Sourcebooks Casablanca Romance Authors

The pumpkins have lost their toothy grins and scary faces. It’s time to get on to the next holiday—Thanksgiving. But do you know how the holiday came to be? I doubt few people do. So here’s some Facts: Although President George Washington set a day aside to give thanks and prayers, it wasn’t made official and the leaders who came after him nixed the idea due to their interpretation of the separation of church and state. In 1846, Sarah Hale who was the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, began a letter-writing campaign in favor of making the last Thursday in November National Thanksgiving Day. The idea gained favor and President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation making it happen. However, following presidents changed the day to various ones they favored. Can you imagine the confusion that led to? It was pretty bad. It wasn’t until 1941 that legislation was introduced in Congress to firmly establish the fourth Thursday of November as Thanksgiving Day and it ...

" If any one element of French cooking can be called important, basic and essential, that element is soup." --Louis Diat, chef for the Ritz-Carlton After a mostly mild summer, with just a few hot days here and there, we're having our first real heat wave in my neck of the woods. Naturally, that presents a challenge when it comes to mealtimes, since one cannot subsist on ice cream--alas!--and an endless array of salads and cold sandwiches can pall faster than you'd think!  Fortunately, I discovered a solution nearly a year ago, during a similar hot spell:  vichyssoise, a cold soup that is simple, delicious, and doesn't require tons of exotic ingredients. There are countless variations on it, but in the end, the basics come down to stock (or broth), potatoes, leeks, and milk or cream. What I didn't know when I started researching the recipe was that vichyssoise has an interesting history. Despite the name, it originated not in France, ...

Baking was one of the first things I learned to do in the kitchen--a pan of brownies, a tray of chocolate chip cookies, muffins, quick breads. (When I went off to grad school in another town, my mother was convinced that I'd starve because she thought--mistakenly--that all I knew how to cook were blueberry muffins! Unbeknownst to her, I’d also mastered meatloaf, spaghetti with marinara sauce, and white-cut chicken). Transitioning from cookies to pies is a significant step, but not an impossible one. I usually turn out a couple of apple pies during the fall and winter, and a few peach pies (possibly my specialty) in the summer. In the last couple of years, I've added lemon meringue to the roster. Every pie presents its own challenge, but lemon meringue can be especially demanding because there are three separate layers to assemble, and if one of them is "off," the whole pie suffers. It could be a burned or still-doughy crust, lemon curd that's too runny or...

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...

November may not be the shortest month of the year, but it always seems to fly past--possibly because it’s one of the busiest. Holidays, elections, shopping at its most insane (Black Friday, anyone?), personal challenges like the Great American Smoke-Out and National Novel Writing Month . . . finding the time to relax, reflect, and simply be in November is an ongoing challenge, even with that extra hour we regain when Standard Time resumes. This year, after a challenging summer, I’m trying to take autumn slow and easy. That doesn’t mean being less productive--while I’m not participating in NaNoWriMo, I am on course to finish my WiP this month--but rather to enjoy the journey and not stress out so much about the destination or how fast I get there. And to savor whatever comforts the season has to offer. I count cooking among those comforts. As the weather cools and the days grow shorter and darker, I find the kitchen one of the pleasantest places to be. Especially when someth...

by Amanda Forester I love the holidays. I particularly love that it starts with a celebration of that beautiful orange gourd - the pumpkin. I recently took the kids to a local pumpkin patch. We traipsed through the mud to find just the right pumpkin.   Pumpkins in the store are all round or oval, but in the field they come in a variety of shapes - round, square, rectangle, oval, and even some that have a waistline or fold over onto themselves.   I'm sure your choice of pumpkin says something about you, but I'm not sure what.   I chose a bright orange oval while my husband chose something that looked like a hunchback pumpkin.   I'm guessing that says something about his quirky sense of humor. At the pumpkin patch we came across bins of little pumpkin-like gourds of every shape and color imaginable - little orange pumpkins, mini white pumpkins, gourds that look like ghosts from Pac-man, gourds that look like crazy sea creatures, and even some gourds that lo...