the SIMMER blog

how to make hot hot chocolate

A little something different today -- video instead of just words. If your weather has been as crazy as ours lately, your winter isn't quite over. Which is a bad thing, because -- boo, winter in April! But on the other hand: hot chocolate doesn't taste quite as wonderful when it's warm outside. And you're going to want to make this one.

Check out this video on how to make hot hot chocolate, with a special secret ingredient (which you already know about if you've read the book...)

 

 

cover story for The Kitchen Daughter

That review roundup I promised will have to wait, but here's a link I know you'll love -- Melissa Walker interviewed me on the Unabashedly Bookish blog (on the Barnes and Noble website) to talk about how the beautiful and unique cover of my book came to be.

(Spoiler alert: not my idea! Wish it had been!)

Here's the Cover Story for The Kitchen Daughter.

Enjoy!

what a week!

Such a busy week with the launch of The Kitchen Daughter I don't think I can wrangle up a whole post for today, but WOW! I am so thrilled and happy and overwhelmed with all the support from family and friends and all the good feedback from readers who are now getting their hands on The Kitchen Daughter. AMAZING.

I'll do a roundup tomorrow of the first week's reviews, but as those of you who follow me on Twitter or Facebook already know: holy guacamole, there are a lot of them.

More food next week, but in the meantime, here's a random snap I took while photographing shortbread last week -- I used to have a whole collection of black-and-white mugs, and over the years I've kept some and given some away, but this one stays with me. Goofy, I know.

 

wordless wednesday lxii

 

 

 
 
  

the hundred-dollar peppermill

Today, I want to tell you about a peppermill.

In general, I'm pretty practical with my kitchen purchases. I buy durable, multi-use things. I own two All-Clad pieces and two Le Creuset pots, all of which were either gifts or bought on steep discount (or both). I believe that you don't need expensive gadgets to make good food, so I don't buy them.

Except for the peppermill, of course.

About three years ago I saw this peppermill in the Williams-Sonoma at the Bellevue in Philly. It has multiple settings to grind your pepper coarse or fine, it runs on batteries, and -- this is the particularly over-the-top part -- it shines a tiny little light on your food as you use it, so you can see exactly where the pepper is going. It's indulgent and expensive and you really don't need to spend a hundred dollars to grind your pepper, but I decided that I would indulge myself when a certain thing happened. I decided that I'd buy the peppermill as a way of celebrating when I got a book deal.

And when I sold my book, in October 2009, that's exactly what I did. (My husband knew about the plan, and as soon as I told him about the pre-empt from Gallery, he said, "So, let's go buy that peppermill!") Today, in April 2011, the book comes out.

 

(Footnote: in an excellent symbolic representation of how long it takes to get a book published, the batteries in the peppermill gave out a couple weeks back. Don't worry, I'll get them replaced. Over-the-top qualities aside, it really is a pretty fabulous little gadget.)

shortbread shortcut

One of the earliest recipes in The Kitchen Daughter is Grandma Damson's Scottish Shortbread. There are a kajillion recipes for shortbread, most of which work fine, but I made this one very simple on purpose. Two cups of flour, two sticks of butter, and a half-cup of sugar. That's all. Ginny does it the old-fashioned way, working the butter into the sugar by hand, and that's the way I'd usually done it as well.

Until last week.

 

Yep, that's a food processor. I was in a rush to crank out some cookies for book club, which I was hosting, and so I decided to use my stand mixer -- except in the close quarters of my kitchen, the stand mixer is currently behind the food processor, so I thought, Eh, I've heard people sometimes use the food processor for doughs and crusts, I guess I'll give it a shot.

Wow. What a shot it was.

 

I made only a half-batch -- so first I creamed a stick of cold butter (salted) with a quarter-cup of granulated sugar, then blitzed in a cup of flour, until the mixture resembled coarse crumbs.

 

Time elapsed? Like, nothing. Maybe literally two minutes. And then there was another time-saving discovery to make: if I patted the crust out on my synthetic cutting board and only rolled it lightly, instead of flouring a wooden board and rolling it thin, I didn't have to worry about the butter melting and making the dough hard to work. It came together in a flash. Pat pat pat:

interview part 2 on writer unboxed

As promised, here's the second half of my interview with the fabulous Therese Walsh, author of The Last Will of Moira Leahy, over on Writer Unboxed.

(Ooh, it's not clear from that sentence, but in this particular case, she's the interviewer and I'm the interviewee. Though we've done it the other way 'round too! Therese is a fellow client of Weed Literary, an incredibly valuable critique partner, and a good friend.)

Click to read about inspiration, surprise, the book's many titles, and of course, more about brownies.

great new review from Booklist!

So here's where we are in the book review process: too early to know which major magazines and/or newspapers are going to review the book, since they only do so after it comes out. We could have 10 reviews next week or none. (Well, there is one we know about, and it's a reeeeeeally good one, but the rest is a mystery.) And reviews could come in at any time, weeks or months down the road, as well. Industry publications are different, and those come out beforehand -- Kirkus, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and Booklist. And so now we have all four of those, with Booklist coming in just last week.

And -- yay! -- it's another good one.

Ginny Selvaggio’s parents have just died in a tragic accident, leaving the young woman with Asperger’s syndrome to care for herself, living in the attic of her family’s enormous and historic home. Her sister, Amanda, a type-A young mother, is determined to sell the house, despite Ginny’s protests. During the wake, Ginny, an epicure obsessed with cooking, whips up a batch of ribollita (bread soup) from her Italian grandmother’s recipe and is shocked when Nonna’s ghost appears in the kitchen and cryptically warns, “Do no let her.” The ghost fades away as Ginny stands amazed, and she quickly discovers an ability to conjure other ghosts via handwritten recipes. She also finds an old family secret hidden in the house and must unravel it before it becomes too late to heed Nonna’s words. With recipes and long, delicious descriptions of ingredients, cooking, and delicacies, McHenry’s first novel is of definite appeal to foodies, yet the compelling characters and twisting mystery constitute a story many readers will devour.

(Did I mention "yay"? One of the great things about reviews has been seeing how other people sum up the book, and this is a great summary. Plus "definite appeal" and "a story many readers will devour" -- I'll certainly take the kind words.)

wordless wednesday lxi

 

follower funding update

So in the end, my offer of donating $1 per new follower for autism/Asperger's classrooms netted my Twitter account an almost-round number of 251 followers by the deadline.

251 -- not bad, right? In two weeks? That's about 18 new people a day, certainly more than I've seen in the past, on average. And I know a lot of them were motivated by the idea of donating for kids on the spectrum, because they told me. You told me. I'm amazed and humbled by all the parents, teachers, and Aspies who piped up and let me know how excited they were -- you are -- about some kind of financial boost for kids on the spectrum and the classrooms in which they learn.

Not bad. But it didn't seem like enough. Especially not once I searched for "autism" and "Asperger's" on the Donors Choose site and saw all these classrooms asking for help purchasing everything from workbooks to iPads to pencil sharpeners to Etch-a-Sketches for their students.

$251 didn't seem like nearly enough. A drop in the bucket, really.

So I doubled it.

So with $2 for every new Twitter follower, that brought my donation up to $502, and that felt better. I know it's still not enough -- not nearly enough -- but it's something.

Thanks to those of you who clicked Follow on the @jaelmchenry page. Thanks to those of you who spread the word by retweeting. And thanks to those of you who actually have no idea what I'm talking about, because you don't care about Twitter, but you do care about a kid on the autism spectrum -- as a parent, a teacher, a relative, or a friend. You're doing more than most of us could ever dream.

And thanks to those of you who are now wondering how you can give to these classrooms directly, because it's easy: go to the Donors Choose projects page and search for autism, Asperger's, or anything else -- schools near your hometown, or projects about music, cooking, self-esteem -- anything you care about.

These teachers are doing amazing work. I'm glad I can play some small part in helping them do it.

(And if you don't know where to start, might I suggest the Tomato Nation superpage? Every year the readers of the Tomato Nation website gather together to show support -- it's where I first learned Donors Choose existed -- and there are all sorts of matches that get triggered along the way, for the whole month of April.)