The Candy Cane Cupcake Killer (28 page)

Potato Soup

Ingredients

1 pound bacon, chopped

1 onion, chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

8 Russet potatoes, peeled and cubed

4 cups chicken stock, or enough to cover the potatoes

3 tablespoons butter

¼ cup all-purpose flour

1 cup heavy cream

Salt and ground white pepper to taste

1 cup cheddar cheese, shredded

1 cup green onions, chopped

Directions

In a Dutch oven, cook the bacon over medium heat until crispy. Remove the bacon from the pot, and set aside. Drain off all but ¼ cup of the bacon fat.

In the bacon fat remaining in the pot, sauté the onion until it begins to turn translucent. Add the garlic, and continue cooking for 1 to 2 minutes. Add the potatoes and toss to coat. Sauté for 3 to 4 minutes. Return half of the bacon to the pan, and add enough chicken stock to just cover the potatoes. Cover, and simmer until the potatoes are tender.

In a separate pan, melt the butter over medium heat. Whisk in the flour. Cook, stirring constantly, for 1 to 2 minutes. Whisk in the cream. Bring the mixture to a boil and cook, stirring constantly,
until thickened. Stir the cream mixture into the potato mixture. Using a potato masher, mash the ingredients 5 times. Taste, and add salt and pepper if needed. Most store-bought stock has a lot of salt, so you really need to taste before adding salt.

Spoon the soup into bowls and top each with the remaining bacon, the cheddar cheese, and the green onions.

Serves 8.

Hot Ham and Cheese Sliders

Ingredients

¼ cup melted butter

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

1 clove garlic, minced

12 sweet dinner rolls

½ pound thinly sliced cooked deli ham

½ pound thinly sliced smoked provolone cheese

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 9-by-13-inch baking dish.

In a bowl, mix together the butter, Dijon mustard, Worcestershire sauce, and garlic.

Separate the tops from bottoms of the rolls, and place the bottom pieces, insides facing up, in the prepared baking dish. Layer the ham onto the rolls. Arrange the cheese over the ham. Place the tops of the rolls onto the sandwiches. Pour the mustard mixture evenly over the rolls.

Bake until the rolls are lightly browned and the cheese has melted, about 20 minutes. Slice into individual rolls, through the ham and cheese layers, to serve.

Makes 12 sliders.

Baked Meatballs

Ingredients

2 pounds lean ground beef

1 cup Italian-style bread crumbs

½ cup milk

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

1 teaspoon pepper

1 small onion, finely chopped (about ¼ cup)

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 eggs

Directions

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Spray two 9-by-13-inch pans with cooking spray.

In a large bowl, mix all the ingredients lightly; don't overwork. Shape into 40 to 48 1½-inch meatballs. Place 1 inch apart on the pan. Bake, uncovered, for 18 to 22 minutes, or until no longer pink in the center.

Serve with your favorite sauce on pasta.

Serves 8 with pasta.

Grilled Chicken and Spinach Salad

Ingredients

4 (6-ounce) skinless, boneless grilled chicken breast halves, sliced

1 bag baby spinach, washed and dried

¹
/
₃
cup sweetened dried cranberries

¼ cup chopped pecans, toasted

3 green onions, thinly sliced

4 tablespoons olive oil

2 teaspoons fresh lime juice

1 teaspoon sugar

Directions

In a large bowl, toss the chicken, spinach, cranberries, pecans, and green onions.

In a small bowl, combine the olive oil, lime juice, and sugar; stir well. Add the oil mixture to the chicken mixture; toss to coat.

Serves 4.

Read on for an excerpt from another Fresh-Baked Mystery from Livia J. Washburn,

A Peach of a Murder

Available now from Obsidian

T
he smell of peaches filled the air, sweet but with a particular bite all its own. Warm sunshine flooded the orchard. Later, the sun would be hot, oppressively so, but now, in the early morning, basking in its glow was like luxuriating in a warm bath. The peach smell could have come from a scented candle, but was instead the real thing, which made it even better, Phyllis Newsom thought.

Balanced on a wooden ladder, wearing blue jeans and one of her late husband's shirts, with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, she reached up carefully into the tree and took hold of a particularly nice-looking peach. With just a little tug, the fruit came loose from its stem. Phyllis turned and handed it down to Mattie Harris, who was helping her fill the bushel basket that sat on the ground.

Mattie was a sight. Somewhere between eighty-five and ninety, which made her approximately twenty years older than Phyllis, Mattie was still as spry and nimble as a bird. She wore
a dress covered with a bright flower print that was even more brilliant in the sunlight, and a straw hat with a huge brim that shaded her face. Like Phyllis, she wore gloves to protect her hands, which could get pretty scratched up from the tree branches while picking, not to mention itchy from the peach fuzz.

“I remember when this orchard was just a sorghum field,” Mattie said, tilting her head back so that she could look up at Phyllis on the ladder. “That was before Newt Bishop got the bright idea of growing peaches. Land's sakes, everybody else in Parker County was doing it already, but Newt was always slow to catch on. I remember a time . . .”

Phyllis knew it was rude, but she tuned out Mattie's reminiscences and searched the tree for the next peach she wanted to pick. Mattie remembered all about the Depression and World War II and working at the bomber plant over at Fort Worth. She had an endless supply of stories about those days. Phyllis had been born just before the war started, but she didn't remember it, of course. She had been too young. As a history teacher—a retired history teacher now—she had a vested interest in the past, and most of the time she really enjoyed listening to Mattie's stories. This morning, though, she was thinking about the upcoming Parker County Peach Festival and trying to come up with a recipe for the cooking contest.

Everybody knew that Parker County peaches were the best peaches in Texas—and, therefore, the best in the world—and every summer the peach festival was the biggest thing in the county seat, Weatherford. The State Fair in Dallas was bigger, of course, and the Stock Show rodeo in Fort Worth was
bigger than the Sheriff's Posse Rodeo, held in conjunction with the peach festival, but those events lacked the small-town charm of the celebration in Weatherford.

Half of the courthouse square in downtown was blocked off and surrounded by portable fences, as were some of the side streets off the square, and into that area were packed dozens of booths showing off the best arts and crafts and food that the county had to offer. Two stages were set up, for musical entertainment at various times during the day. Whenever a live band wasn't playing, recorded music blared from large speakers. There was a kids' area, filled with games and rides, puppet shows and face-painting booths. A little bit of something for everybody, and during the day of the festival, it was almost possible to forget that Weatherford was part of a much bigger, not-so-nice world. There was nothing like eating cotton candy and homemade ice cream, listening to a high school band, and strolling through a display of homemade quilts to make it seem as if time had stood still, as if Weatherford had indeed somehow gone back to a slower, gentler era.

The high point of the festival, at least for Phyllis, was the cooking contest. Everything revolved around peaches, of course. Peach cobbler, peach pie, peach ice cream, peach preserves . . . If there was any way to work peaches into a recipe, somebody was bound to try it. And at the climax of the festival, a winner would be named by a panel of judges. There was a blue ribbon, of course, just a little thing made by the local trophy shop that read
BEST PEACH RECIPE—PARKER CO
UNTY PEACH FESTIVAL
, with the year printed on it.

Phyllis wanted that ribbon. She told herself it wasn't because Carolyn Wilbarger had won it the past two years
while Phyllis's recipes had finished fifth and second, respectively. She just wanted to be recognized for the good work she'd done.

But if that involved beating Carolyn, then so much the better.

Phyllis picked another peach and turned to hand it down to Mattie. As she did so, she saw a burly figure strolling toward them along the row of peach trees. Phyllis had often heard someone described as being “about as wide as he is tall,” but Newt Bishop came as close to actually fitting that description as anyone she had ever seen. Despite the fact that it was summer, Newt wore a greasy, stained pair of overalls and a long-sleeved white shirt. An old-fashioned fedora was on his head. Phyllis had never seen him in any other clothes. She knew he even wore them to church, when he went to church.

Newt stopped and turned his round, sunburned, jowly face up toward Phyllis. “You findin' some good ones, Miz Newsom?” he asked in a thick, rumbling voice.

“Yes, thank you, Mr. Bishop. It looks like you have a good crop this year.”

“Ought to. Worked hard enough on it. You ladies need 'nother basket?”

Phyllis thought about it for a second. The peach festival was still a couple of weeks away, which meant she had time to experiment. She was thinking about trying a peach cobbler, but she wanted to give it some added spice. She wondered how it would taste with a little jalapeño pepper, but even if that worked out, it might take several tries before everything was just perfect. That might take all of one bushel, and it would be nice to freeze some this year. Store-bought frozen peaches
were good, but home-prepared Parker County peaches were better.

“Yes, I believe I will get another bushel,” she told the farmer.

“I'll have the boy bring a basket down from the barn.” Newt tugged on the brim of his fedora. “Ladies.”

He moved on, probably bound for the part of the orchard where Carolyn was picking her peaches with the help of Eve Turner. Newt was always trying to sell just a little bit more. He would probably tell Carolyn that Phyllis was buying a second bushel of peaches, in hopes that Carolyn would feel that she had to have another basketful, too.

He grew some really fine peaches, though.

Phyllis looked down at Mattie. “Didn't you have Newt's boy in your class once?”

“Darryl,” Mattie said with a nod. “Yes, he was a very sweet little boy. I never saw Newt at school, though, except at Open House. Parents didn't have as much to do with the schools then as they do now, especially the fathers.”

“Yes, I know. I haven't been retired all that long.”

“But you taught junior high,” Mattie pointed out. “When I substitute in the elementary schools these days, there are sheets stuck up all over the classroom for the parents to sign up for this and sign up for that, to go on this field trip and provide refreshments for that class party, to volunteer for this and that. In
my
day, that classroom was my domain, you could say, and I'd just as soon the parents kept their noses out and let me get on about my job. From eight thirty in the morning to three thirty in the afternoon, those were my kids. They didn't belong to the parents during that time.”

Phyllis was old enough to understand Mattie's attitude, even though she knew perfectly well it wouldn't fly in today's modern classroom. She had come out here to pick peaches, not to discuss changing theories in education. She reached for another plump fruit hanging from the branch just above her head.

The slamming of a car door made her look toward the Bishop farmhouse and the barn, about three hundred yards away. She saw that a pickup had pulled up in front of the barn. A man stood next to it, talking to Newt Bishop, who had circled through the orchard and returned to the barn by now. Phyllis recognized Newt by his clothes and his barrel-like shape. She had no idea who the other man was, only that he was younger, taller, and leaner.

And perhaps angry, to judge by the way he waved his arms around as he talked to Newt. It was none of Phyllis's business, of course.

A boy about ten years old came trotting through the orchard, carrying a couple of bushel baskets woven out of wicker. He stopped and set one on the ground next to Mattie's feet. “My granddad said you ladies needed another basket,” he announced.

“That's right,” Phyllis said from the ladder.

Mattie looked down at the boy. “Lord have mercy! Darryl?”

He grinned. “No, ma'am. Darryl's my daddy. I'm Justin. I'm workin' here this summer, helpin' out my granddad.”

“Well, that's mighty nice of you. Do you like it?”

The smile abruptly disappeared from Justin Bishop's face. He shrugged. “I guess so. It's work. I'm tryin' to earn enough
money to buy me a copy of
Scorpion Clone Blaster Four: Armageddon Fever
.”

Mattie patted him on the head. “Son, I don't have the foggiest notion what you're talking about.”

“It's a game, this really cool video game, about these giant scorpion clones from Mars, and you gotta blast 'em before they can sting you and suck your guts out—”

“Boy!” Newt called from the end of the row. “You get that basket on down to Miz Wilbarger and Miz Turner, you hear?”

“Yeah, Granddad, I hear,” Justin called back. “I gotta go,” he said to Phyllis and Mattie, then trotted off carrying the other basket.

“Those video games,” Mattie said with a shudder. “I never heard of such.”

Newt wandered back toward the barn and went inside. His visitor, whomever he'd been, was gone now, Phyllis saw. The pickup had driven off, leaving a slowly settling haze of dust over the dirt road that led from the farmhouse to the highway.

Mattie said, “I need to go visit the little girls' room. You be all right here by yourself for a little while, Phyllis?”

“Go right ahead,” Phyllis told her. “I'll be fine.”

That meant she would have to climb up and down the ladder more often, Phyllis thought, but the exercise wouldn't hurt her. It was a beautiful day, and she got caught up in trying to pick out the best peaches, considering each one carefully before she plucked it off the tree. Her attention strayed to the farmhouse and the barn only occasionally, just enough for her to notice that several more vehicles came and went while she was busy. Probably some of her competition coming to buy
peaches from Newt Bishop, she thought. Judging by the way the last one left in such a hurry, peeling out in the gravel in front of the barn, she was eager to get to her stove and start cooking.

Justin Bishop, having delivered the bushel basket to Carolyn and Eve, ran up and down the orchard rows with the boundless energy of the young. Phyllis sometimes wished she still had that much energy, but at the same time she figured if she did, it might kill her. Mattie came back from the farmhouse and started taking the peaches that Phyllis handed down to her, placing them carefully in the wicker basket so they wouldn't bruise. A couple of jets flew overhead, probably bound for the Joint Reserve Base on the west side of Fort Worth, some twenty miles away. Even higher in the sky, big passenger planes droned along, taking off and landing from the Dallas–Fort Worth airport. Out here in the middle of the orchard, however, it was easy to forget there even were such things as jet planes and video games and cell phones and satellite TV. Out here there was only warm sunshine and leafy trees and the sweet smell of peaches . . .

Somewhere, somebody started screaming.

Phyllis stiffened as she listened. It sounded like Justin screaming, but Phyllis couldn't tell if he was hurt or scared. At the foot of the ladder, Mattie exclaimed, “Land's sakes, what's that?”

Phyllis descended quickly to the ground. “I think it's coming from the barn.”

She started along the row of trees, breaking into a trot as the screaming continued. Mattie followed, trying to keep up, but Phyllis was younger, taller, and had longer legs. She jogged
a couple of times a week, too, in an attempt to stay in decent shape.

As she neared the barn, Phyllis could tell for sure that the screams came from inside the old, cavernous structure. The doors were open, and as she ran inside, going from bright sunshine into shadow, she was blinded for a second as her eyes tried to adjust. “Justin!” she called. “Justin, what's wrong?”

“Granddad!” the boy cried. “Granddad!”

Phyllis could see a little better now. Justin stood beside a large, heavy thirty-year-old car that was more like a tank than an automobile. Newt Bishop had been driving that big car ever since it was brand-new, at least when he went into town. Like everybody else, he had a pickup for work around the farm.

As Phyllis's eyesight sharpened even more, she spotted an old-fashioned bumper jack lying on its side at the front of the car. Stepping in that direction, she peered around the vast hood with its upthrust ornament at the prow. Her hand went to her mouth in horror as she saw the overall-clad legs sticking out from under the car.

Newt Bishop was a large man. Almost as wide as he was tall, Phyllis thought again. And as she forced herself to bend over and look under the car, she knew what she was going to see: the same thing that had made Justin scream and now cry in sniffles and ragged sobs. The bulging eyes, wide and glassy. The trickle of blood from the corner of the mouth. The arms fallen loosely to the side when the attempt to hold up the awful weight had failed.

When that big old car had slipped off the jack and fallen, it had crushed the life itself out of Newt Bishop.