“Is Amethyst here too?”
Bessie pouted. “You don’t even want to talk to me. All you’re interested in is her.”
“No. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“It certainly sounds that way to me.”
“Honestly, that’s not why I’m asking.”
Bessie looked at him for a moment. Then she said, “No. She’s not here.”
“Good.” Ken heaved a sigh of relief. “Is anyone else here?”
“Like who?”
He thought back to when he used to live at the school. “Like Esmeralda.”
Bessie giggled. “Nope. It’s just us. Isn’t that super?”
Ken thought for a moment. Then he took Bessie’s hand and gave it a squeeze.
“Yes, it is,” he said to her. “It really is.”
RECIPES
I always think of Halloween food as fall food—food made out of apples and pumpkins, pears and cranberries; food seasoned with ginger and cinnamon and cloves; food that says, “Come in and pull up a chair.” Here are a few offerings. Two of them are Mexican in origin and are served up in celebration of Mexico’s Day of the Dead, one of the recipes comes from the niece of a good friend of mine, and the remaining one comes from my recipe box. I’m not sure where I got it from, but I’ve been making it for years and can tell you that it’s virtually bulletproof.
Maria’s Pumpkin Bars
4 eggs
1 2/3 cups sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
2 cups (16 ounces) canned pumpkin
2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
Icing
8 tablespoons (1 stick) softened butter
Two 8-ounce packages cream cheese
1 tablespoon vanilla
2 to 3 cups powdered sugar
1 tablespoon milk
Beat all the icing ingredients together in a medium mixing bowl until smooth and creamy. Add more powdered sugar if the icing is too runny. Put aside.
Beat the eggs, sugar, oil, and canned pumpkin in a large mixing bowl. Add the flour and all the other ingredients. Mix well and pour the batter into a greased 10 x 15-inch pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 25 to 30 minutes. Let cool. Apply the icing. Cut in one- to two-inch squares. Keep in the refrigerator.
Here are two recipes that Mexicans serve on the Day of the Dead.
Pan de Muerto (Bread of the Dead)
½ cup butter
½ cup milk
½ cup water
5 to 5 ½ cups flour
2 (1/4-ounce) packages active dry yeast
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon whole aniseed
½ cup sugar
4 eggs
Glaze:
½ cup sugar
1/3 cup fresh orange juice
2 tablespoons orange zest
Bring the sugar, the orange juice, and the orange zest to a boil in a small saucepan over medium heat. Boil for 2 minutes. Set the glaze aside.
In a saucepan over medium flame, heat the butter, milk, and water until they are warm to the touch. Do not boil.
Measure out 1 ½ cups of the flour, and set the rest aside. In a large mixing bowl, combine the 1 ½ cups of flour, yeast, salt, aniseed, and sugar. Beat in the warm liquid until well combined. Add the eggs, and beat in another cup of flour. Continue beating in more flour until the dough is soft but not sticky. Knead the dough on a floured board until smooth and elastic.
Lightly grease a large bowl, and place the dough in it, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise in a warm place until the dough is double in bulk, about 1 ½ hours. Punch the dough down, and shape it into loaves resembling skulls, skeletons, or bones. Let the loaves rise for an hour.
Bake the loaves in a preheated 350°F oven for 40 minutes. Remove the loaves from the oven, and paint on the glaze with a pastry brush.
Calabaza en Tacha
This Mexican recipe uses pumpkin in an unusual way. The dessert is very sweet, and a little goes a long way.
1 4- to 5-pound pumpkin (Pie pumpkins are best for this.)
2 pounds raw or brown sugar
8 cinnamon sticks
Juice of 1 orange
4 cups water
With a sharp, heavy knife, cut the pumpkin into 3-inch squares or triangles. Remove the seeds and strings. Cut a diamond design into the pulp.
Put the sugar in a large pot with the cinnamon sticks, orange juice, and water. Boil until the sugar has dissolved.
Place a layer of pumpkin, pulp side down, in the syrup. Place a second layer of pumpkin on top of the first layer, pulp side up. Cover and simmer. Check every 10 minutes or so. When the pumpkin is ready, the tops of the pumpkin pieces will look glazed and the pulp will be soft and golden brown.
Let the pumpkin cool. Serve the pumpkin with the syrup.
The recipe for cranberry walnut bread is mine.
Cranberry Walnut Bread
This bread couldn’t be simpler to make. It makes one relatively small loaf.
1/4 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg
2 3/4 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda ½ teaspoon salt
1 cup canned whole cranberry sauce
3/4 cup honey or wheat beer (Try different beers to vary the taste.)
2 tablespoons grated orange peel
3/4 cup chopped walnuts
Cream the butter, sugar, and egg in a large mixing bowl. Mix the dry ingredients together in a medium mixing bowl. Combine the cranberry sauce, the beer, and the orange peel. Add the flour mixture and the cranberry mixture alternately to the butter, sugar, and egg mixture. Add walnuts. Bake in an 8-inch loaf pan in a preheated 350°F oven for 60 minutes. Cool the bread before cutting. This recipe keeps well.
When sisters Bernie and Libby Simmons sign on to cater a prize pooch’s birthday bash, they think they’re ready for anything. But they haven’t bargained for a killer with a bone to pick…
A Little Taste of Heaven catering certainly knows how to feed people. Dogs, however. .? Bernie and Libby will have their chance to impress guests of the four-legged variety when they lay out the spread for Trudy the Pug’s birthday luncheon. But this isn’t just any doggie ’do. Trudy’s owner, Annabel Colbert, is one of the richest women in town—and as mascot of the Colbert toy company, Trudy herself is a bona fide celebrity.
When the big day arrives, Trudy and her canine cohorts are ready to dig in to the delicacies—but the first to dip her fangs into the wine is Annabel. Mere moments later, the hostess is shrieking she’s been poisoned—and proving it by falling face first into her soup. After two days in a coma, Annabel is dead.
It seems the woman who had everything also had her share of enemies. In fact, Annabel was cheating, blackmailing, or backstabbing most of the people she knew, including her very own best friend, her very own husband, his personal assistant, and last but not least, Trudy’s trainer and kennel owner.
With so many suspects, sniffing out the truth is rapidly becoming a tricky not to mention risky proposition. Bernie and Libby had better close the oven on this case fast—before they get burned…
Please turn the page for an exciting sneak peek of A CATERED BIRTHDAY PARTY coming in December 2009!
Chapter 1
Libby dried her hands on the edge of her apron. She put the spatula covered with brownie batter in the sink before turning to face her younger sister. Then she took a deep breath. When that didn’t calm her down, she took a second and a third. Maybe Marvin was right. Maybe she did need to mellow out.
“You like dogs,” Bernie said to her in her most soothing voice.
“Not to the point of making dinner parties for them,” Libby told her sister.
“Birthday party,” Bernie corrected. “We’re making a birthday party.”
Libby frowned and waved her hand in the air. “Same thing.”
“No it’s n
ot.”
“It’s close enough.”
“Let’s not get overly semantic.”
“You do,” Libby told her.
Bernie decided to ignore the comment and stick to the matter at hand. “This isn’t for any dog,” Bernie said. “This is for Trudy, Annabel Colbert’s dog.”
“I know who Trudy is,” Libby replied as she studied the toothpick she’d just plunged into the first batch of brownies in the oven. “Everyone in the world knows who Trudy is.”
Okay that was an exaggeration, but not by much Libby thought. There might be some obscure tribe living in the Brazilian jungle who didn’t know about Trudy but that was about it. Trudy was the model for the Puggables, a group of stuffed toys that were the lynchpin of the Colbert toy empire.
The collection was composed of Eenie and Minnie, the mom and the dad, plus the three pups, Pagggie, Poogie, and Twinkles, as well as numerous other family members with names too disgustingly cute to mention. Not only that, but they came in a range of annoyingly saccharine pastel colors. However, they had made Annabel and her husband a fortune. Before the Puggables, the Colbert Toy Company had been just another company struggling to survive.
Libby sighed as she turned her thoughts back to the brownies. They were almost done. Five more minutes at the most. That was the trouble with brownies. They were easy to make, but difficult to make well. If you added the chocolate and butter mixture to the flour before it cooled, the bars came out heavy. If you baked them too long, they came out dry.
Bernie nodded at the brownies. “Are these the ones you made out of seventy percent dark chocolate with chili powder?”
Libby nodded. “It’ll be interesting to see how they sell.”
“We need to call them something cool.” Bernie was a firm believer in the power of names.
Libby shrugged. She wasn’t.
“Dogs can’t eat chocolate you know,” Bernie told her getting back to the matter at hand. “It gives them heart attacks.”
“Then I’m glad I’m not a dog,” Libby retorted as she watched her sister smooth her shirt down around her waist.
It was twenty-five degrees out, and Bernie was wearing a long black cashmere sweater, a white and gray stripped scarf, a silk shirt, twill pants, and suede boots. How she did it, Libby didn’t know. She herself was wearing a flannel shirt, a hoodie, jeans, and wool socks, and she was still cold.
“It’s really for Annabel Colbert’s friends and family,” Bernie continued. She took up the conversation where she’d left it a moment ago.
Libby slammed the oven door shut. “And dogs.”
“Pugs,” Bernie corrected. “Six pugs.”
“Wonderful.”
“Well, you wouldn’t want Trudy to have a birthday party without her friends. That would just be mean.”
Libby threw the toothpick into the garbage can, stalked over to the cutting board, and began shredding ginger for their special gingered chicken. As Bernie followed her, she reflected that she probably should have talked to her sister about the dinner later in the day. She might have been more receptive then. The fact that they were behind because their counter girl Amber had called and told them she was going to be three hours late this morning hadn’t put Libby in a good mood.
As Bernie peered over Libby’s shoulder, she once again marveled at the speed with which her sister’s hands moved. “I’m going to Sam’s Club to get napkins, plates, sugar, and salt. Do we need anything else?”
Libby kept chopping. “I don’t like pugs,” she informed Bernie.
“Neither do I,” Bernie said as she snagged a piece of carrot off the table. “They wheeze.”
Libby stopped chopping and turned to face her. “So why are we doing this?”
Bernie snorted. “You can’t be serious?”
Libby wasn’t. Not really. She new exactly why they were doing this. They were doing this because you don’t say no to the wealthiest person in town. At least you don’t if you want to stay in business. Libby chewed on the inside of her lip as she extracted a piece of chocolate from the pocket of her shirt, unwrapped it, and popped it in her mouth.
That wasn’t the issue. Not really. The issue was respect. Bernie was always running off and committing them to engagements without asking her first, leaving her to run around like a chicken without its head, to coin one of her mother’s expressions. Frankly she was sick and tired of it.
“You should have discussed it with me first,” Libby told her.
“I was going to,” Bernie protested. “But you were asleep when I got home.”
Libby grunted. “You could have left a note.”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
Libby felt her resolve weakening. This was the problem. She could never stay annoyed with her sister for long. “When is this event supposed to take place?”
Bernie hemmed and hawed. Libby started tapping her foot.
Bernie plastered a grin on her face. “Friday.” She gave the word an upward swing.
“Which Friday?”
“Err…this Friday.”
“That’s two days away!” Libby yelped.
Bernie looked unhappy. “Well, you know how impulsive Annabel Colbert is. But on the bright side, the Fields canceled their dinner party, so that leaves an opening.”
Libby’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t tell me that either.”
“It was on the answering machine last night. I figured you’d listen to the messages.”
Libby cursed silently as she strode towards the calendar hanging on the wall. At least they hadn’t butter-flied the lamb yet or ordered the scallops for the coquille St. Jacques so that was good. And she had to admit that what Bernie had just said was true. Annabel Colbert was impulsive. And insistent. She never took no for an answer. She had that sense of entitlement the super-rich have. Just saying it made it so for her.
Libby clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth while she studied the calendar. They were pretty well booked, what with dinner parties, benefits, and bar mitzvahs. But Bernie was correct. The Fields had been the only event they had going for Friday night.
“She’s going to want a deal,” Libby said. “She always does.”
“No. I’m not,” a voice behind them trumpeted. “Nothing is too good for my Trudy.”
Libby and Bernie spun around. Annabel Colbert was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the counter area with her pug in her arms. She’d recently gotten a short, spiky hairdo, but instead of making her look punk, it made her appear even more gaunt. Scrutinizing her, Bernie decided that the “thin” part of the adage “you can never be too rich or too thin” had definite limits, and Annabel Colbert was on the verge of transgressing them. There was thin and then there was just plain bony. Bernie was thinking about what the tipping point was when she noticed that their counter guy, Googie, a.k.a. George Nathan III, was right behind her.
“I’m sorry,” he stammered as he wiped his hands on his apron. “I couldn’t stop her. She just barged in.”
Libby nodded. “It’s okay.”
“I…”
“Seriously. Go back behind the counter,” Libby said, and she shooed Googie away before turning her attention to Annabel. A Little Taste of Heaven wasn’t packed, but there were ten people out front waiting to be served. Aside from which it didn’t do to leave the cash register unguarded. Longely wasn’t the type of place where you had to worry about stuff like that, but why take chances? “I’m sorry but Trudy can’t be in the kitchen,” Libby told Annabel. It would just be their luck to have the health inspector walk in on them.
“But I’m holding her,” Annabel protested.
Bernie shrugged. “Health code rules are health code rules.”
Annabel scowled. “She’s cleaner than most people.”
“I’m sure she is,” Bernie said as she escorted Annabel out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the Simmons’ living quarters.
Luckily her dad was out at the moment, because he wasn’t a big fan of
the Colbert family.
“Morons” was the kindest comment he made whenever their name came up.
“I like Trudy’s collar,” Bernie said on the way up the stairs. It was thick braided leather with a large gold buckle.
A Catered Halloween Page 27