Trouble's Brewing (30 page)
1½ teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon sugar
2 cups water
7-ounce package spaghetti
3 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese (optional)
Brown ground beef in Dutch oven over medium high heat until brown. Remove fat. Stir in minced onion, tomato sauce, and spaghetti sauce. Add salt, sugar, water, and spaghetti (uncooked). Heat to boiling over medium high heat, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking. Cover and simmer over low heat about 15 minutes or until the spaghetti is tender. Remove from heat and stir. Sprinkle with grated Parmesan cheese before serving.
Serves 6.
Donna’s Cook’s Notes
Vonnie has made this dish for me since I was a little girl. I often stayed over with Vonnie and Fred when my daddy had the evening shift. Sometimes I would stand on a chair and help Vonnie stir in the ingredients. It always brings back warm and happy memories.
Orange Roughy with Tarragon
1 pound orange roughy fillets
¼ teaspoon salt
1½ to 2 tablespoons butter, melted
½ teaspoon snipped tarragon or ? teaspoon dried tarragon leaves
paprika
Place orange roughy fillets on greased rack in boiler pan; sprinkle with salt. Drizzle with butter; sprinkle with tarragon. Set oven to broil. Broil with tops about 4 inches from heat until fish flakes very easily with fork and is opaque in center, 5–6 minutes. Sprinkle with paprika. Serves 4.
Evangeline’s Cook’s Notes
Everyone in Summit View knows I hate to cook. Okay, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, so let me rephrase that. Everyone in the Potluck Club knows I hate to cook. So, for me, the simpler the better. That’s why, if I have to cook, I go for quick and simple. Like this recipe.
Red Velvet Punch
2 quarts cranberry juice
6 ounces orange juice concentrate
2 cups grape juice
2¾ cups lemon juice
3 cups pineapple juice
1 quart ginger ale, chilled
Mix together. Makes 12 cups of punch.
Lisa Leann’s Cook’s Notes
This quick and easy punch serves me well at weddings, baby showers, and even church potlucks. I make it several times a year. Come to think of it, I made it for Mandy’s wedding as well.
The authors
send a special, love-filled
thank-you
to our wonderful editors, Jeanette Thomason and Kristin Kornoelje. Without your help and encouragement and especially your wisdom and prayers, we would not have been able to pull this off!
Thank you! Thank you! And thank you to our exceptional recipe artists: Connie Salmen, Barb McCauley, Betty Purvis, and Gayle Scheff. Write on, ladies!
Also a special thanks to the women of AWSA (Advanced Writers and Speakers Association). We’ve appreciated your love and prayers as we wrote our second Potluck book. You ladies rock, and it’s a privilege to be a part of your lives.
Linda writes:
A special thanks to my family, Paul, Jimmy, and Laura, for your patience, love, and support. I am so blessed by having you all in my life.
Another shout-out to the women in ministry who subscribe to the Right to the Heart of Women electronic magazine. You’ve not only become readers, you’ve become friends. I so appreciate the work you do in your church and communities.
And again, a big thanks to my dear friend Eva. We’ve laughed, cried, and prayed our way through this manuscript. You are a true friend.
Eva writes:
Thank you to my husband, who releases me into the cold tundra of Colorado every year for the writing escapades Linda and I manage to get ourselves into. Thank you to my dear family and friends (especially my Bible study group!) who have prayed me through some tough times this year. You da best!
And, of course, thank you to my coauthor and friend, Linda “E.S.” There were days (and nights) I could not have gotten through this year without your love, encouragement, prayers, and snoring. (Okay, heavy breathing …)
Linda Evans Shepherd
has turned the “pits” of her life into stepping stones following a violent car crash that left her then-infant daughter in a yearlong coma and permanently disabled (see LindaAndLaura. com).
Linda is the president of Right to the Heart Ministries and is also an international speaker (see ShepPro.com), radio host of the nationally syndicated Right to the Heart radio, occasional television host of Daystar’s Denver Celebration, the founder and leader of Advanced Writers and Speakers Association (see AWSAWomen. com), and the publisher of Right to the Heart of Women ezine (see RightToTheHeartOfWomen.com), which goes to more than ten thousand women leaders of the church.
She’s been married twenty-six years to Paul and has two teenagers, Laura and Jimmy.
Linda has written more than eighteen books, including
Intimate Moments with God
(coauthored with Eva Marie Everson),
Tangled Heart: A Mystery Devotional
,
Grief Relief
, and
Right to the Heart of Prayer
.
Award-winning author and speaker
Eva Marie Everson
is a Southern girl who’s not that crazy about being in the kitchen unless she’s being called to eat some of her mama’s or daddy’s cooking. She is married About the Authors to a wonderful man, Dennis, and is a mother and grandmother to the most precious children in the world.
Eva’s writing career and ministry began in 1999 when a friend asked her what she’d want to do for the Lord, if she could do anything. “Write and speak,” she said. And so it began.
Since that time, she has written, co-written, contributed to, and edited and compiled a number of works, including
Sex, Lies, and the Media
and
Sex, Lies, and High School
(co-written with her daughter, Jessica). She is a Right to the Heart board member and a member of a number of other organizations, and is a mentor with Christian Writers Guild.
A graduate of Andersonville Theological Seminary, she speaks nationally, drawing others to the heart of God. In 2002, she was one of six journalists chosen to visit Israel. She was forever changed.
To read more about the authors or to find additional recipes, visit
www.PotLuckClub.com
at the Next Adventure of the Potluck Club
Some days you’d just as soon wish away. Turn back the hands of time. Jump into bed, pull the covers over your head, and pretend they never happened. Such was this day.
It’s not that I haven’t had bad days before. The good Lord knows I’ve had some pretty bad ones. You can’t be married to an unfaithful man for nearly thirty years and come away unscathed.
But this one … this one was the worst of all. This one was such a slap in the face; I thought I’d never recover. What had started out as a cold and crisp December morning touched with a hint of promise, followed by an evening of dining and laughter with one of my best girlfriends, had turned into a night filled with despair.
Despair and anger.
Fury.
Remorse.
Oh, why did I ever say I’d go away for a weekend with my estranged husband, Lord? What in the world was I thinking?
“Charlene Hopefield is out of your life
,” Lizzie had said.
But she wasn’t. Isn’t. Not by a long shot.
Lizzie hadn’t been gone five minutes when my doorbell rang. I’d already stepped into the small bath adjoining my bedroom and begun to scrub my face when I heard the gentle chime. Grabbing A Sneak Peek a hand towel, I patted my face dry as I moved toward the front of the condo, calling out, “I’m coming.”
When I got to the front door, I switched on the porch light and peeked out the peephole. The hair on the back of my neck stood straight on end. It was Charlene Hopefield.
No store to walk out of or street to cross,
I thought as I drew back.
“What do you want?” I called through the closed door. I peeked through the hole again.
She wrapped her arms around herself as though she were freezing to death. “Goldie, I need to talk to you. Please. It’s very important.”
I stared at her for a long moment. What in the world did that woman think she had to say that would be of any interest to me?
“My name—as far as you’re concerned—is Mrs. Dippel.”
I watched her roll her eyes. Even in the dim overhead porch light, her disdain for me was evident. “Whatever. I need to speak with you. It’s important. I’m being nice here. Nice enough to come to you instead of going over to Jack’s and talking to him.”
I flipped the lock and jerked the door open. “You stay away from my husband,” I said.
She just stared at me. “May I come in or not?”
I stepped aside. “May as well.” I looked down at her snowcovered boots. “But wipe your feet; I don’t need your slushy mess on my carpet.”
Charlene pounded her feet on the front mat for a few moments, then looked back up at me. “Will that do?” she asked, arching an eyebrow.
Cocky little thing.
“I guess.”
She stepped over my threshold, pulling her long dark wool coat from her somewhat pudgy body. She held it toward me, as though she actually expected me to take it, then threw it across the chair behind her. “Is that coffee I smell?” she asked. “Decaf? Because I can’t have regular.”
“It’s stale,” I answered, crossing my arms over my middle. “What do you want, Charlene?”
She turned toward the sofa and extended her arm a bit. “May I?” she asked.
I arched my brow. “May you what?”
“Sit? I’m exhausted,” she said, sitting in spite of the fact I hadn’t invited her to do so. “Not to mention I’ve been waiting across the street for your friend to leave. My gosh, what do you people have to talk about so long? My back end was going numb from sitting in my car that whole time.” She paused. “Please sit, Goldie.”
I coughed out a snicker. “I beg your pardon? I’ll decide when or if I sit down. This is
my
home.”
She nodded, looking around. “So it is. It’s … nice. Certainly not the home you left, but it’s … nice.”
On that note, I sat in the nearest chair, one I’d picked up cheap at a thrift store down on Dyer Street. “You know nothing about my home.”
She slid herself back on the sofa like a plump goddess, crossing one leg over the other. “Oh, Goldie, Goldie, Goldie.” She laughed, sounding more like a cat than a woman. “Silly, silly Goldie.”
I flushed red with a mixture of anger and embarrassment. If Jack had brought that woman into my home, he could take her and Summit Ridge and all the years we had between us and choke on them as far as I was concerned.
“I hear you’re going away for the weekend,” she purred. When the question she clearly expected from me flashed in color on my face, she answered without my saying a word. “Oh, you know. One person tells one person, and that person tells another. Eventually, it got to me. Summit Ridge, I understand?” I raised my chin before she went on. “Quaint. Not anywhere I’d want to be—least not with Jack—but for the two of you … well, I suppose it could be … quaint. Anyway,” she said, stretching and draping her arms around her knees, “that’s not why I’m here. I’m here because we have a bit of a problem.”
“I can’t imagine what,” I said. “You are no longer a part of my husband’s life and therefore no longer a part of mine.” My heart began to pound as though it knew that life as I’d known it not ten minutes earlier was about to change forever.
