Recipes and Ghost Stories

[neadods]

Most of the cooks on the flist are going to point and laugh at this, but: it was a huge revelation to discover that you don't *have* to make mac and cheese with a milk-based cheese sauce. I like mac and cheese. But making cheese sauce is a pain and the professional sauces have too much salt, corn syrup, or both.

So when Giada De Laurentiis said in Everyday Pasta that she made mac and cheese by stirring the noodles with butter and parmesan, it was a revelation. And a favorite meal went from taking ages to taking about 10 minutes - fill pasta plate with butter, cheeses (I used a little shredded cheddar and cream as well as the parmesan), make pasta, stir.

Next up, lemon butter, pasta, and steamed broccoli.

I'm also going to have to learn to make cream of tomato soup. The store has stopped carrying Heintz and it's one of the few things that I'm name brand loyal to.

Nobody voted no, so here's a quickie rundown of Margaret Lucke's House of Whispers (#1 in the Supernatural Properties series) and Wendy Roberts' The Remains of the Dead (#1 in the Ghost Dusters mysteries).

First of all, I have in all honesty to say that I didn't read either one cover to cover. I'm pushing to go through a lot of my mysteries before Malice so I can drop them at the swap table. It's very easy to skim a mystery. At worst you can outright Cliffs Note it - read the first 75 pages to meet the characters and the setup then the last 10 to find out whodunit, as the criminal must, by law, attempt to kill the amateur detective while detailing the various crimes, simultaneously insisting that it would have worked if not for you meddling kids and your dog. Read the last 20 pages if there's a denouement in which the injured hero/ine makes peace with his/her overbearing but loving mother/ambitious jealous sibling/angry significant other or best friend who was accused of the crime/emotionally fraught actual cop friend or lover who is worried sick and angry that they butted into police work and grateful that they solved the crime.

Not that I've read WAY too many of these or anything!

*ahem*

I started with Remains on the assumption that it would be funny; the opening scene is about the heroine, who runs a crime scene cleanup service, having no sympathy for the ghost who is bitching that he hadn't meant to blow out the brains she was cleaning up. I was mistaken in this. The heroine has a corking case of ose (old fannish term - ose, ose, and more-ose) about her dead brother, is jealous of her sister, creeped out by her sister's fiancee who looks like the brother, and is surprisingly annoyed by and curt with the ghosts she sees.

Also, my one main time to read these days is mealtimes, and Roberts writes lots and lots of descriptions of decomp and bodily fluids.

There's nothing that I can point to as being subjectively "wrong" with the book, though, at least in the 1/3 of it I read. It gives every indication of being a bog-standard supernatural cozy. So it's not bad, it just gets a solid "meh" out of me.

House of Whispers on the other hand, at least enticed me to read maybe 3/4 of it. Lucke shifts POV between characters and does so deftly - it's just often enough to shake things up but not so often as to shake the narrative loose. Mind you, the characters tend to be pretty stock ones - the bitchy sexpot determined to get ahead, the long-suffering heroine, the cute little girl, yadda yadda. I can't say I'm going to rush right out and buy the next one, but I personally found it a better read than Remains... if for no other reason that I could read it over lunch.

It didn't help that between the two I read Charlene Harris' Three Bedrooms, One Corpse in which a non-supernatural realtor keeps finding dead bodies in show houses. Frankly, they're all blending together a bit in my mind.

(On a side note, I'm amused by Laura Childs just throwing down on the whole special-interest cozy thing by creating the Cackleberry Club mysteries about a place that does diner breakfasts in the morning, high tea in the afternoon, and in the evening has a book club and knitting club in two specialty sales nooks. The premise is blatant and Eggs in Purgatory is merely okay - but on sober reflection, I have to admit, I would shop and eat in such a place.)

Comments

[teenygozer.livejournal.com]

I can't do dairy at all: I make mac & cheese using a very light olive oil in place of milk or butter. It tasted amazing!

[teenygozer.livejournal.com]

Oops, somehow my last couple of lines got cut when I posted (actually, I may have cut them out accidentally as I wasn't paying close attention to what I was doing, I was watching Robin Williams on The Actor's Studio!), here it is:

I know the powder that comes in the box is supposedly "dairy", but whatever it is in cow juice that makes me get all asthmatic, it's not in that orange powder, so I'm okay with it! I use Annie's Organic Mac & Cheese and like it alot.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking of investing in one of those butter/olive oil blends to use, because my pasta consumption is about to leap forward. It's quick and filling for when I have nothing else in the house (those times when I used to get fast food) and it's a not-bad way of using up small amounts of leftovers. I'm thinking leftover rotisserie chicken + lemon butter + broccoli, for example. (Which would work just as well with olive oil and a lemon.)