Interviews
Joanne Fluke
BLACKBERRY PIE MURDER
Exclusive Q&A for BN.com
Hannah's mother, Delores, changes her mind so many times about what food she wants served at her wedding! Is Delores based on anyone you know in real life?
Delores does change her mind frequently when it comes to her wedding preparations. In that respect, and only in that respect, she's a lot like my Grandmother. When it was Gammie's turn to host a ladies luncheon with her friends, she went into a regular tizzy about which dessert we should serve. She'd begin to deliberate at least two weeks before the affair. Of course Mom and I would help by suggesting things we knew she liked and, at that time, she would decide on one. The next day she'd come down the stairs for breakfast and say she'd been thinking about it and she'd changed her mind. One time that I remember in particular, Gammie didn't reach a final decision until the night before the luncheon. And then she chose the first dessert that we'd suggested!
You may have noticed that someone else in the Swensen family also has trouble reaching a decision. Both Mike Kingston and Norman Rhodes have proposed to Hannah, but she still hasn't married either one of them. Will Hannah eventually choose? I don't have a clue. She hasn't told me yet!
If you were planning a wedding reception dinner, what would you make for dessert?
If I were planning a big event like a wedding reception dinner I'd choose something easy, something that could be made in advance and served rapidly, something attractive, and something that I thought almost everyone who attended would enjoy. One of my very favorite desserts is something that fits into all those categories. It's mixed and sugared berries in a tall, fluted dessert glass with a generous dollop of my cr?me fraiche on top. Since my recipe for pseudo cr?me fraiche can be prepared hours before serving, I would put these desserts together in advance, refrigerate them, and then simply sprinkle the top with a little brown sugar. (The recipe for my homemade cr?me fraiche is in Strawberry Shortcake Murder.)
In the bonus scene you wrote for the exclusive B&N edition of BLACKBERRY PIE MURDER, Hannah's sisters are helping her prepare for a dinner party. Do you have any helpers who you call on when you need an extra set of hands in the kitchen?
I do have an extra set of hands in the kitchen whenever I prepare for a large celebration. The hands belong to my son, John, who's an excellent cook in his own right.
The night before Thanksgiving, I baked the pies: both pumpkin and pecan. John peeled the potatoes and put them in salted water in the refrigerator. He also made the dressing. (In my family, we call it "stuffing" if it's inside the turkey and "dressing" if we bake it in a casserole dish or a crockpot.
We started the next morning at 6AM by getting the turkey ready to roast and boiling the potatoes for the Make Ahead Mashed Potatoes. We also prepared a wheel of cooked, chilled asparagus with a side dish of dressing. We got out my phalanx of crockpots (I have 6 at last count). My Make Ahead Mashed Potatoes went in the biggest crockpot and the dressing in the second largest. We prepared my Green Beans with a Twist, a baked yam dish, and my Holiday Rice. Then we set the tables lined up all the crockpots and serving dishes for our buffet, and had 5 minutes to spare before the first guests arrived.
It was fun, but it was also a lot of work to prepare the traditional Thanksgiving feast for 36 people. The moment the last guest left, I put the leftovers away and went to bed. John told me that he went home and did the same.
(Most of these holiday recipes are inSugar Cookie Murder.)
In the special B&N edition of BLACKBERRY PIE MURDER, Hannah makes Scottish Shortbread from a recipe she got from her grandmother. Do you have a favorite recipe that's been passed down throughout the generations in your family?
I have several favorite family recipes and I've used most of them in the Hannah series. My Grandmother's Buttermilk Pie is one and I used it in Blackberry Pie Murder. Then there's my mother's Lemon Meringue Pie, which is in Lemon Meringue Pie Murder. I also have Gammie's Molasses Crackles (Strawberry Shortcake Murder) and Mom's Chocolate Chip Crunch Cookies, which are inChocolate Chip Cookie Murder.
I'd better stop with that. I have too many favorites and writing about them is making me hungry. It's breakfast time right now and I might just have dessert for breakfast!
Do you memorize the specific measurements for your recipe or do you measure by taste?
My grandmother was the only one in our family that could bake without using a measuring cup. We had a flour canister, a big one, and she would reach in, scoop out handfuls of flour and dump them into the mixing bowl. The same went for sugar. I don't think Gammie measured anything including any liquids in the recipe. I remember asking her how she could tell the amount of flour and sugar to use. She replied, "That's simple, honey. You just add until there's enough." Mom and I never quite picked up Gammie's trick of not measuring and we relied on measuring cups and measuring spoons instead.
