And now. Well. I was going to hell. I was taking my piercings outside the realm    of all decent folk.

I was going above the lobes.

So Hank and I walked into anAshevilletattoo  parlor (the optimum place to get a professional piercing done, according to the multi-pierced college students at our hometown pub.)

The staff and clientele looked at us as if we might have wandered in by mistake, intending to enter the Oldies But Goodies Vinyl Records Collectibles Shop next door. I explained that I wanted a piercing in each ear.

The young man behind the counter decided to humor me and asked where? I pointed vaguely to my ears. Somewhere in there. And on the edge over there.

This is when he gets out the chart. The ear anatomy chart.

We go over more terms than a high school human physiology class.

Helix, triangular fossa, crus helix, tragus.

Tragus. I ask if that isn’t the time travel thingie in Dr. Who?

Hank sits down in a corner and hides behind his cell phone.

No, the tragus is that thick ridge that guards the entrance to your ear canal.

Okay, that would be a prominent display spot for a glittery semi-precious stud. Very cool.

“I’ve got a pierced tragus. Want to see my tragus?”

I like the sound of that.

On to the other ear. Helix. The outer fold. Soft and fleshy. “That looks like a good spot. Not much cartilage. Won’t hurt, right?”

“Not much,” the child-man behind the counter says.

He said something similar about the tragus.

Actually he said, “Not too bad.”

Next to me, a young child of twenty or so, dotted with a lot of metal already, says, “Hey, you  oughta try this. She points to her ear. Inside, upper half. A stud gleams on a  shallow mound that looks as if it would be very hard to maneuver a needle through. My stomach felt funny. I looked  at the ear chart.

The antihelix.

That sounded . . . anti. Not for me.

I paid, I signed papers, I swore I wasn’t underage, high or drunk, and I showed my driver’s license. I was disappointed when I found out all the pretty studs on display in the jewelry cases were forbidden for a piercing process. I had to go full-titanium pre-sterilized. This was some serious stabby work.

“Come on back here,” said a reincarnation of John Belushi, covered in tattoos and a beard, and wearing inch-wide ear-plugs in his lobes.

This is how men think they’re proving they could give birth if they had to.

John took me into a very doctorly room with sterilizers and cabinets and an exam table with sanitary paper on it. He had nearly twenty years of experience piercing everything that can be pierced on the human body, and when he realized I was happy to hear the gory details, (writers ask questions, and former  newspaper reporters ask a LOT of them) he merrily told me.

I began making a mental list of the anecdotes I would not be sharing with Hank.  A lot of men don’t like hearing stories about needles going through that down there.    

“Ready?” John said, his Latexed fingers holding a needle the size of a toothpick  next to my unsuspecting targus.

“Sure!”

When  your daddy stabbed your earlobes with Mama’s  largest sewing needle while your kid sister went “MAKE IT BLEED,” you’re  confident you can handle a steel toothpick through your targus.

Zap.

I said bad words. My eyes watered. It was over in three seconds. Maybe two. But still. Damn.

“You all right?” John asked.

“Sure!”

I was looking around for something sharp to cut him with if he picked up a second needle. Fortunately, he recognized the reaction. “The other side will be a piece of cake. You’re doing great. Didn’t you say you have a calico cat? Look, here’s a picture of my calico. She sleeps between me and my wife every night.”

He distracted me with photos of his kitty on his cell phone. The dull throbbing in my targus settled down. Okay, it was still attached. I took a deep breath. “Ready.”

“Good girl.”

He moved fast. Ready, set, aim. Ka-zap. My helix lost its virginity. Not so bad. John gave me instructions on saline cleansing. We shook hands. We’d bonded.

I swaggered out like a female pirate. A stud in my targus. A stud in my helix.

“Do I look hot, or what?” I asked Hank.
“Pale, really pale,” he said.
“I need wine. A lot of it.”

He took me by the arm and we wandered out into the sunshine.

Ashevillesurrounded me. I was one with the weirdness. Proudly alternative.

But a little wobbly.

I wanted a Teddy Bear to talk to.

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Coming this winter: a sprawling story of romance, mystery and danger. An isolated North Carolina community is haunted by the massacre of ten prominent families in 1930. Were they vicious bootleggers or the victims of one man’s vengeful greed? A brilliant textile engineer and a disgraced ex-NFL football player must pick up the pieces of a dramatic legacy and defend it against a new generation of revenge.

Excerpt

Caillin Anna MacBride and Sean Liam Gallagher
Eire County, North Carolina
February 1930
The terrible fate about to befall my family and the others of Eire County was woven from a skein of pride as fragile as the mountain skies but as strong as steel chain. For nearly two centuries the ten founding families of our Appalachian paradise had worked, died, loved and lost, celebrated and mourned and, most of all, prospered. Eire County Scots-Irish fought and died as heroes in the Revolutionary War. They built a town, a community, and a proud way of life based on sheep and whiskey.
They were dirt poor when they walked off a ship in Philadelphia in 1735, bringing with them little besides their Presbyterian stubbornness and their heirloom skills from the old country: herding, weaving, needlework, and the making of fine liquor. They journeyed south, into the Southern highlands. They fell in love with the mountains of the colony that would become North Carolina. They established a county and named it Eire, for Ireland.
By the mid-eighteen hundreds Eire County was known for two things: the Little Finn River Whiskey Distillery and fine woven goods from our imported Irish sheep. The distillery sold our libations all over the Southern states. The bottles were beautiful, made of amber glass and stoppered with hand-carved corks. The labels were gloriously ornate, and the names poetic: Old Irish, Ram’s Head, Proud Chief.
Our women supervised vast herds of sheep, ran two wool mills to prepare the fleeces, and imported Peruvian cotton and Asian silk. They employed a network of mountain women who knitted, crocheted and wove Eire County fiber into everything from linens and lace to rugs to socks.
We carried on ancient celtic traditions through their woven patterns—the symbols handed down for generations. Birds, deer, sheep, celtic circles, celtic crosses; each family had its motif. Among our next-door neighbors, the Gallaghers, the heirloom symbol was a bound sheaf of grains; the ribbon around them swirled into itself, unbroken and eternal.
Among my family, the MacBrides, the favorite symbol was the dair, the oak, grand and sheltering, a stylized tree whose pattern took enormous skill to create. Oaks were not just sentimental choices; in the life of a whiskey clan the handmade oak barrels, usually charred just-so on the inside, meant the difference between harsh grain alcohol and bourbon whiskey. The oaks’ charred essence seeped into the new-born liquor and transformed it. A smooth drink needs two years in the oak, our elders said.
We drank from the soul of the oaks. Yes, we timbered them, and harvested their bountiful acorns to feed our sheep and pigs, but we also planted groves of new trees.
In the valley of the Little Finn, where the cold, sweet water flowed across our front pastures like a moat, broad fields of corn grew higher than a man’s head every summer. The corn was milled into flour and grits, but also for stewing as sour mash. On the banks of that pretty mountain river, the Little Finn Distillery spired a handsome bell tower into the sky; it was a grand brick-and-stone structure. When the mash was cooking in the big copper pot stills, a delicious roasted-corn aroma sifted through the valley along with the river’s silver mists.
But now the distillery was empty and shuttered. Our stand against Prohibition had edged us toward a horrifying label as lawbreakers. We hid our handsome stills in the sheep barns and the deep creek hollows. We found lucrative markets for our liquor in the gangsters’ speakeasys—many of them owned by our kin, since we often sent our young men and women to the cities for college, and they often came home with husbands and wives as well as degrees. We partnered with the Spanish mob in Florida to export our whiskey and import their rum. We married into it to seal the deal. My aunt, Maureen MacBride, was now Maureen Esperanza, married to Emil Esperanza, a kingpin of bootlegging in Tampa.
We prospered mightily. Under the houses of the ten founding families of Eire County were buried enough gold coins to run a small country. My grandfather had a personal showpiece collection begun by his great-grandfather in the seventeen hundreds. Even in nineteen thirty there were rare coins in it worth a small fortune each.
Prohibition did not ruin us. In fact, it turned us from modestly rich to very rich. We concluded that doing business with corrupt men was an act of civic rebellion, and would bear no permanent consequences, and that the smooth liquor of ambition was a righteous balm for righteous people. We continued to make liquor, and to weave wool, as if nothing would change.
We forgot that wool does not weep for injustices and bourbon does not mourn for lost souls.

Do authors get homemade cardboard purses from their editors at the Big 6 publishers? I think NOT!!!!

Here at Bell Bridge we’re known for . . . okay, Deb Smith is known for . . . using any excuse to play in the glue-sticky world of home crafting. Which is why Bell Bridge authors often open perfectly businesslike-looking packages to find, tucked among official correspondence or book galleys, some beaded bracelets, photo pendants, custom bookmarks or Christmas ornaments made from dried peppers. And yet, for GODDESS OF FRIED OKRA author Jean Brashear, the Craft Goddesses had something special in mind: a GOFO purse made from cardboard, fabric, an Inkjet transfer of her cover art, and lots and lots of buttons, beads and assorted metal geejaws to hide the glue marks.

And so we present, below, THE PURSE, as modeled by the lovely Jean herself.

It has been suggested that THE PURSE may serve best as 1. a windowsill planter for some nice catnip or a cactus 2. a bird feeder 3. a doorstop 4. a weapon or 5. all of the above.