Death of a Kitchen Diva (Hayley Powell Food and Cocktail Mysteries) (3 page)

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Authors: Lee Hollis

BOOK: Death of a Kitchen Diva (Hayley Powell Food and Cocktail Mysteries)
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Chapter 4
 
Hayley stared at the blank computer screen. She had been sitting there for well over an hour, her paper cup of coffee long since swallowed, tiny beads of sweat forming on her brow. She chalked it up to Bar Harbor experiencing one of the hottest fall seasons on record. Temperatures in the low nineties with stifling humidity.
But no, it wasn’t the weather. It was nerves. She had no idea what to write about. After testing some appetizers at home, she knew which one she wanted to use to kick off the column. Maybe build up to a main course dish and then finish off with a cool refreshing dessert. Do seven courses over the next couple of weeks. Made sense. Readers would have a full-course meal to try out at their next dinner party. She was beginning to doubt she’d even get to the salad course before Sal fired her and replaced her with someone who knew what she was doing.
Hayley couldn’t just jot down the recipe and be done with it. She had to talk about something first. Introduce herself. A lot of the locals already knew her, but there were visitors to the island who had no idea what her qualifications to write this column were.
Probably because she had none.
Hayley needed more coffee. And her break was coming up, so she knew she could kill some more time by running a few errands, like buying stamps at the post office and running home to let the dog out so he could do his business. Wait. She was just delaying the inevitable. No. She was going to sit here and not get up until she had at least written the opening sentence.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The phone rang and she lunged for it.
“Island Times,” Hayley chirped, grateful for the distraction.
It was Liddy, placing an ad for her latest listing. But really she was just calling to gossip about the dirt she picked up while getting a facial at the local beauty shop.
“Guess whose husband came home from a trip out of town early to find his wife in bed with a local contractor who was putting a new roof on their house?”
Hayley feigned interest, but her mind was elsewhere. This was torture. She should just march into Sal’s office and remove herself immediately from this potentially humiliating situation.
Liddy would’ve prattled on for at least an hour if Hayley didn’t stop her. “Liddy, I really need to hang up. Sal wants this column by three. We’re going to press.”
“Our little Hayley has her first deadline. That’s so adorable,” Liddy cooed.
“I need it by noon!” Sal bellowed from the back office, clearly eavesdropping on her conversation.
Hayley dropped the phone and could faintly hear Liddy still chattering away. “Noon? You said three.”
“I’m going fishing with Bruce on Long Pond and want to leave early today, so you better come up with something. And fast,” Sal yelled.
Hayley pictured him in the other room, smiling, enjoying the fact that he was adding pressure to her already frayed nerves. She knew exactly what he was doing. Sal was old school. Pounding out a story in two minutes and racing it over to the printing press. He always did his best work while under the gun. Deadline looming. He loved the chaos of big-city newspaper reporting. Unfortunately, he didn’t realize when he moved back to Bar Harbor to start his own paper that things never moved quite so quickly on the quiet coast of Maine. And this kind of tactic was not going to work on Hayley. Or was it?
Suddenly, after what seemed like an eternity, Hayley just started typing. She had to write something. And whatever came to mind was certainly better than a blank page. So she wrote. And kept writing. And before she knew it, she was writing the recipe. And then she was done.
Hayley read it over for typos and then e-mailed it to Sal. She could have made a big production of printing it out and delivering it in person, but she was too scared about his reaction. What if he hated it? She would just have to stand there as he read it, and then get screamed at for doing such a lousy job. But what if he actually liked it? What if her fears were dead wrong? She thought the column was kind of cute. Maybe he would find it charming. As it turned out, her first instinct was right.
“What the hell is this?” Sal hollered as he came bounding out of his office. Sal was a big guy, so the fact that he actually stood up from his desk and walked all the way out to the front office to yell at her meant he really, really hated it.
“I can’t print this!”
“Why not?”
“It’s all about your personal life. Where the hell are the recipes?”
“I include them at the end.”
“This isn’t supposed to be about you. Or your dog. You spend half the column talking about your dog, Leroy! This is a cooking column. For people who want to cook. Not read some precious diary entry.”
That’s when Sal’s fishing date, Bruce Linney, blew through the door.
Oh, great. Bruce. Just what Hayley needed.
Bruce was the crime reporter for the paper. Which meant he was only a part-time employee, because there wasn’t that much crime in Bar Harbor to cover. A lot of women in town found Bruce to be a stud. Especially when he would put on a Speedo to go biking around Eagle Lake shirtless. Women, including Liddy, would actually hike the six miles around the lake just to catch a glimpse of him zooming by on his mountain bike. He was muscular, with close-cropped brown hair, always with some stubble on his face, and a pair of puppy dog brown eyes that made a girl’s heart melt.
Hayley didn’t get the appeal.
I mean, sure he was good-looking
, she thought,
but then he would open his mouth
. It was like getting hit in the face with a bucket of cold water. And he loved the sound of his own voice.
Bruce believed he had the most important job at the paper, which Hayley found annoying. But mostly, she couldn’t stand the fact that the two of them had dated briefly in high school when he and Hayley had been paired as lab partners in biology. Hayley was terrible in science and when the class was surprised with a pop quiz, she didn’t know one answer, so she winged it and wrote down whatever came to mind. The teacher told them to exchange papers with their partners so they could each grade the other’s paper. When she got hers back, she had an A. Bruce had changed all her answers to the right ones so she wouldn’t fail.
Okay, not the most noble reason to fall in love, but fall she did. Hard. For about a week. Until she discovered he was dating three other girls, one in algebra, one in typing, one in drivers’ ed. And all of them scoring A’s on their pop quizzes.
Despite the death of their torrid affair (Hayley at least let him get to second base), there had been some lingering sexual tension between them ever since. Hayley insisted it was just indigestion. There was no way she could ever have feelings for Bruce Linney. Ever.
“Ready to go, Sal?” Bruce said, eyeing Hayley with a smile. “Looking good, babe.”
Hayley was too busy trying not to burst into tears over Sal’s horrible reaction to her column to acknowledge the compliment.
“I can’t go,” Sal said, sighing. “Hayley royally screwed up her first column and now I have to walk her through the basics of journalism.”
Bruce shook his head. “Why do you need a cooking column anyway? It just takes up space. You should’ve canceled it the second old lady what’s-her-name announced her retirement.”
“People like Hattie’s column, Bruce,” Hayley said, her cheeks burning with anger. “I get calls all the time from her fans.”
“Blue-haired ladies with nothing better to do,” Bruce sneered. “Has nothing to do with what’s really going on in the world.”
“Maybe people want to be entertained sometimes instead of getting hammered constantly by bad news,” Hayley said.
Bruce ignored her. “You should be focused more on hard news, Sal. Forget the fluff.”
“Hard news?” Hayley laughed. “Your last two
hard news
scoops were a stolen moped and a sting to arrest Mrs. Sheldon on Hancock Street for refusing to curb her Labradoodle.”
“A two hundred dollar fine is nothing to sneeze at, Hayley,” Bruce said proudly. “She won’t be messing up my lawn again.”
“You know the only reason Bruce is pushing for more crime reporting is so you’ll make him a full-time employee and he can finally get health benefits,” Hayley said.
“Don’t listen to her, Sal,” Bruce said. “One of these days something big is going to happen in this town, and you won’t have me around to cover it. Now, are we going fishing or what?”
Sal furrowed his brow, debating with himself.
“Come on,” Bruce said. “Just print what she wrote. It’s one column. If you get a complaint, then it will be cause to celebrate. That means one person read it.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Sal said. “It’s not like one bad column will stink up the whole paper.”
“In case you two have forgotten,” Hayley said, glaring at the two of them, “I’m sitting right here.”
“Okay, Hayley, you win,” Sal said, putting on his Red Sox baseball cap and grabbing a fishing pole from the hall closet. “We’ll run it as written, but I want it buried in the back of the issue. And from now on you write recipes. And only recipes. Plain and simple. Got that?”
“Yes, fine,” Hayley said, feeling like a complete and utter failure.
Despite her fantasies of becoming the Maureen Dowd of Down East Maine, it was becoming painfully clear that Hayley’s career as a newspaper columnist was going to be astonishingly short-lived.
Island Food & Spirits
 
by Hayley Powell
 
 
 
First of all, for those of you who haven’t heard the news yet, I would like to announce that our own Food & Wine columnist, Ms. Hattie Jenkins, is retiring after many wonderful years of writing mouthwatering recipes for all us lucky island residents. Good luck, Hattie! It will be truly hard following in your footsteps, but I will try my best!
So last night after I got home from work, I was in my kitchen trying to unwind, which I’d like to add here is not always the case when my Shih Tzu Leroy is barking at every passing dog out the open window and I’m yelling at him, “This is why you don’t have any friends!” I honestly think I’ve seen some of the dog owners roll their eyes as they walk past our house.
Anyway, now I’ve got to come up with another idea for dinner. And it’s not easy when you have kids with completely different tastes in food—one won’t eat anything but pasta and the other has a more sophisticated palate. And she’s the one who will be coming home within the hour from soccer practice demanding a time check on when her dinner will be ready because she is absolutely starving! It’s a lot of pressure for one single working mother to take.
So to relax and regroup, I made myself a great Lemon Drop Martini, which I tried for the first time with my friends the other day after work at the Drinks Like A Fish bar right here in town, and let me tell you, I ran right out and bought a martini shaker and glasses because this is my new favorite beverage. I’ll share the recipe with you later on.
Anyway, as I was still trying to come up with a dinner idea for my two hungry teens and enjoying my second martini (and let me say once again these are really wonderful drinks!), I happened to hear on my police scanner that four visitors from “out of state” were in distress and very sick at the Jordan Pond House, our lovely tea and popover restaurant in the heart of Acadia National Park. They had made their way there after coming out of the woods where they had been picking and eating wild mushrooms. Who on earth from “away” would actually come here and try to eat wild mushrooms unless they knew something about them?
I must admit I should have felt sorry for them, but it gave me a good chuckle for the night as I sipped on my Lemon Drop. Oh, and in case you were wondering, all of them survived, but won’t be straying too far from their RV toilet anytime soon.
It struck me that for my first recipe this week, I have a great crab stuffed mushroom appetizer recipe to share with you! The perfect starter for any New England dinner party. And many thanks to the four people from away for helping me come up with this idea for my first recipe column! So enjoy your Lemon Drop Martini with this tasty appetizer. And remember, don’t go looking for your mushrooms out in the woods. It’s easier and safer to just pick some up at our local supermarket.
Lemon Drop Martini
 
Three parts vodka to one part simple syrup (equal amounts of sugar and water dissolved together by simmering briefly) and one part lemon juice; fresh is best but not necessary. Simmer lemon rind in with the simple syrup, or use ginger or whatever to add flavor. So if you use 1 cup of vodka, you would add
cup of lemon juice and
cup simple syrup (I always go a bit lighter on the simple syrup because I like a tart flavor).
Maine Crab Stuffed Mushrooms
 
8 Tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter
1 small onion, minced
1 clove garlic, minced
2 pounds large mushrooms, stems removed and chopped (buy them from your local store)
¼ cup dry sherry
½ stack Ritz crackers, crushed
1 Tablespoon minced parsley
½ pound fresh Maine crabmeat
Freshly ground pepper and salt to taste
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese
Heat oven to 350.
Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the onion, garlic, and chopped mushroom stems. Sauté until the onions are transparent. Add the sherry and cook for 2 minutes more. Remove from the heat and add the cracker crumbs and parsley. Fold in the crabmeat. Add salt and pepper to taste. Mound the crabmeat mixture onto each mushroom cap and top with a bit of Parmesan cheese. Bake until the cheese turns golden and the mushrooms are cooked through, about 15 minutes. Serve warm.
 

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