Killer Takeout
Page 22
I mentally ran through my list of pitch ideas, which was running a little thin because of the chaos over the last few days. “The only piece I’ve really started is something on Robert the doll. I’ve got the notes and photos, but I haven’t shaped it yet.”
“Send them on. I’d be happy to do that for you.”
“You’d better go over to the museum and talk with him first. He’s been known to haunt people who don’t ask his permission.”
Her laugh came quickly, high, and shrill. “Don’t be ridiculous, Hayley. He’s a stuffed doll. Spooky looking for sure, but he doesn’t have any power. Not over me or anyone else. Unless you give it to him, the way you do with that Lorenzo character.”
So she wasn’t completely reformed—she couldn’t resist a zinger. For a moment, I considered arguing with her further, insisting that she consider all the damage Robert had done to blustering visitors in the past.
On the other hand, if Robert put a curse on her, we could write him a note and beg for forgiveness. Tell him she wasn’t a local. Like all of us Key West immigrants, she was still learning the ropes of living on the island.
On the other, other hand, maybe she and Robert made a perfect match.
Recipes
Key West Boiled Dinner
This recipe is based on one I saw in Epicurious .com, but it’s been tweaked to suit Hayley, who serves it to her mother and her mother’s fiancé their first night on the island. It’s super simple to do the preparations ahead. Then cook at the last minute when your company arrives—and look like a domestic goddess.
Serves six
1 lemon, quartered
4 garlic cloves, peeled but left whole
2–3 bay leaves
5 tablespoons Creole seasoning (like Tony Chachere’s)
½ to 1 pound multicolored fingerling potatoes
1½ pounds large Key West pink shrimp (or other fresh local shrimp if possible) in shell
1 package sausage of your choice, cut into 2–3 inch lengths
1 package frozen corn on the cob, or fresh if it’s in season
Bring a gallon of water to boil in a big pot. Squeeze the lemon into this, and then add the lemon quarters, the garlic, the bay leaves, and the Creole seasoning.
Simmer the seasonings together for a few minutes.
Meanwhile, wash the potatoes and rinse the shrimp. Add the potatoes to the water, simmer until almost soft. (About 10 minutes, depending on the size.) Add the sausage and corn, simmer a few minutes. Finally, add the shrimp, simmer until they turn quite pink—another 2–3 minutes.
Dump the whole pot into a colander, drain, and serve the ingredients on a large platter.
Serve cocktail sauce (⅔ ketchup to ⅓ horseradish) and Dijon mustard on the side, along with a green salad.
Everyone takes as much as they want and peels their own shrimp as they go, until you are left with … nothing but shells and cobs!
Strawberry Cake with Strawberry Frosting
Hayley makes this to celebrate Sam and her mother’s engagement and upcoming wedding. It’s a sheet cake, so it serves a crowd. But it’s stunning, especially if you make it during strawberry season.
Ingredients for the strawberry cake
1 cup butter, softened
2 cups sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2½cups cake flour
¼ teaspoon table salt
½ teaspoon baking soda
1 cup buttermilk (or 1 cup milk, with 1 tablespoon cider vinegar added)
⅔ cup chopped fresh strawberries
Butter well a 9 x 13 inch pan, and heat oven to 350°F.
Using an electric mixer or food processor, beat the butter with the sugar until light and fluffy. Beat the eggs in one at a time. Beat in the lemon juice and vanilla extract. Combine the flour, salt, and baking soda in a small bowl. Add ⅓ of the dry ingredients to the butter mixture, alternating with adding ⅓ of the buttermilk. (I used a cup of milk with one tablespoon of cider vinegar instead of buttermilk.)
Pulse in the chopped strawberries until they are small pieces and the batter begins to look pink.
Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and bake for about 40 minutes until a toothpick stuck in the center comes out dry. Cool the cake on a wire rack.
Ingredients for the strawberry icing
4 ounces cream cheese, softened
½ cup chopped strawberries
½ teaspoon vanilla
⅓ cup sugar
1 cup heavy cream
Beat the cream cheese with the strawberries until mostly smooth. Add the vanilla and half the sugar; beat those in. Whip the cream with the remaining sugar until thick. Fold the whipped cream into the cream cheese/strawberry mixture. Spread the icing on the cooled cake and refrigerate until serving. Decorate with strawberries if desired.
Hayley Snow’s Shrimp Salad
One of the great joys of writing the Key West mysteries is imagining what the characters would really do, and that includes considering what they would really eat. They are characters in a book, but they honestly begin to feel like real people. I can picture Hayley Snow and Miss Gloria on their houseboat wondering what to have for dinner. And then I can imagine them remembering that—oh joy!—there are shrimp left over from the night before.
Then Hayley goes to work. She looks in the fridge again and finds celery and onions and capers. And Miss Gloria goes out to the back deck and picks some fresh dill and a few beautiful ripe tomatoes. And then they whip up a quick but delicious shrimp salad served over greens and sliced tomatoes, with maybe a delicious leek biscuit on the side. Can’t you just see it? And that night my husband might say, Where did this recipe come from? And I say … Hayley made it, of course… .
Serves two, generously
½ pound Key West or Stonington pink shrimp
1 small mild onion, diced
1 stalk celery, diced
1 tablespoon capers
1 tablespoon chopped fresh dill
1 tablespoon mayonnaise
Boil the shrimp until just pink. Drain, then shell and clean out the veins. Cut these into bite-size pieces. Add the onion, celery, capers, and dill, then mix the mayonnaise in. Serve over crisp salad greens or a sliced tomato
Mango Hot Dog
One of the best food trucks in Key West serves a mango hot dog that is to die for. Garbo’s Grill adds sliced mangoes, sliced jalapeños, and some kind of supersecret sauce for which I did not have the recipe.
So I wandered off into my own version of grilled hot dogs with a spicy mango relish. My guests, to be honest, looked at this askance when it first came to the table. But every single eater was a convert by the end of dinner.
Enough relish for six hot dogs
1 ripe mango, diced
1 jalapeño, seeded and minced
1 small red onion, minced
½ teaspoon sugar
A couple of squeezes of lemon
Good quality hot dogs (I used all-beef, no-nitrate dogs from Niman Ranch. My hub doesn’t usually like natural hot dogs, but these were good!)
Good buns to match
Combine all the ingredients, mango to lemon.
Serve the salsa on grilled hot dogs, on toasted buns, with good mustard.
Hayley Snow reviews this hot dog, eaten at Garbo’s Grill, in this book. She loves it as much as I did!
Eric’s Coconut Cake (Almost)
My friend Eric (the model for the psychologist character in the Key West mysteries) is famous for his coconut cake. And I’ve been looking for a recipe for coconut cake for forever, so I begged for his. Of course, never able to quite leave a recipe alone, I did change things up a little from what he sent me. I used less of the cream of coconut and one block of cream cheese in the icing instead of two. Oh, and unsweetened coconut instead of sweetened. It was delicious, if I say so myself. I think I will try this as a sheet cake next time I have to take something to
a party… .
Serves ten to twelve
Ingredients for the Coconut Cake
1¼ cups all-purpose flour
1¾ cups cake flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
2 cups sugar
¾ teaspoon salt
1½ sticks unsalted butter, softened but still cool
2–3 ounces Coco Lopez from an 8-ounce can (save the rest for icing)
4 eggs, room temperature
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ teaspoon almond extract
Heat oven to 350°F. Prepare two 9-inch cake pans by buttering them well, lining with parchment, and then buttering the parchment too.
Mix all the dry cake ingredients in the bowl of an electric mixer or stand mixer at slow speed. Add cool cubes of butter, a few at a time, along with the Coco Lopez, and continue beating on low for about 1–2 minutes. Beat the eggs in one at a time, mixing well but minimally after each.
Mix the milk with the extracts.
Add ½ cup of milk mixture to flour mixture and beat until combined. Add remaining ½ cup of milk mixture and beat for about 1 minute.
Pour batter evenly into the two prepared cake pans.
Bake until toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean and cake springs back when touched, in the neighborhood of 25 minutes. (Watch this because you don’t want to overcook.)
Cool the pans for ten minutes, and then remove the cakes, one to a plate and the other to waxed paper, and allow them to cool to room temperature.
Ingredients for the coconut icing
1 8-ounce block cream cheese
1 stick unsalted butter
Coco Lopez—the rest of the can
1 teaspoon vanilla
About 1½ cups confectioner’s sugar
6 ounces unsweetened flaked coconut
Beat everything together except for the coconut. Then taste to see if it’s sweet enough for your audience. Ice the top of the first layer, and then sprinkle with coconut. Add the second layer, ice the whole cake, and sprinkle the coconut all over, patting as needed.
And then watch your people swoon… .
Knockoff Painkiller Cocktail
This is one of our favorite ways to celebrate after a day on the water, but you can drink it on land as well!
Serves one
4 ounces pineapple coconut juice (Knudsen, for me)
2 ounces orange juice
1 to 2 ounces Pusser’s or other dark rum
Sprinkling of fresh nutmeg
Combine the liquids in a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Stir well, and then pour into a glass filled with ice and garnish with a sprinkle of nutmeg. This is definitely tasty enough to serve without the rum too, if you prefer… .
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Clinical psychologist Roberta Isleib, aka Lucy Burdette, is the author of the Key West Food Critic Mysteries, including Fatal Reservations, Death with All the Trimmings, and Murder with Ganache. Her books and stories have been short-listed for Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards. She is a past president of Sisters in Crime and blogs with seven other mystery writers at jungleredwriters.com.
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