Sharon: Hello, Readers. Today I have Alli Wesson with me. Alli is a personal chef in the “Dinner is Served” series. You can follow her amateur detective work in Mission Impastable. Welcome, Alli, to Write Away.
Alli: Hello, Sharon. A big shout-out to all my blog followers who are finding your site today.
Sharon: Alli, I know you are experiencing some success with your personal chef business now that you got out from under that police investigation. What happened there?
Alli: Well, when Gina, she’s my BFF and business partner, when Gina’s boss was poisoned, we were the prime suspects since we cooked for her family. I had to clear our names with the police, or our business would have been cooked before it was even put in the oven. The theft of a jade dragon just added in complications we didn’t need!
Sharon: (laughs) You and Gina are pretty different. How does that work when you are planning your menus for your personal chef business?
Alli: We’re a good counterbalance. Oh, sure, I’m not a measurer, but Gina is, and if I tell her my recipe ideas and we taste it together, we’re pretty able to come up with a recipe we can replicate. It just takes longer than I like to spend on the dreary part of cooking. Inventing, creating, experimenting, that’s the fun part. And sometimes it even tastes great!
Sharon: I know you are a busy girl, so I won’t keep you long, but what’s up next for the “Dinner is Served” culinary mystery series?
Alli: Book two is Prime Rib and Punishment. We take jobs at a cooking school, but the head chef hates amateur cooks and we, well, mostly I, tangle with him. So when he ends up dead, I’m kinda the main suspect. And I just get out from under that when the cooking school owner dies suspiciously. It’s hard for a girl to keep on truckin’ sometimes!
Sharon: Omigosh! That does sound complicated. I heard that you have a couple of guys on the string? True? How serious?
Alli: Of course, Evan is introduced in Book 1. He’s a cop I have an on and off relationship with. I kinda tick him off sometimes with my crime solving. But it’s not like I go looking for this stuff. Murder just seems to find me! Oh, and Mostel, he’s a guy from high school. We have a history, and that keeps pulling me back to him.
Sharon: Keep us guessing, eh? (laughing) Is there another adventure planned for you and Gina?
Alli: Our third book is Cooks in the Can. Gina and I cook for the county sheriff’s jail, using mostly canned goods commodities, when his regular cooking crew are out with a big flu epidemic. We clear some family friends of wrongful accusations and have to solve a murder at the jail. You know, just another day in the life of Alli and Gina!
Sharon: And that book will be filled with good recipes, too, I’ll bet. Before you go, any cooking tips for our readers? Or a quick recipe maybe?
Alli: Sure. In Mission Impastable, I included a really easy appetizer. You can whip this one up in five minutes with a couple of minutes leftover. The sweet-sour of the chutney is a nice counterpoint to the sour-creamy of the cream cheese.
Alli's
Super-Easy-but-Elegant,
Never-Fails-to-Impress Cream Cheese Cracker Spread
8 oz. cream
cheese
4 T best-quality
chutney
Carr’s Water
Crackers or other expensive cracker
Unwrap the block of cream cheese and place
on an elegant plate with a silver butter spreader to the side. Place the
chutney in tablespoons equidistant from one another down the middle of the
cream cheese. With the spoon, arrange the chutney so it artistically drips down
the sides of the cheese.
Serve with a
small basket of crackers.
What a fun interview! I love the titles of your books in this series, Sharon! Have these books been released yet? I looked on Amazon and didn't see Mission Impastable.
ReplyDeleteCool interview! Let us know when your books are released. I love mysteries.
ReplyDeleteTracie Banister and Elke Feuer, this mystery is the one short-listed in a contest (first prize is publication). I'm glad you think the series sounds like a fun one. I have dozens of titles, more than I can ever write, because the punny ones are so fun and easy to come up with. I really want to write Mint to Be and Tequila Mockingbird, but I'm not sure I'll live long enough since Taming of the Stew, Fried and Prejudice, Romeo and Julienned, Bone Appetit, and Glazed and Infused are ahead of them!
ReplyDeleteThose titles are so clever, Sharon! I am really impressed because I am horrible at coming up with titles! I've been struggling to think of a good title for my third book for months! It really is a talent!
ReplyDeleteWishing you the best of luck with the writing contest!
The culinary mysteries make it easy to come up with titles--just pun some food thing. It must be much harder with "real" books. Maybe you could think of an aphorism for the book theme and then twist one of more of those words. Like "A stitch in time saves nine" could become "A bitch in time saves mine". I don't know--that was a dumb one, but you get the idea.
ReplyDelete