Terry Ambrose

Writing is like a good barbecue sauce, if it ain't bold, it ain't worth doing.

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Jamaican Curry Chicken and Potatoes — a one-pot delight

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Photo courtesy of New York Times

At Christmas, we invested in an All-Clad stainless steel turkey roaster. When we bought it, my thought was that it would get used periodically during the year to make large one-pan dinners. This Jamaican Curry Chicken and Potatoes recipe was the perfect opportunity to test out my theory. And, guess what? It worked! Like a charm. I was able to caramelize the onions, brown the chicken, and then cook the dish. The really great thing was that the pan not only handled the cooking well, but it was big enough so we had no worries about spillovers or anything like that! Loved it and ready to go again!

If you’d like to see more gluten-free recipes, click here.

Photo courtesy of New York Times

Jamaican Curry Chicken and Potatoes

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Ingredients
  

  • Chicken thighs
  • Kosher salt and black pepper
  • 2 tbsp olive oil plus more as needed
  • 1 large onion sliced
  • 4 garlic cloves minced
  • 2 tbsp Curry powder
  • 1 tbsp Chipotle peppers Buy a small can, use what you need, freeze the rest in a plastic baggie. Adds a nice depth of flavor.
  • 4 medium Yukon Gold or white potatoes washed and quartered
  • 1 to 2 quarts chicken stock reduce or add liquid depending on pot size
  • 1 dried bay leaf
  • 2 fresh thyme sprigs May substitute 1 tsp. dried thyme
  • 1/4 cup cornstarch

Instructions
 

  • Place chicken in a large bowl. Season chicken with the garlic powder, salt (depending on taste) and 1/2 teaspoon pepper, making sure the chicken is evenly coated. Let sit to come to room temperature.
  • Heat a deep Dutch oven or heavy pan over medium heat. Drizzle in the olive oil. Add sliced onions, season with salt and pepper. Using a wooden spoon, stir to combine, and cook until soft and fragrant, 3 to 4 minutes. Add garlic, stirring to keep the garlic from scorching, and cook for 30 seconds or until tender. Using a pair of tongs or a spoon, remove onions and garlic from the pan; set aside in a bowl.
  • If needed, add more oil to coat the bottom of the pan. Reduce the heat to medium. Add the room-temperature chicken to the pan, and sear chicken on both sides, in batches if necessary, until golden brown, about 7 to 8 minutes total.
  • Sprinkle curry powder over and around chicken. Let the spices bloom and toast until fragrant, about 2 minutes.
  • Add reserved onions and garlic to the pan. Add chipotle peppers and potatoes, and stir to evenly coat chicken and potatoes in spices.
  • Pour in chicken stock to nearly cover the chicken. Add the bay leaf and thyme sprigs. Bring to a simmer. Cover and cook for 30 minutes or until chicken is tender. Taste and adjust the curry powder, salt and pepper as needed.
  • In a small bowl, combine cornstarch with 1/4 cup water to form a slurry. Stir slurry in, about 1 tablespoon a time and bring back to a boil, adding more until desired thickness is reached. Retrieve bay leaf and thyme stems and discard.

Notes

For this recipe, you can use a combination of legs and thighs if you’d prefer. We use boneless, skinless chicken thighs to keep things simple, but mix-and-match to meet your taste! We ate most of the potatoes the first night, then served with mashed potatoes when we had leftovers.
Original recipe comes from cooking.nytimes.com https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1021842-jamaican-curry-chicken-and-potatoes

Three tips to shut down warranty scams

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Vintage automobile - three tips to shut down warranty scamsThe Pomona Review,newspaper, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The Pomona Review,newspaper, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

“We’re calling about your warranty.” Those five words lead into a scam that can cost victims thousands of dollars. Is it any wonder robocalls, and that includes warranty scams, are among the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) top consumer complaints? Let’s take a look at the scoop behind robocalls and warranty scams.

Don’t touch that dial! Not with warranty scams—or any other

Warranty scams are typically initiated by a computer that can make millions of calls per hour. If you’re a direction follower, you may be tempted ‘press 1’ for more information. Or a different key to be taken off of the calling list. Don’t. Pressing any key will record the response and let the dialer know it has found a live number. And when you’re dialing for dollars, a live number is worth money.

Curiosity killed the cat—and could be hazardous to your bank account

Do a search for warranty scams and it becomes obvious there are almost as many flavors of this scam as there are ice cream. Okay, maybe not quite that many, but there are a lot! To make things worse, data breaches from credit agencies and lenders provide scammers access to specific information about your vehicle.

According to the Federal Communications Commission, “What makes it particularly hard to discern if this type of call is fraudulent is that the scammer may have specific information about your particular car and warranty that they use to deceive you into thinking they are a legitimate caller.”

The bottom line is asking questions, even simple ones like, ‘Which of my vehicles are you calling about?’, can bring you a step closer to making the wrong decision. Hang up or don’t answer at all. It’s your best defense.

What if I make a mistake and engage with the caller?

First off, don’t beat yourself up! It happens. Just make sure you follow these three tips to shut down warranty scams.

Tip #1: Give no information.

Keep your personal and financial information private. Never give it out over the phone or in an email to someone you don’t know.

Tip #2: Screen your calls.

There’s no need to pay a service to screen calls. There are free apps to help with stopping robocalls. On IOS, there’s a nifty feature called ‘Silence Unknown Callers’ (Settings > Phone). This feature sends the caller straight to voicemail if they’re not in your contact list. True, it’s overkill, but it might provide a respite from scam call fatigue.

Tip #3: Report the scam.

If you think you’ve been the victim of a scam, report the crime to the FCC. The best way to shut down warranty scams is to let the authorities know so they can investigate. You may not get your money back, but you might help someone else avoid making the same mistake.

Did you like this scam tip? If so, check out last month’s tip, Beware the temptation to skip the Covid-19 vaccine line.

Friday Fotos – Lifou sights are plenty and beautiful

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Monument behind Lifou school
This monument is behind the school

There were so many Lifou sights to enjoy. Of course, the people were friendly and the setting was pristine. The weather is typical South Pacific—warm and humid (exactly the way I like it!). We only had a day to enjoy these Lifou sights, but it was a delightful one.

We were warned by our tour guide that when we got to the commercial district we should be careful about who we spoke to or did business with. Apparently, with the tour boats come the scammers. Why would things be any different there than here, right? Of course, that could have also been a way for the tour company to funnel business into the very commercial store where we parked.

We thoroughly enjoyed our time on Lifou, despite the warnings, and I’d love to go back if we had more time to just hang out. That, however, will have to come in a whole different year!

Want to see more photos from our trip? Here’s a link where you can check out all the entries in our travel journal. Learn more about Lifou Island here.

Guest post for A Game of Cones by Abby Collette

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A Game of Cones tour graphic
A Games of Cones cover

Writing about murder

I was standing in line at Loganberry Books, an independent bookstore close to where I live, waiting to buy a book and at the same time talking on the phone. I was complaining to the person on the other end about the main character in a book I was writing. I said into the phone, with people all around me, “She won’t die. I keep trying to kill her, but she just won’t die.” Everyone turned to look at me with horror in their eyes. I quickly explained, I was talking about a character in my book.

I write cozy mysteries. In fact, I’ve written about twenty-five of them and am working on several more. They are a genre I really enjoy writing in. And in them, there is always a murder to be solved. 

My first book, In the Beginning, was often compared to Dan Brown books. It was a mystery, only I didn’t include peril around every corner, not swear words or sex. I just don’t write like that and readers complained. But then I found cozies and I learned there are certain criteria needed to make a book a cozy and I was comfortable with all of them. I was hooked.

But since cozies have the same formula, I decided to come up with different ways for my stories to stand out, to set them apart from other cozy murder mysteries. I think one way to do that is to make the method of the murder different. To “kill” the victims in my story in an unusual way. I try to do that in all my books, but let me tell you, it ain’t easy! I often search for hours on a way to murder the bad guy. (I only hope that no one in law enforcement would ever have to do a scrub of my computer, I would be in so much trouble!) 

Abby Collette, aka Abby L. Vandiver

To make my murder mystery more interesting, I like to google weird and unusual ways that people have died. Like Isadora Duncan, the famous dancer. She loved long scarfs and wore them all the time. One day, while riding in a convertible, a breeze caught the end of the scarf around her neck, wrapped it into one of the tires on the car and choked her to death. Weird, right? Here’s another one: The London Beer Flood in 1814. A high-pressured beer vat burst causing a domino-effect that splintered all the other vats. More than 300,000 gallons of beer flooded the brewery and street and eight people died. That would be a great way to kill someone, don’t you think?

I haven’t been able to come up with a way to use either one of those methods to kill the victims in my books. But I’ve come up with some interesting ones—like water intoxication and dry drowning. In my new series, An Ice Cream Parlor Mystery, I used succinylcholine as the murder weapon in A Deadly Inside Scoop. I saw that method on a true crime show way before I started writing books and never forgot about it. 

You’ll have to read my books to find out what other unique ways I’ve come up with. When you do, let me know what you think. Or, if you’ve heard of an unusual way someone died and think it will make a good story, please, tell me all about it!

About Abby Collette

Abby Collette is the pseudonym of Abby L. Vandiver, a hybrid author who has penned more than twenty-five books and short stories. She has hit both the Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller lists. A Game of Cones is the second book in the Ice Cream Parlor Mystery series, Learn more about Abby at www.authorabby.com.

Want more book news? If so, click here to read more Behind the Story interviews from your favorite authors.

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Behind the story of A Side of Murder

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A Side of Murder tour graphic
A Side of Murder by Amy Pershing

Amy Pershing is a lifelong mystery lover who spent every summer of her childhood on Cape Cod. She’s been an assistant editor at Viking Penguin, a restaurant reviewer for Playbill magazine’s Restaurant Reporter, and a journalist at the Rome (Italy) Daily American. Eventually, she went on to lead employee communications at a global bank. A Side of Murder is the first book in the Cape Cod Foodie mystery series.

Food, friends, and family

For Amy, food, friends and family are very important. As she put it, cooking for and/or sharing a meal with people you love is one of life’s great gifts.

When I was a child, food was a celebration. Not on a daily basis, of course. My mother had five kids to feed on a budget EVERY SINGLE NIGHT, and I do not blame her for the endless weekday dinners of scalloped potatoes and ham and tuna casseroles. But on Sundays and holidays, Mom went to town.

She worshipped St. Julia Child, and she was a firm believer that children will eat anything if you put enough melted butter on it (and she was right). Sunday dinners were a formal affair with candles, cloth napkins and the required “May I please be excused?” if we wanted to leave the table. I truly believe my mother thought Sunday dinner was her only chance to civilize her five little monsters.

And then there were the birthday feasts! Each of us got to choose our favorite meal, and the others had to lump it. Mine was leg of lamb rubbed with rosemary and garlic, parsley buttered potatoes, and asparagus with browned butter (I warned you about the butter!). Christmas dinner was delicious and unchanging (as all traditions should be): roast beef (a huge treat for a family of seven), baked potatoes with sour cream and chives, broccoli with hollandaise sauce, and hot fudge sundaes for dessert. I still make this same Christmas meal for my family every year. My mother is gone now, but in this way we continue to celebrate her legacy of food as a celebration of love.”

Cape Cod comes front and center

Amy Pershing, author of A Side of Murder

“I spent every summer of my childhood on Cape Cod, that fragile spit of land jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean from the coast of Massachusetts. It was magical. There was absolutely no attempt to try to civilize us. We kicked off our shoes the minute we hit the sandy soil of our little cottage by the bay and we did not put them back on until September. We learned to swim in the pond across the street, happily shivering in the cold morning fogs. We were dumped into fat little wooden sailboats of the local sailing club, where we made friends for life and grew to know and to love the blue waters of our bay.”

Amy said she always knew she would someday share Cape Cod in a book. As a mystery addict, she hoped it would be in a mystery. The series is, in a way, a dream come true for her.

Getting personal

“I have two wonderful sons, one working on his PhD thesis in African history and the other living in Singapore as a cybersecurity expert. I have no idea where all this intellectual firepower came from unless it was from my equally wonderful husband, who is the smartest, funniest, cutest guy I’ve ever known—and I’ve known him since high school!.”

In the Cape Cod Foodie mysteries, Amy’s protagonist is restaurant reviewer Samantha Barnes. “She comes by this expertise honestly,” Amy said. “I was able to indulge my inner foodie reviewing restaurants back in the late 1980s – when restaurants were theater and chefs were celebrities – under the tutelage of a future Gourmet magazine restaurant critic no less! I mean, what do you do when you’re young and broke and living in New York City and love great food? Obviously, you can’t actually pay to eat in those restaurants. But what if you got to EAT FOR FREE in those restaurants?! And all you had to do was write about it? Eating great food and writing about eating great food? That wasn’t a job. That was a dream come true.”

Like most authors, Amy worries that her Internet search history might someday be used against her. However, she did have a nice twist on the answer. “What would someone make of the query ‘coconut as a murder weapon’?”

Learn more about Amy Pershing amypershingauthor.com. Did you like this interview? If so, click here to read more Behind the Story interviews from your favorite authors.

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Friday Fotos – a stunning Lifou bay beckons

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A stunning bay on Lifou Island
These waters just seem to be calling! What about it? Anyone for a swim?

Anyone for a swim? This stunning Lifou bay was so tempting! It was a warm day in the South Pacific. We’d been crammed into a rickety tour bus after disembarking and were hot and sweaty from the heat and humidity. Despite the less-than-five-star transportation, we weren’t complaining. This was a beautiful island in the South Pacific where everything just naturally gets a little ‘earthy.’ (If you catch my drift.)

This Lifou bay would have been the perfect place to cool off—except for one thing. We never would have made it back to the MS Noordam in time and might have had to stay on Lifou for a very long time. Come to think of it, maybe we did make the wrong choice in coming back! Learn more about Lifou Island here.

Want to see more photos from our trip? Here’s a link where you can check out all the entries in our travel journal.