We were desperate for pancakes so I tweaked another recipe I was working on to make these. < Back Gluten-Free Pancakes January 24, 2021 Prep Time: 10 Minutes Cook Time: 20 Minutes Serves: 10 Pancakes Tags: Muffins and Breads, Gluten Free, Baking, Breakfast About the Recipe Ingredients 1 cup gluten-free flour 1 cup almond flour 1 tsp baking soda ½ tsp baking powder ½ tsp cinnamon 2 eggs 1 cup plain kefir or yogurt 1 cup water 1/3 cup canola oil 1 TBSP unfiltered apple cider vinegar 1 tsp pure vanilla extract Preparation In a medium bowl, stir together the dry ingredients. Mix the wet ingredients together in a smaller bowl and pour wet ingredients into drive ingredients. Stir just until blended. Heat a large baking pan to medium high. Scoop a large spoonful of batter (it’s thicker than usual pancake batter), three or four at a time. Flip when bubbles form and bottom is golden brown. Place finished pancakes on a serving plate and cover lightly with a tea towel until all the pancakes are ready. We love eating them with Earth Balance and real maple syrup. Note: there is no sugar added to the batter. Previous Next

A sweeping picture of family trauma, Native American and Black history, and the earth’s vengeance on human pettiness. A retired colonel’s wife dies, leaving him alone in a snooty North Carolina senior community. Reba, an elderly Black woman who speaks to the ghosts of her family, takes in the white child whose father killed her beloved niece. The colonel mistakenly causes damage to Reba’s old car and unleashes a torrent of spirits, while his son guards the bones that have been unearthed in what was once “Indian Field.” This is a stunning debut about race relations, land use, history, and memory. < Back Indigo Field Marjorie Hudson October 24, 2023 Indigo Field by Marjorie Hudson (Regal House Publishing 2023) paints a sweeping picture of multigenerational family trauma, Native American and Black history, and the earth’s vengeance on human pettiness. A retired colonel is stunned when his wife dies, leaving him stranded in the fancy, rural North Carolina retirement community he’d hated from the start. The community is located next to an abandoned field that hides centuries of crimes. The only person who remembers is Reba, an elderly Black woman who speaks to the ghosts of her entire family. Reba takes in the white child whose evil father killed her beloved niece, whom she doesn’t want to disappoint. The colonel mistakenly causes damage to Reba’s old car and unleashes a torrent of spirits, while the colonel’s son guards bones that have been unearthed in what was once “Indian Field.” This is a stunning debut in which North Carolina race relations, land use and ancient trees, farming and development, history and memory are all uprooted during a massive storm. Marjorie Hudson was born in a small town in Illinois, raised in Washington, D.C., and now lives in rural North Carolina. Her new novel Indigo Field explores the untold stories of the people and history of the rural South, hidden under the surface of an abandoned field. Her story collection Accidental Birds of the Carolinas was shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Novello Fiction Award. Her creative nonfiction book Searching for Virginia Dare explores the fate of the first English child born in America. Hudson’s stories, essays, and poems have appeared in six anthologies, including Idol Talk: Women Writers on the Teenage Infatuations That Changed Their Lives , and What Doesn’t Kill You (stories) as well as in many magazines and journals, including Story , West Branch, Yankee , American Land Forum , and National Parks Magazine . She writes on topics ranging from pond fishing to Sufi dancing, from extraordinary dogs to English explorers, from Indigenous history to the life of the monarch butterfly. Her work has won support from the Hemingway Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, Headlands Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook Retreat for Women Writers, and the North Carolina Arts Council, as well as earning the Blumenthal Award, a North Carolina Fiction Syndicate Award, and two Pushcart Special Mentions. A community-builder in Chatham County, NC, she has created two ambitious community reads, run a coffeehouse for artists and writers, been a mentor for at-risk children, served on the board of her local arts council, the board of the Black Historical Society, and the Board of the Haw River Assembly, serving as volunteer crew for an ambitious river festival. In addition, Hudson is known for educating her community about the life and work of enslaved poet George Moses Horton. She teaches creative writing through conferences, universities, and her own Kitchen Table Workshops, ongoing since 2009.Hudson lives on a family farm in Chatham County, North Carolina, with her husband, Sam, her small feisty terrier DJ Calhoun, and a community of wild birds. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

A Whipped and Sipped Mystery: Book 1 < Back Available from these sellers Click on the icon below to purchase a copy today When Whipped and Sipped Café proprietor Alene Baron finds a dead body next door, she calls the police and dashes home — to make soup for her family. Alene is 38 and divorced, living in a Chicago high rise with her father and children. She wonders if the murderer is an ex-spouse, a neighbor, or one of her employees. Then someone batters two more people who are connected to the café. There’s another mystery, closer to Alene’s heart: Is the lead detective going to take her seriously? Battered A Whipped and Sipped Mystery: Book 1 Previous Next

Today I talked to Esinam Bediako about here novel Blood on the Brain (Red Hen Press, 2024). < Back Blood on the Brain Esinam Bediako October 8, 2024 When Akosua, a 24-year-old grad student in New York, falls and bangs her head, she has too much drama in her life to pay attention to her headaches and exhaustion. She’s just broken up with Wisdom, her boyfriend, she learns that her long-estranged Ghanian father is in New York, and she’s worried that dropping so many graduate classes means that she’ll lose her scholarship and work-study job in the library (where she met Daniel, her new crush). As she grapples with her Ghanian-American identity, her mother’s wishes for her, her troubled relationship with the father who left when she was a child, and her coursework, Akosua’s head injury worsens, and she wakes up in the hospital, forced to confront her own history, memory, dreams, and desires. Esinam Bediako is a Ghanaian American writer from Detroit. She writes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, including awkward third-person autobiographies. A graduate of University of Southern California (M.A.T. in Secondary English), Sarah Lawrence College (M.F.A. in Fiction), and Columbia University (B.A. in English and Comparative Literature), she has worked as a high school English teacher and administrator, a textbook editor, and, during one nerve-wracking summer, a pharmacy technician. She currently writes and edits for the Spondylitis Association of America. She is the author of the Ann Petry Award-winning novel, Blood on the Brain (Red Hen Press, 2024), as well as the essay/poetry chapbook, Self-Talk (Porkbelly Press, 2024) and you can find some of her recent work in Porter House Review, Cathexis Northwest press, Great River Review, North American Review, and Southern Humanities Review. Esi lives in Claremont, CA with her husband and their two sons, who create stories, videos, and other artwork with enviable speed and imagination. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Georgette Heyer: Mysteries < Back Georgette Heyer Author of various mystery novels August 1, 2019 One of my literary heroes is Georgette Heyer (London 1902 – 1974), who never appeared in public or gave an interview. She was a bestselling author for over fifty years without spending a single minute building a social media presence when she could have been writing. Maybe if I’m jealous, I should just sit down and write excellent books, at least one every year, that people will continue to read a half century after I’m gone. She wrote her first book at seventeen, and it is still selling, but she was known to be extremely private. When someone would ask about herself, Heyer would refer the person to her books, and most of what is known about her comes from her correspondence ( I skimmed through her bio). She was known for her romances and is considered by some to be the inventor of the Regency Romance genre (which inspired Jane Austen, among others). There was a period of many years during which she wrote one romance and one thriller every year, but I am particularly interested in her Country House, Inspector Hemingway, and Inspector Hannasyde mysteries (12 in all). They are terribly droll and describe period dress, behavior and standards in great detail. The first three (I look forward to reading through the rest) take place in 30’s London and evoke a bygone age of wealth and prestige. The nuances of visiting a manor house, dress, comportment, dining, and after-dinner entertainment are delightfully precise. Readers can almost see the characters coming to life in all their 30’s finery. In terms of Juicy Must-Read Mysteries, Georgette Heyer is pretty high on the list: Neville opened his eyes, and looked at her in undisguised horror. “Oh, my God, the girl thinks I did it!” “No, I don’t. I’ve got an open mind on the subject,” said Sally bluntly. “If you did it, you must have had a darned good reason, and you have my vote.” “Have I?” Neville said, awed. “And what about my second victim?” “As I see it,” replied Sally, “the second victim — we won’t call him yours just yet — knew too much about the first murder, and had to be disposed of. Unfortunate, of course, but, given the first murder, I quite see it was inevitable.” A Blunt Instrument, Georgette Heyer Previous Next

Mosely Albright works in a Mission house helping drug addicts, alcoholics and those who are down on their luck. The reverend has asked him to search for one of the men who isn’t capable of surviving in the freezing cold. < Back Speed of Dark Patricia Ricketts July 5, 2022 Speed of Dark (She Writes Press, 2022) by Patricia Ricketts opens with a black man getting off Metra train in Northbrook, Illinois to search for someone who might be hiding in the woods. Mosely Albright works in a Mission house helping drug addicts, alcoholics and those who are down on their luck. The reverend has asked him to search for one of the men who isn’t capable of surviving in the freezing cold. The man he finds is a different one though, and he’s gone when Mosely wakes up, stiff and frozen the next morning. He’s forgotten the way back to the station and knocks on Mary M. Phillips’s door to ask for a glass of water and directions. Mosely has the gift of seeing when people need help, and he knows that Mary Em is desperate. He wants to help her, but the lake, (Mishigami – its Ojibwe name) wants her in its icy waters. Told by Mary Em, Mosely, and Mishigami, Speed of Dark is a story about human connection, the plight of the great lakes, and the power of kindness, friendship, and love. Patricia Ricketts inherited a lifelong love of music, the written word, the visual arts, and healthy arguing from her Irish Catholic household. While teaching English to many wonderful students, Patricia raised two fine daughters and a stand-up son and now has six beautiful grandchildren who live in the Kansas City area. Throughout her life, she penned essays, short stories, poems, and novels; however, her passion for writing escalated after being awarded a scholarship for creative writing from the University of Edinburgh. Since then, she has had short stories published in New Directions, Slate, Meta, Blue Hour, Realize Magazines, and on NPR’s “This I Believe” website. The Peninsula Pulse awarded her third place among hundreds of entries in its short story contest. She is currently working on a new novel, tentatively titled The End of June. Patricia lives in Chicago with her partner, artist and photographer, Peter M. Hurley. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Starting in Jamaica, the stories shift back and forth in time and place, from Europe to Chicago to Door County, Wisconsin. We follow Greta’s emotional journey, spiritual longings, and religious awakening as she survives the complexities of a full life. < Back Side by Side but Never Face to Face Maggie Kast July 1, 2020 During the first few stories, we think the book centers on Manfred, an Austrian Holocaust survivor whose parents converted out of Judaism to save him from centuries of oppression. He and his third wife, Greta, are forced to mourn the accidental death of their youngest child, a trauma that affects them deeply but differently. Only after several stories focused on Manfred’s upbringing and young adulthood do we realize that the protagonist is his wife and then widow, Greta. Starting in Jamaica, the stories shift back and forth in time and place, from Europe to Chicago to Door County, Wisconsin. We follow Greta’s emotional journey, spiritual longings, and religious awakening as she survives the complexities of a full life. Today I talked to Maggie Kast about her new book Side by Side but Never Face to Face: A Novella and Stories (Orison Books, 2020) Kast received an M.F.A. in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has published fiction in The Sun, Nimrod, Rosebud, Paper Street and others. A chapter of her memoir, published in ACM/Another Chicago Magazine , won a Literary Award from the Illinois Arts Council. Her essays have appeared in America, Image, Writer’s Chronicle, and Superstition Review and have been anthologized in Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs (Beacon Press) and Gravity Pulls You In: Perspectives on Parenting Children on the Autism Spectrum (Woodbine House). Kast is a Board Member of Links Hall , an incubator and presenter of dance and performance art in Chicago. When not writing, Maggie loves cooking, and although she loves traditional midwestern food, also specialized in Viennese cuisine. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

What do you do when you want to cook something special and filling for breakfast that is packed with vegetables and doesn't need eggs? < Back Almond Zucchini Apple Fritters February 12, 2023 Prep Time: 10 minutes Cook Time: 15-20 minutes Serves: 4-5 Tags: About the Recipe I've got a zillion variations of the theme of fritters - try switching out vegetables or replacing apple with banana. Ingredients 1 cup almond flour, 1 grated apple ½ cup grated zucchini Optional: chopped sweet red peppers ½ cup olive oil 2 tsp baking powder, 1 tsp flax meal 1 tsp pure vanilla extract ¼ tsp salt Preparation Stir everything together in a bowl and let sit for 10 minutes. Heat a non-stick frying pan to medium. When hot, drop 1 Tablespoon size pancakes and turn when they start to bubble. Previous Next

In Everywhere You Don’t Belong (Algonquin Books, 2020), Gabriel Bump has created an unforgettable debut novel that will sometimes make you laugh, and sometimes pull at your gut. < Back Everywhere You Don’t Belong Gabriel Bump June 8, 2020 Abandoned by his parents and raised by a strong-willed grandmother and her live-in friend, Claude McKay Love just wants to have friends and fit in at school or on the playground. He faces all the usual hurdles of growing up, with the additional challenge of being black. And he lives in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, formerly home of both Michelle Obama and Kanye West. It’s packed with beautiful old homes and sits on the lakefront about 9 miles from downtown Chicago, but it was a food desert for a number of years and missed out on much of Chicago’s growth and expansion. Claude has to navigate past gangs, drug wars, and a riot in which seventy neighbors and friends are killed. He also falls in love. In Everywhere You Don’t Belong (Algonquin Books, 2020), Gabriel Bump has created an unforgettable debut novel that will sometimes make you laugh, and sometimes pull at your gut. Gabriel Bump grew up in South Shore, Chicago. His work has appeared in: McSweeney’s, Guernica, Electric Literature, SLAM , and elsewhere. Everywhere You Don’t Belong is his first novel. His second novel is forthcoming, also from Algonquin. He was awarded the 2016 Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award for Fiction and the 2015 Summer Literary Seminars Montreal Flash Fiction Prize. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. He currently lives in Buffalo, New York, where he teaches at Just Buffalo Literary Center and University at Buffalo. When he’s not writing or reading, Gabriel enjoys playing video games and starting, sometimes finishing, long boring history books. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Charles Finch: Charles Lynch Mysteries < Back Charles Finch Author of The Charles Lynch Mysteries February 14, 2022 Charles Finch is a literary critic and author. Born in 1980 (!!) in New York City, he was educated at Yale University and Merton College, Oxford. The first book in his Charles Lynch Mystery Series came out in 2007 and was nominated for an Agatha and chosen as one of Library Journal’s best books. Having loved six of these Charles Lynch novels, I’ve gotta say that I never expected to fall in love again, but I’d run off to England’s lake district with either of the Charleses. Finch gives a beautifully detailed portrayal of mid-nineteenth century England, and his writing is pitch perfect. Detective Charles Lynch is thoughtful, insightful, and competent, but he knows that he’s worth little without his wife, family, and friends. I just emerged from devouring The Last Passenger, and as usual, was immersed in the tiny details of Victorian society’s requirements, characters’ distinct personalities, and Lynch’s visits, meals, and meanderings. I wonder how much of himself the author put into his protagonist, the similarly named Charles Lynch. Charles Finch is on my list of authors-I’d-most-like-to-meet – and it turns out that he also lives in Chicago! Chronological list of Charles Lynch mysteries: A Beautiful Blue Death 2007 The September Society 2008 The Fleet Street Murders 2009 A Stranger in Mayfair 2010 A Burial at Sea 2011 A Death in the Small Hours 2012 An Old Betrayal 2013 The Laws of Murder 2014 Home By Nightfall 2015 The Inheritance 2016 Gone Before Christmas 2017 The Woman in the Water 2018 The Vanishing Man 2019 The Last Passenger 2020 An Extravagant Death 2021 Previous Next

Serve as shown in sections in the bowl because it looks awesome. Then mix at the table. < Back Mango-Avocado Salad June 11, 2020 Prep Time: 10 Minutes Cook Time: 0 Minutes Serves: 4 Servings Tags: Vegan, Vegetarian, Entrees About the Recipe Ingredients 1 Mango cut in small pieces 1 Medium Avocado cut in small pieces 1 cup (or more) chopped Napa cabbage 1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley 1/2 cup chopped red onion Juice and zest of one medium lime 1/4 cup Trader Joe’s Chunky Salsa (my favorite – has a smoky flavor) Salt and Pepper to taste (optional) Preparation Serve as shown in sections in the bowl because it looks awesome. Then mix at the table. Or just serve it already mixed. It’ll taste delicious either way! Previous Next

Mako Yoshikawa's Secrets of the Sun: A Memoir (Mad Creek Books 2024) contains a host of essays about her difficult, brilliant father. Shoichi Yoshikawa grew up in a wealthy family in 1930s Japan, but his mother died when he was five, and he died alone on the eve of Mako’s wedding. < Back Secrets of the Sun Mako Yoshikawa February 20, 2024 Mako Yoshikawa's Secrets of the Sun: A Memoir (Mad Creek Books 2024) contains a host of essays about her difficult, brilliant father. Shoichi Yoshikawa grew up in a wealthy family in 1930s Japan, but his mother died when he was five, and he died alone on the eve of Mako’s wedding. He had been a genius, renowned for his research in nuclear fusion and respected at Princeton, until he fell apart. She remembered him being alternatingly kind or violent when bipolar disease gripped him. Her mother packed up and left the house with Mako and her sisters, later remarrying a wonderful man and brilliant chess player who Mako considered the father she always wanted. Mako wants to understand him; why he cross-dressed, why he was so passionate about fusion, why he alienated his daughters so that he hadn’t even been invited to Mako’s wedding. Mako Yoshikawa is the author of the novels One Hundred and One Ways and Once Removed . Her novels have been translated into six languages; awards include a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant and a Radcliffe Fellowship. As a literary critic, she has published articles that explore the relationship between incest and race in 20th-century American fiction. After her father’s death in 2010, Mako began writing about him and their relationship: essays which have appeared in the Missouri Review , Southern Indiana Review , Harvard Review , Story , Lit Hub , Longreads , and Best American Essays . These essays became the basis for her new memoir, Secrets of the Sun . Yoshikawa grew up in Princeton, New Jersey but spent two years of her childhood in Tokyo, Japan. She received a B.A. in English literature from Columbia University, a Masters in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama at Lincoln College, Oxford, and a Ph. D. in English literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Mako is a professor of creative writing and the director of the MFA program at Emerson College. In addition to her MFA classes, Mako teaches Comedic Lit to undergraduates in Emerson’s Comedic Arts program. She also teaches as often as she can in the Emerson Prison Initiative, a degree-granting program that is based in MCI-Norfolk, a medium-security prison for men. She lives with her husband and two unruly cats in Boston and Baltimore. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next