Alli Wesson: Guest and Personal Chef from the "DInner is Served" Culinary Mystery Series

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.

Sharon:  Umm. I just tried a bite of that recipe. Oh, yummy! Thanks to Alli Wesson, visiting from Mission Impastable in the “Dinner is Served” culinary mystery series by Sharon Arthur Moore. We hope to see you again--and in print! Oh, and don’t forget to check out the Cooking with Gina and Alli video on YouTube, “Hermosillo Salsa” at http://bit.ly/XgepIq

Tweet Me Well: @Good2Tweat

You may have met Alli Wesson, my personal chef character (from the “Dinner is Served” culinary mystery series I am writing) when she dropped by for an interview at my writing blog, http://samwriteaway.blogspot.com/. She is quite a character, so to speak!

Anyway, Alli and I were talking about how we’re going to develop a marketing plan for the “Dinner is Served” books. One thing that occurred to me, and Alli just loved it, was to start a Twitter following of her recipes. That is such the hot thing these days among foodies. It makes such sense, too. She is virtual, so why not do virtual food?

So I set up a Twitter account. Follow me there @good2tweat. I promise some cooking tips, food facts, and recipes in miniature. Come to think of it, that may be one reason I am so taken with tweeting recipes: I make miniature room settings and dollhouses. This fits perfectly with my interests in other areas. Sometimes I will provide the more traditional version of the recipe here for those without Twitter and/or people who like their food prep spelled out.

That would not be my character, Alli, but her partner in crime, Gina likes things clear. So the recipes on this site will be for Gina.

I ordered Eat Tweet: 1,020 Recipe Gems (Maureen Evans), and I follow Maureen on Twitter. She is amazing! She was not only the first to tweet recipes, she does really unusual stuff, complicated recipes, even ethnic ones. And she does it in 140 characters or fewer. That includes spaces and punctuation by the way. To show you what I mean, here is a recipe from Alli that appears in Prime Rib and Punishment, the book I am currently writing:

Savory Butter: Pulse n mini fd proc .5cbutter/3T bell pep/1grn onion/1clv garlic.

Sprd bread or Portobello shrooms n grill. Srv 1T on cookd meat.

Gina’s version of Savory Butter would be:

½ c butter

3 T bell peppers, a mix or just one color

1 green onion

1 clove of garlic, minced

Pulse the butter, peppers, onion and garlic in a mini food processor until finely chopped. Use as a spread on bread to grill, spread over the gills of a Portobello mushroom and grill, or put 1 T on your cooked pork or steak before serving.

I’ve begun tweeting some recipes. Those of you who like word puzzles AND cooking can enjoy them! Look for me on Twitter now @good2tweat and you will find cooking tips, recipes, and food facts accumulating.

Whether you like to cook or not, you may have friends who do. Let them in on Twitter recipes. Build up my traffic for that Twitter account! Retweet me to all your friends.