Before anyone starts getting ideas from the name of today’s recipe, let me clarify: I’m neither interested in, nor pushing the nuptial element. This is purely about surviving the cold rainy season through carbs and cream. Steps can be taken to avoid the lactose, but not really the calories. Whatever, my chins, my choice.

Marry Me, You Giant Bean

This is a spin on Marry Me Chicken, a dish said to be so good you’ll want to marry the chef (or at least consider joint taxes). The folks at Delish adapted the original from a Tuscan recipe, and then it was relentlessly TikTok’d into legend.

When I first tried my luck at the non-poultry version, I had in my possession a jar of Greek fasolia gigantes, but you don’t have to go that far. Regular butter beans (lima beans if you’re of the US persuasion) or even cannellini will do nicely. Size doesn’t matter, but it’s a pleasant surprise, as the saying goes.

Ingredients:

• 450 grams/ 16 oz of drained beans
• 2 shallots (or one small onion)
• 200 ml (1 cup) of vegetable broth
• 250 grams/1 cup double cream (heavy cream in the US). Substitute coconut cream if you want a vegan/dairy free version
• 3 good tablespoons of sundried tomato paste. Or about 40 grams of chopped sundried tomatoes
• 40 grams (half a cup) of grated parmesan
• Flavourings: sweet smoked paprika, rosemary, salt, pepper. Of course, you can riff here, and go closer to the OG Marry Me recipe with garlic and red pepper flakes, or experiment with thyme, basil, sage, lemon peel, chilli oil etc. Make it your own!
• Baby spinach (optional) – in the UK, one of those small salad bags the supermarkets annoy us with. In the US, about 3 cups. Remember it wilts down to nothing.

Slice the shallots and fry on medium heat for 5-10 minutes, until brown and soft, then stir in the flavourings and the sundried tomato paste and cook for another 2-3 minutes. Add the beans and the broth and cook them uncovered for 5 minutes. Crush some of the beans if you want it EVEN creamier. No one has the right to judge you or your cream needs.

Pour in the cream and the parmesan and watch it thicken, then take off the heat and stir in the spinach if you want it (or if you’re anemic and don’t have a choice).

And that’s it. My sourdough starter, Olivia Low-Gluten John, makes a very crusty loaf and I dove right in with a slice. Pure bliss. It also works as a very rich side, for those days when you scream into the void and the void doesn’t know what it wants for dinner either.

In ye olden times it would probably be called a dish for women on the go, but I am very much a woman on the stay. Stay inside and be cosy.

Marrying always optional.

The post Eat, Drink, and Be Married (or Not) first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

This week was heavy on traditional publishing tasks and business side of things. We needed a merchandising contract. We needed a lawyer to look it over. We had some IP questions regarding the audio books. We did some writing.

I’m a bear of very little brain at the moment.

I decided to bundle all of the recipes from the blog into a small cookbook. Surprisingly, we posted quite a bit over the years and people kept losing the recipes as the posts are archived.

Posts are archived and deleted for a reason. They become obsolete or we might have said something that now isn’t accurate because situation changes. When the posts are gone, it’s because we want them gone. Anyway, a cookbook would preserve the recipes in a single convenient place.

Unfortunately I’ve discovered that I’m terrible at food photography. Things I can do: make delicious food. Things I cannot do: photograph it.

I’m not sure if the cookbook will have pictures. I will try my best. I’m testing every recipe to make sure I can include actual ingredient quantities rather than a dash of this and a pinch of that.

On the plus side, I have been approved for a purchase of a massive air fryer. We will probably charge a couple of bucks for the cookbook to recoup editing and production costs, and the air fryer came in handy. This particular model has a shallow and wide basket. I stuffed 24 drumettes into it. It took a while for them to crisp because of the mayo coating, but Gordon, as the official sampler, pronounced them delicious.

I do not understand the deep air frier baskets. Nothing crisps for me in those.

Today might be pork carnitas day. I’m not sure.

Someone asked about my favorite tea. As you probably know by now, my blood is 78% tea water. I used to lean heavily into oolongs, but now I mostly drink black tea. Since we established that I take terrible food pictures, I will be stealing images from Harney & Sons. All teas will be linked below.

All teas were consumed without milk or lemon, although sometimes Splenda was added. We receive no compensation from the tea providers below and these are not affiliate links.

Russian Country

To no one’s surprised at all, this is my go to. My first cup of tea in the morning is usually Russian Country. It’s a smoky tea, strong flavor, blended from several tea varieties. It’s probably an acquired taste, but it reminds me of my childhood.

Harney & Sons: Russian Country tea.

Celebration

This is a milder black tea, and the lighter flavor lets the other ingredients shine: it has apricots, blue cornflowers, hazelnut, plum, and cinnamon. I will be honest, I can neither smell nor taste cinnamon in this, and I don’t miss it. This tea smells amazing, its taste is complex, and it makes you think of fruity desert.

Harney & Sons: Celebration tea.

Valentine’s Day

This smells amazing. The vanilla is strong and there are hints of chocolate. This is another milder tea with chocolate nibs and rose petals, and it’s Chinese black tea base allows those flavors to come through. Gordon bought this in bulk for me and I drink it when I want a treat during the day.

Harney & Sons: Valentine’s Day Tea.

Vanilla Comoro

Vanilla Comoro is a decaffeinated tea, and it is amazing. It tastes rich, with a strong hint of vanilla, and if you would like an evening or late afternoon tea without the caffeine spike, this is an excellent choice. I drink massive quantities of this and restock frequently.

Harney & Sons: Vanilla Comoro.

Vahdam Spiced Turmeric

The last tea on my list is an herbal tisane. When my primary doctor looked at my latest blood results, she saw some inflammation markers and she suggested turmeric to lower it. Not in a pill or supplement form. Apparently, turmeric is the latest “miracle” fad. Supplements are very loosely regulated in US and some people became sick taking them.

My doctor was very clear: turmeric consumption had to come in a way of actually consuming the spice itself, and this tea was my answer. It is spicy and strong, with turmeric, lemongrass, and ginger, and I honestly thought I would hate it, but instead I look forward to it.

It is a very acquired taste; however, so I would recommend sample size to try it out. It does help with inflammation, but I also drink a lot of it.

Vahdam: Turmeric Spiced Herbal Tea.

I am now going to brew myself a cup from this selection, check on my friend, and then dive back into work. we have some fun stuff coming down the pipeline, but too early to talk about it. More to come.

The post Tea and Cooking first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Stock image of the honey mustard chicken. I didn’t take a picture of mine.

Recipe

• Assorted chicken pieces. I did 4 thighs and 8 wings, skin on
• 1 bottle of balsamic vinaigrette dressing. This is not the time for organic limited reserve. Just the cheapest bottle of balsamic vinaigrette you can find. I used Ken’s Steak House brand.

Put the chicken into a dish, dump the balsamic vinaigrette dressing on it, coat well, refrigerate. I did mine for 4 hours – it worked great – but you can do it overnight if you prefer. Make sure to turn the chicken after a few hours.

When you are ready to cook, we’re going to preheat the oven to 375°F (190°C), fish the chicken pieces out of the marinade, arrange them in a pan, and bake them for 45 minutes. If your chicken pieces are bigger, like thighs and drumsticks together, increase the baking time until the thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the thigh reads 165°F (74°C.)

While the chicken is cooking, we’re going to make the glaze

• 1/2 cup maple syrup. Dark varieties work best. You want to taste the maple. But any maple syrup will do
• 1/2 cup dijon mustard
• 2 garlic cloves, crushed or 1/2 tsp of garlic powder
• 1 Tbsp of apple cider vinegar
• 1/4 tsp pinch of chili pepper (optional)

We are going to mix everything together. I whisked mine.

When the chicken is done cooking for 45 minutes, we are going to remove it from the oven and liberally glaze it using a kitchen brush or just a teaspoon if you don’t have the brush handy. You want it good and coated. The flavor will be strong. Some people skip this altogether and just cook the marinated version. Some people skip the marinade and go directly with the glaze.

Once that’s done, the chicken goes back in the oven for about 7-10 minutes. Don’t worry, it will stay moist. You can keep baking it or you can broil it for crispness. If you are broiling it, broil in the middle of the oven, not directly under the broiler and keep checking it every 3-4 minutes, because it can burn.

And we are done. This chicken goes well with everything. Potatoes, white rice, brown rice, steamed or sauteed vegetables, etc. You can get fancy and do roasted potatoes and over-charred Brussel sprouts, or you can heat up a can of corn, and it usually pairs well.

If you want even stronger flavor, reserve some glaze and serve it as a drizzling sauce. Refrigerate the leftovers. The good thing is that next day, this chicken still tastes delicious, so you can reheat it and reasonably get a couple of dinners out of it. We did a baked potato dinner the first night, mostly wings, and the next day I cut off the meat from the thighs, quickly stir-fried it with some mushrooms, sprinkled it with sesame seeds, and served it over rice. It didn’t need additional sauce.

The post Maple Mustard Chicken first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Normally we don’t do posts on Saturday, but US Thanksgiving is right around the corner and this is time sensitive.

Every Thanksgiving, we get a Cajun turkey from Popeyes. It is cooked and requires thawing and then warming up in the oven. The turkey is delicious and moist and saves us a lot of time on Thanksgiving, because we have an unreasonable amount of sides and usually at least one other meat, like ham or prime rib.

Last year, there was a lot of butthurt because I mentioned the secret Popeye turkey “too late,” and local Popeye locations were sold out, and since the turkey is frozen solid, there was not enough time to thaw it.

I am not sure how I got designated as the Popeye turkey peddler.

This is your Popeye turkey PSA: they have them, Kid 2 bought one yesterday. They always sell out online, but I just sent Kid 2 to the nearest location and she walked out with a huge $80 turkey.

Here is a video of a dude eating this turkey and although he claims it’s not the best turkey he ever had, he can’t stop eating it.

This has been your Popeye turkey announcement.

Also, if you are in Texas, and you can’t get the Popeye turkey, check with your local BBQ place. Most of them smoke turkeys for Thanksgiving. Here is Smokey Mo’s.

We will do the projected Thanksgiving menu post on Monday. ::cracks knuckles:: Gordon requested ham this year. I am thinking of smoking it on the BBQ grill.

The post Popeye Turkey first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

On the phone with Jeaniene Frost

Me: I haven’t done anything for a whole week.

J: I hear you. Dragoncon was a lot.

Me: I might take the next week off too.

J: This is so unlike you. I’m starting the new project next week.

Me: But why?

J: List of reasons that make sense.

Me: No, don’t work!

J: I need to start it so I at least have something…

Me: No, be lazy with me!

J: This is highly ironic coming from you.

Clearly I need more time off. My body and mind are not ready. Nope.

Also Satisfactory 1.0 hit, Gordon and I playing Wow – Dragonflight is pretty awesome, so we are starting there, and I have read 2 books last week. If I can gather together enough willpower, I will clean the kitchen. Or I might not. I might just be lazy.

I think I ran out of whatever it is that makes workaholics function. I seem to have misplaced it. Maybe it’s in my craft room, around the yarn stash somewhere. I should really go look there.

Look at this cute doggie!

I still have to make some kind of a dinner. What is your favorite lazy meal? Please share and save me from having to let go of my laziness.

Happy Friday, everyone. I wish you the best weekend.

The post The Irony first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

“I live in constant terror that someone around me might be even a little bit peckish” said Nigella Lawson once, and honestly, she gets me. My Notes app is full of recipes that look good, my counters with food experiments, and my thoughts are occupied by yumminess I remember and want to have again.

It’s very hard for me to start being health-conscious vs cravings-led, but people have started to confuse me for an adult a lot recently (only because of my age! So unfair!). That tells me I need to walk right past the trendy Dubai Chocolate and the Crumbl Cookies dupes, and into the high protein/high fibre section of the popular food scene.

Cucumber salad

The concept of Girl Dinner or as we call it in the UK, picky bits, sparked a lot of viral content.

From egg flights (a way of eating a lot of exotic-combo devilled eggs I’m absolutely on bord with) to tinned fish date night, people have been making themed plates of various yummy nibbles and moving away from the concept of cooked mains and side dishes.

And absolutely nothing has captured the public forums as much as Logan Moffitt’s intro, “Sometimes, you need to eat an entire cucumber”:

His recipes always start with slicing the aforementioned entire cucumber into a container with a lid that can be shaken (not stirred). And then, the combinations are legion: tzatziki style, cream cheese and smoked salmon with red onions, sprinkled with furikake (Mr Mod R actually licked the plate), peanut cucumber salad, chilly crisp salad… There is almost nothing you can’t add to a sliced cucumber, shake well, and Bob’s your oyster.

My favourite involves soy sauce, sesame oil, sesame seeds, kimchi (or just gochujang), MSG, vinegar. Heavy is the hand that adds the garlic in this house, but as always with aromatics, you do what works for you.

As Icarus before us, we sometimes fly too close to the sun, and discover the combinations are not exactly unlimited. Peanut butter and jelly (jam) cucumber salad? Let’s not.

Cottage cheese cheesecake

The world went a bit wild with cottage cheese, because hello, affordable high protein source! Everything was made out of it at some point, from cottage cheese sandwich wraps, to cottage cookie dough and cottage cheese pizza bowls.

This is the only recipe that stuck with me, works every time, and is so delicious my lactose will just have to be tolerated.

Ingredients:

• 1 egg
• 120 grams of cottage cheese (that’s a cup in freedom units)
• 1 scoop of protein powder that you like (30 grams for most brands)- I always go with vanilla, they just seem to have figured out the taste of it better
• 1 tablespoon of Greek yogurt, in a complementary flavour (depending on how dry my cottage cheese is, or whether I’ve used low-fat, sometimes I add a bit more)

This is the base recipe. You can blend it and bake it just as is in a 160 C degree oven for about 20 minutes and get something ok. But as with life, if you want happiness, you can start adding the good stuff in: a teaspoon of vanilla or other extracts (coconut was amazing!); grated lemon zest, my favourite; top it with berries, nuts, chocolate chips; add maple syrup, honey, other sweeteners if you like things very sweet. The cheesecake sky is the limit.

This makes two servings (one for me now, one for me later) and has so much protein if I’m not careful I could turn into Lord Swoledemort! My horcruxes would all be Christmas fruit cakes, no one touches those.

My ongoing recipe experiment: I made my own pickled pineapple spears. I’m from Transylvania, we pickle everything that stands still long enough, but I’ve only seen this from the US and never would have thought about it on my own. I used the brine recipe my family uses for zucchini pickles: 30 grams of salt and a tablespoon of honey per litre of water, 1 horseradish, 2 bay leaves, peppercorns and mustard seeds to taste. If it doesn’t work, I’ll try the green tomatoes brine next.

Next food adventures: Find/make ooey Gooey St Louis butter cake – either original yeasty version or cake mix version, probably both. Apparently, it’s life changing. Maybe if I eat it, I go to the next level? I could sure use some of that.

What have you been nibbling on lately? And did you know you can do it whilst listening to the Magic Rises Graphic Audio adaptation released today?

The post Friday Foodies first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

One of the worst things about copyedits is that it requires you to make a chain of instant decisions. Replace this word or not. Clarify this sentence or not. Decide, look at the next comment, decide, rinse and repeat. It’s remarkable how quickly making a bunch of quick decisions leads to fatigue.

I feel like I am dealing with a life’s version of a copyedit. Every time I turn around, there are either admin tasks or family problems, all of it requiring decisions. It’s like life has been firing tennis balls at me at top speed from different directions. I tried making a list of things to do and gave up.

Instead, I am going to bring you this odd dessert. One of my friends ran into a Ukrainian woman at a fair, tried this dessert, and emailed me to ask me what it is.

In the former USSR, this was called kartoshka, meaning potato, named so not because it contains potatoes, but because the finished product looks like one. This is a great dessert to make with small kids as it requires no baking.

This dessert originated as means of using leftovers in public bakeries. Once the cakes and cookies have been baked, unused cuts of the cake sponge and broken cookies were ground into crumbs and repurposed for this “cookie.” The texture is moist and almost fudge-like.

There are two basic recipes for kartoshka. The first involves baking a basic white cake sponge – box cake will do great and then pulsing it in a food processor. The second involves graham crackers or an assortment of your favorite cookies, once again pulsed into a coarse crumb. The cookies should be relatively dry, like shortbread or sugar cookies. Moist chocolate chip or oat cookies will not work well.

Traditionally, this recipe also called for 2 Tbsp of cognac. I leave the liquor choices up to you.

Basic recipe:

2 1/2 – 3 cups of cookie crumbs (or crumbled cake sponges)

8 oz of butter

14 oz can of sweetened condensed milk

5 tbsp of cocoa powder (and some for dusting)

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 cup walnuts (or pecans or almond) crumbs or just a cup of nuts that you can dump into food processor. You could technically even have them in chunks, if that’s your preference.

1 pinch of salt

Preparation:

Cream butter with a mixer. Add condensed milk. Cream some more. Add vanilla and cocoa powder. Cream some more. Dump everything else into it. Mix until you made a brown mess. The mixture should clump together easily. Form into potato-shaped lumps, dust with cocoa powder, chill a bit, serve.

Here are some recipes from the internet with detailed how to:

Cake sponge version – Valya’s Taste of Home and Olga’s Flavor Factory.

Cookie version – That’s What She Had and Dished (this is a video, and her kartoshka needed a little bit more cookie crumbs. It was looking slightly too moist. Also, don’t roll these in cocoa, sift the cocoa on top instead. Cocoa powder tends to be bitter when thick.)

The post “Potato” for Dessert first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Happy Monday! Huge thank you to Mod R for a week of awesome posts.

It’s a beautiful, although overcast day. I have a mountain of work ahead of me, all of which needs to be done asap. Good news, I can sit in the chair a bit longer now, and I no longer wince when I try to stretch.

We’ve received the first design of the interior chapter headings for Roman’s novella and it is too adorable for words. I wish I could show you, but I need to get all the paperwork settled. It is amazing how tasks accumulate when you take time off.

My new gallbladder-missing status has come with menu challenges. Prior to the surgery, my diet was mostly “things that might not hurt me.” Prior to that, there was severe limiting of starches because of the prediabetes. I had stuck to whole grains, fresh vegetables like cucumbers, tomatoes, and onion, cooked vegetables like brussels sprouts and cauliflower, fruit, fish, and small servings of meat.

Onion is off the table for some reason. The dietary guidance doesn’t explain why, just says limit. Cauliflower and broccoli are gas producing and counter indicated right now. Salmon, my go to fish, is fatty, and everyone says it should be approached with caution. Bacon, sausage, etc. are right out. I can’t keep leaning on oatmeal, no matter how plain or old fashioned, because there is too much starch, and I have to be really careful, as I am unmedicated for the next 30 days.

Help me, BDH. Give me some healthy breakfast ideas that don’t have fat, sugar, or simple carbs. ::looks at the list:: Maybe I should eat paper. On second thought, with my luck, I will develop termite metabolism and find some way to digest it.

The post Food, It’s Complicated, Actually first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.