Joint Review of Grace Draven's Radiance & Entreat Me at The Immersed Reader + Giveaway Winner!

A quickie post to say that I'm visiting with Ana Coqui at Immersed in Books today. We read Entreat Me and Radiance, both by Grace Draven and chatted about both books. I liked one better than the other. For what we thought about these fantasy romances, check out Ana's blog.

Also, Blogiversary Week is over for the year and this morning I drew the winner of the $50 Amazon giftcard. Congratulations, Lorn L. You win! I'll be emailing soon to find out your ebook store preference.

And thank you again to everyone for reading and commenting and loving romance and food right along with me this past year. You're the best!

Blogiversary Week: The Gag Reel

If you missed it the first two days of this week, it's Cooking Up Romance's first blogiversary! I'm celebrating by giving away a $50 Amazon Giftcard, which you can enter to win here.


If you've ever looked at one of my photos and thought, "Aw, how come my food doesn't look that good?!?" this post is for you. Because not everything works for me either. I just tend not to publish my failures. Although if you follow me on Twitter, you probably have a sense of how often I burn myself doing something stupid. It's...a lot.


Not every oops involves injury though and there has been a bloggy learning curve. For instance, whenever I open up the folder where I store all my Cooking Up Romance photos, right in the upper right hand corner--the first thing I see--is a folder entitled "all the f*cking tarts". You can probably guess how I was feeling by the time I finally published my review of Laura Florand's book The Chocolate Thief. Those sexy French pastry chefs sure set a high standard! But the main problem was that I hadn't figured out the settings on my camera yet and got, well, this.

In case you can't tell, that's out of focus, the color balance is wrong, the composition is terrible and the wrinkled placemat was a particularly nice touch, I thought. But I didn't look at the photos until we'd eaten all the tarts. I had to make them all over again in order to get better photos. I've gotten better, thank goodness! And lesson learned. Look at the photos BEFORE eating the food.

Then there are the recipes I love and everyone else hates.

Aren't those adorable little petit fours? When Alexis Hall's Liberty and Other Stories came out at the beginning of the year, I made three batches of what I thought were going to be the perfect quirky petit fours. Unfortunately, I sent them to work with my husband and they were...well...just a little too quirky. Turns out nobody else liked the combination of Lapsang Souchong (a smoky flavored tea) and vanilla buttercream as much as I did.

Still pretty though.

Here's a fun one. I was super inspired by Jackie Ashenden's hero in Living in Shadow. He's from West Africa originally and I thought it might be interesting to try making some traditional West African cuisine. I was drawn to a recipe on an ex-pat site that suggested making pepper sauce for plantain fritters out of 20 Scotch bonnet peppers. Not 2, but 20. Two. Zero. That's a shit ton of EXTREMELY HOT PEPPERS.

Um. I thought I was going to die. Or permanently kill off all my taste buds or something. I've got a pretty good tolerance for spice, but that one? Well, let's just say it exceeded it. The final recipe ended up with ONE Scotch bonnet pepper. And it was still pretty hot. OUCH.

Then there are the recipes that are delicious and perfect...and resemble a scene from Sweeney Todd. There have actually been several of these, the most egregious of which was the duck with citrus cherry port sauce I made for my review of 1960s romance Nurse Janice Calling. Once you see the bloody pulp and blood spatters, you can't unsee it. Go ahead, thank me.

*insert horror movie sound effects here*

Finally, there was the time I dropped my phone onto a tray of just-piped meringue dessert cups. I didn't take a photo of that one though. You'll just have to take my word for it. My vast and creative vocabulary of four-letter and other not-for-polite-company words.


What about your impressive kitchen disasters? Come on--tell me about the time you set the stove on fire. (I've totally done it, just not in the past year.)

Confession time!

First Blogiversary Thanks & Giveaway

There's something about milestones that get people thinking. And thanking. There's nothing inherently different this week than any other week, except that now I've been writing Cooking Up Romance for a full year as of May 10th. Oh, and I'm doing a giveaway this week to say thanks for reading! Scroll down for that.

I never imagined how readily and warmly I'd be accepted into this weird little community we call Romland. But right from the beginning, writers Shari Slade, Alexandra Haughton and Amy Jo Cousins befriended my little egg self on Twitter with zero followers and zero clue. Since then I've started beta reading for Shari (which is literally the best thing about this whole blogger-reviewer business), bonded over musical theater with Lexi and spent many happy Thursday evenings rewatching West Wing with Amy Jo and my #westwingclub buddies.

I've become fast friends with reviewers Maria Rose and Ana Coqui, sharing the ups and downs of life, of good books and bad ones. You gals keep me (reasonably) sane.

Writers Emma Barry and Amber Belldene have been invaluable in beta reading the essays and guest posts I've written over the past year, pointing out flaws in my logic and writing and alerting me to on-coming cliffs to avoid. And Megan Mulry for always making me feel like I have something to say that matters.

Seeing a photo of Sarah Frantz Lyons' beautiful tattoos on Twitter brought me her profound wisdom and intelligence. This year would have been a much sadder one without her friendship, not the least because that acquaintance brought me a newfound love of queer romance. And shortly thereafter Alexis Hall, whose books and whose insights on the romances we read together for AAR have enriched my soul. And sometimes left me laughing in a heap on the floor.

And finally, Bree Bridges, who brought me Dragon Age. Nuff said.

I've also discovered buckets full of new-to-me writers over the past year--most notably Delphine Dryden, Carolyn Crane, Rose Lerner, KJ Charles and Jeffe Kennedy--whose very different, but brilliant romances remind me of the enormous potential of this genre every time I pick one up.

Also fun has been the guest posts I've both been invited to write and foisted upon people. I did a post for Wonkomance, one of my very favorite romance blogs. I've guest posted several times with Alexis on All About Romance, an amazingly long-lived and positive community of romance lovers, bloggers and commenters that continues to be my go-to place for reviews and best-of lists of every kind of romance. I wrote about February's Popular Romance conference at the Library of Congress for Romance Novels for Feminists, the blog that got me into blogging in the first place, which then got picked up on Teach Me Tonight, the blog for popular romance academics, which still feels like a crazy huge honor because those people are just so darn smart. And I got to do a Valentine's Day menu for the Romantic Times website, which still kinda makes my eyes bug out of my head.

None of this would be possible of course without my husband, who puts up with my annoying extroverted-thinker tendencies when I have to tease out a particular post, Chipotle runs when I've got a book I absolutely must finish or when it gets too dark to take photos of whatever I had intended to serve for dinner and the occasional repeat of a meal three days in a row while I refine my recipes. Oh, and his coworkers, who eat all the baked goods so I don't have to. I love you, darling. And sorry, yes, we're having salmon again tonight.

Last, but not least, it brings me such joy to see people pick up the books I've recommended and try the recipes I've invented. Your tweets and comments are what keeps this fun for me. So all my thanks to readers new and old.And to show just how much I like all of you, I'm giving away a $50 Amazon gift card. This giveaway is available worldwide and can be transmuted to a giftcard to the ebook retailer of your choice, which I'll work out with the winner, to be chosen at random at 11:59 pm EDT on May 18th, which gives you a whole week to enter!

a Rafflecopter giveaway
 
Cake photo above from this post about Queer Romance Month.