My Weblog

Happy, merry

by Kris Neri, with the Femmes Fatales

December is such a special month. It’s when we come together with loved ones and reconnect with our warmest, special traditions. For those on a spiritual path, we find peace and hope through our forms of worship. 

I wish all of you the happiest and healthiest of holidays.

My gift to you this year is a traditional recipe for bizcochitos or
biscochitos, as some spell it. Bizcochitos became the official cookie of New Mexico in 1989, making it the first official cookie in the US. Most states still don’t have an official cookie, though many have made other foods official.

According to legend, this pastry came from Spain with the colonists who settled in the Santa Fe area. They have been a New Mexican tradition ever since, especially at Christmas, though they’re also made for weddings and other festive occasions.

This is a classic recipe, and the one I use, though if you’d like to see some variation, you can only find a million or so online: 

Ingredients:

6 cups flour

3 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1 pound lard (found in boxes in the hard shortening aisle)

2 cups sugar

2 Tbsp anise seed, crushed with the side of a knife (can substitute powered or liquid anise, but the anise flavor won't be as rich) 

2 extra large eggs

1/4 cup brandy

1/4 cup sugar + 2 Tbsp cinnamon (for dusting after baking)

Directions:

Sift together flour, baking soda, and salt. Cream lard with sugar and anise seed on medium speed until light and fluffy. In a medium bowl, beat eggs well. Add eggs and brandy to creamed sugar/lard mixture and mix. 

Slowly add flour 1/2 cup at a time and mix gently until a stiff dough has formed (should look similar to piecrust dough). Don’t overwork! Remove dough, wrap, and refrigerate for at least a few hours, or overnight.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Let dough stand 20-30 minutes or until soft enough to roll out. 

Roll out dough to around 1/4 inch thick, or thicker if you prefer. Cookies should be plump. Cut with cookie cutter and place on cookie sheet covered with parchment paper. Bake 10-12 minutes or until bottom turns a golden brown.

Mix cinnamon and sugar in a bowl. When cookies come out of the oven, cool for a couple of minutes, then drop into cinnamon/sugar mixture facedown. Place on a rack for further cooling.

Some people object to using lard, on health grounds. You can substitute butter or vegetable shortening, or a combination of both. But they aren’t exactly health foods, either. Besides, aren’t the holidays a time to indulge? Lard works much better than any substitute. It will yield a light, crisp shortbread.

Others like to make theirs with orange juice or orange zest, either instead of or in addition to brandy. Can’t say that does it for me, but I’ve never favored orange pastries. Some prefer the addition of lemon zest, instead of orange. Still not something I’d care for. 

You can substitute other liquids for the brandy, such as other kinds of whiskies, or apple juice. Some bakers add a bit of vanilla, in addition to the above ingredients. I’ve never tried it, but I do have a fondness for vanilla. I’ll probably try that sometime. 

Another variation is to use more sugar and less cinnamon or the final dipping, or even more cinnamon. As for me,
I can never get too much cinnamon, so I tend to have a heavy hand with it.

So, that’s one of my holiday traditions that I happily share with you. What are some of your favorite holiday traditions?

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Books make a great gift for yourself or others! Please consider these:

Revenge on Route 66: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1937556026/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

High Crimes on the Magical Plane: https://www.amazon.com/High-Crimes-Magical-Plane-Annabelle-ebook/dp/B07MSBSM1T/ref=sr_1_2?qid=1574371591&refinements=p_27%3AKris+Neri&s=digital-text&sr=1-2&text=Kris+Neri

The Rose in the Snow: Tales of Mischief and Mayhem: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QP11K4D

Trust No One: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PDHZBHT

Write Around the Holidays

by Alexia Gordon

Thanksgiving 2019 is in the books and the holiday season has officially started. (I know some of you started way back in October but, to me, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade marks the season’s beginning.) From now until New Year’s, we’ll be inundated with holiday-themed everything. Fashion, home dec, music, movies, books, you name it. If it can be remotely connected to Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, or New Year’s, we’ll be able to buy, rent, watch, wear, listen to, or read it.

Before you accuse me of pathological grinchiness, I’m not knocking the holiday theme. I’ve got a few Christmas playlists queued on Spotify. I’m not going within ten feet of an ugly Christmas sweater but I do own a few pieces of Christmas-themed jewelry. I also own (and use) Lenox Christmas china. (Don’t judge.) I’ve added a few holiday films to my streaming watchlists and I’ve dragged the holiday movie DVDs out of the cabinet. I’m also looking for some Christmas-themed reads.

If I asked most people (perhaps, not you, as you’re reading a crime fiction blog) to recommend a Christmas-themed read, they’d probably recommend a story filled with heart-warming and peppermint-scented sweetness. But I’m in search of something less sentimental. After all, Christmas occurs during the darkest, coldest time of the year. Why shouldn’t seasonal fiction skew dark and cold? Why shouldn’t our holiday reads explore our fears as well as our hopes? One way of taming our fears is to confront them in a safe format. Books are safe. Thought-provoking, challenging, mind-expanding, maddening, yes, but safe, compared to the complicated, complex reality we navigate every day. If what we’re reading gets to be too much, we can turn the page or shut the book or set it aside until we’re ready to deal with the world depicted within.

But, you say, escapism tops your holiday wish-list. All you want for Christmas are candy canes, hot cocoa, and warm hugs. There’s nothing wrong with escapism. We turn to it to restore the feelings of safety, security, and certainty that real life too often denies us. Bring on the sentiment. (Sentiment sells, is the mantra of several streaming services eager to oblige your emotional sweet tooth with over 100 holiday rom-coms for your escapist enjoyment.) You want your holiday reads to be the warm blanket you hide under to escape the dark and cold.

Give darkness a chance. Escapism and fear are not mutually exclusive. What better way to calm your anxiety than through the vicarious pleasure of experiencing your fears being conquered on the page? Maybe you can’t slay the boogeyman rampaging through your actual life. You can imagine yourself as the protagonist who beats the bad guys in 250 pages or less. Maybe justice is harder to find in real life than Santa’s workshop. You can escape into a book where good wins and nice guys finish first.

Christmas mysteries and Christmas ghost stories are two types of fiction that fit the non-sentimental seasonal niche. Once upon a time, Christmas (or Yule to the pagans who thought of it first)—the darkest time of the year—was believed to be a time when the worlds of the living and the dead came closest, even closer than at Halloween. Ghost stories were standard fare. (Smithsonian Magazine has a good article explaining the history of the Christmas ghost story. It contains links to other articles on the tradition, as well as the names of some authors who penned spooky Christmas tales. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-do-ghost-stories-go-christmas-180961547/) It wasn’t until the puritanical Cromwell killed everyone’s buzz that these stories, along with the holiday itself, fell out of fashion. Charles Dickens revived the tradition. (“A Christmas Carol.” Ghosts. Think about it.) Others, such as M.R. James, often heralded as the master of the modern ghost story, carried it on.

Authors of crime fiction may not have consciously carried on the ancient tradition of honoring the time when the realms of the living and dead came closest, but they certainly appreciated the tension created by juxtaposing murder against all that cheer and goodwill. With happy, happy, joy, joy as a backdrop, the crime of taking a life seems all the more heinous. Thus, it feels all the more satisfying when the sleuth unmasks the killer, ensuring justice for the wronged. A Google search for “Christmas Mysteries” returned 59,500,000 results in 0.80 seconds. Agatha Christie is one of the best known. Hercule Poirot’s Christmas wasn’t very merry but it was fun to read/watch. Martha Grimes gave us Jerusalem Inn. Thanks to Martin Edwards and the British Library, we’ve rediscovered believed-lost classics like, J. Jefferson Farjeon’s Mystery in White. Both Crime Reads (https://crimereads.com/christmas-mysteries-a-tradition-revived/) and Book Bub (https://www.bookbub.com/blog/christmas-mystery-books) offer further suggestions for your Yuletide reading, as do The Strand magazine (https://strandmag.com/top-ten-holiday-mysteries/), Dead Good Books (https://www.deadgoodbooks.co.uk/classic-christmas-crime/), and about 59 million others.

I’ve focused on Christmas because that’s the holiday I celebrate. Suggest some favorite, non-sentimental reads focused on Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and New Year’s. Thanksgiving, Advent, and Epiphany, too. (Hint: Death in D Minor, my second Gethsemane Brown novel, is set during the run-up to Epiphany.) Or name drop some of your favorite reads that flirt with the dark side of Christmas.

 

Also rans

by Donna Andrews of the Femmes Fatales.

Every year I do a calendar, using the 13 best photos I took all year--12 months plus a cover. And every year I have photos I really like that for one reason or another just don't make it onto the calendar. Maybe they're too much like another photo I want to use this year--or used last year. Maybe they're vertical, when the calendar requires a strong horizontal. Sometimes I'm not quite sure why

So here are some of the also-rans for my 2020 calendar . . . with one that I am using, slipped into the mix. And I'm giving away a calendar to the first person who can guess which one I DID use. (At least which one I'm using right now, as I'm writing this. I reserve the right to change my mind!)