Sourcebooks Casablanca Romance Authors

I do a lot of the cooking in my family, which is something I enjoy most of the time. After a day of wrangling contentious characters and problematic plots, it's almost a relief to go into the kitchen and start handling tangible things like ingredients and utensils. And to know that, within a relatively brief interval, there will be a finished project to show for my work. Sometimes, I like to mess around, trying out a new recipe or tweaking an old one. Or cooking something complicated that requires my full concentration and tests my culinary skills, such as they are. At other times--when I'm on deadline or have multiple projects vying for my attention--I turn to dishes that are so easy and straightforward that I could prepare them in my sleep . . . and I'm not sure I haven't done just that, on occasion! Avgolemono soup is one of my "go-to" recipes. I first tasted it at a small family-owned Greek restaurant--sadly defunct now--that opened in the university t...

by Olivia Cunning I love flower gardening. Each winter, I long for the first spring flowers to emerge from the ground and display their brave blooms. There was a time, not so long ago, that I would spend entire weekends planting, tending, weeding, mulching and watering all my pretty little flowers. This is what my garden looked like in the spring. These are photos I took of my garden flowers around five years ago. It was so wonderful to see such gorgeous blooms after a long, harsh winter in The Plains. This is the same garden in the summer. Lilies thrive in this climate, much to my delight. Obviously, I love spring flowers and lilies. Some of my lilies grew shoulder-high and they smelled heavenly. Due to my increasingly busy life and lack of commitment to weeding and fertilizing and watering, my flower garden slowly deteriorated. Each year there were more weeds and fewer flowers. I kept telling myself ...

and it's spilling all over the furniture. I'd like to say I'm speaking metaphorically, but, sadly, the dog growled at the cat, who took three leaps: one from the sofa to the coffee table, then the coffee table to the chair--where the other dog is--then onto the end table, where she went skidding off and knocked my glass of grape juice over. It's 10:00 at night when I'm writing this--do you know how much I DON'T want to get up and clean up the grape juice. (Chat amongst yourselves; I'll be back. Grape juice does stain after all.) I'm back. The cat is sufficiently chastised from the barrage of words that frothed from my tight lips (and she does look somewhat similar to this picture, only Pagan is black and doesn't have a smushed face) and the dogs are grinning that they aren't the ones getting in trouble. And this is just the last five minutes of my life. I started a day job the other day. For the past almost 2 years I had been laid off from my day...