Party Lines Fiesta Chicken Salad

Emma Barry is one of my favorite romance writers. And I'm not just saying that because she's a friend. She's one of those writers who could write cereal box copy and I'd read it and love it. But add in the romance and politics and Washington, DC settings of the Easy Part series and this West Wing loving election junkie was basically in wonktastic heaven. Party Lines is the third book in the series and while it could be read as a stand-alone, it will be richer having read the previous two books as the other two couples make appearances here and take a final curtain call at the end of this book.

Party Lines tells the story of two opposing campaign staffers working political campaigns in the run-up to the American Presidential election. Lydia Reales is an ambitious, idealistic Latina who also happens to be a Republican Presidential campaign staffer, a development that plays with both the hero's and the reader's expectations. Lydia is just starting out on the national stage and while she has all the makings of a top staffer, she runs into obstacles to being taken seriously as a professional along the way, largely because some of her superiors seem to see her as a token minority brought on board to appeal to the Latino portion of the electorate. She experiences microaggressions throughout the novel, mainly in a professional context, some of which she shrugs off, some of which irritate her. I cringed for her over and over again. It was Lydia, ambitious, competent, aggressive Lydia who really made this book for me. I might not agree with her politics, but I was rooting for her the whole way through.

While Michael Picetti is the more seasoned staffer, he has also become jaded in orchestrating run after Presidential run for various sub-par Democratic candidates. Michael assumes that Lydia is naive, in need of a friend and a Democrat like him, all because of her age and her ethnicity. But it's clear to the reader that there's some mansplaining going on during their first conversation on an airplane on the way to Iowa. And...well...after that too. He's an interesting illustration of privilege because he is aware of the issues surrounding sexism, racism and economic inequality. But he's also an educated white male, which blinds him to certain things. I liked how Barry treated this because it's both realistic and sensitively handled. I didn't dislike Michael for it, while still being able to acknowledge that some of his attitudes and utterances are insensitive.

When Lydia and Michael clash, which they do, repeatedly, both in and out of the bedroom, it's pretty explosive. Not only do they disagree on a lot of policy questions, they are at different points in their political careers. Lydia is just reaching the last camp before attempting the summit of American electioneering. Michael has been sitting at the summit for a while and is ready to start back--maybe get out of a position where he has to keep traveling all the time and settle down a bit. So these two have a lot of challenges to work through. We're kept guessing throughout, not finding out until the very end whether these two are going to be able to make it work long-term.

Unlike the first two books (and especially the second book, Private Politics), Party Lines really does explore ins and outs of American politics. There is a substantial amount of discussion about policy and elections, both between Lydia and Michael and among the various campaign staffers. Despite the fact that some readers may not enjoy the side of politics with their romance, I'm glad Barry didn't shy away from it. No matter what side of the aisle readers fall on, they will find their views fairly and equitably represented. Barry seems to be reminding us that whether or not we can agree on policy, we are all complicit in the state of our political system.

I'm desolate that this is the last book in this tremendous series. I very much enjoyed everything about it--from the focus on work and family and balancing priorities to the measured development of the romances between the characters. While these books have used romance tropes, conventions and language at every step, there's a realism to them that I don't commonly see, even in contemporaries. Lydia and Michael and the other heroes and heroines have read like me, like my friends, like the people and situations I've come to know living in DC for the last almost 20 years. I'm eager to see what Barry comes up with next.

Oh, Applebee's. How I love to hate you with your 2,000 calorie pseudo-salads large enough to feed a family of four. Though I do understand why Lydia and Michael end up there together, having what might be the strangest accidental first date ever. I did campaign field work for a while, starting with a congressional race and moving onto some issue campaigns. And at the height of campaign season, an hour to eat something that wasn't Chex Mix, any hour at all, would have left me overcome with relief. Even if it involved eating at Applebee's. Truly, campaigns leave absolutely zero time for anything other than campaigning. Well, unless that time is after midnight and involves vast quantities of red wine and/or Jack Daniels.

This salad is based on an actual Applebee's menu item, which I've never had and don't ever intend to. So this isn't precisely a copycat recipe. I just used the description on their website to come up with something that might somewhat resemble what Michael orders in that pivotal scene. Though honestly, I have to wonder what Applebee's is thinking here. The original menu item purports to have "chimichurri-glazed chicken" which does make any sense to me because chimichurri is an Argentinian condiment comprised mainly of olive oil and parsley. How you make a "glaze" out of oil was impenetrable to me.

So instead I basically made broiled southwestern style chicken slices and topped the whole thing off with black bean and corn salsa, a bit of cheddar cheese and used the chimichurri as a dressing. It makes more than you'll need, but is traditionally used on any kind of grilled or roasted fish, fowl or meat. So you can use it to dress up a simple dish later in the week if you end up with extra.

Finally, I've called for crumbled tortilla chips here to add a little bit of extra crunch as a garnish. I actually went ahead and deep-fried five thinly-sliced corn tortillas in about two cups of vegetable oil in a small saucepan, but frankly, that's a lot of effort and mess for a topping. So you could do that or you could take the easier route (which admittedly didn't occur to me until after I'd eaten the salad) and just do the crumbled chip thing.

I might be a complete snob when it comes to Applebee's, but hopefully I'm not totally unreasonable.

Fiesta Chicken Salad
Makes: 4 servings
Time: 90 minutes (30 minutes hands-on)

Marinade
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (approximately 1 pound), sliced on the diagonal
1/4 cup lime juice (from 2 limes)
3 garlic cloves, minced
3 tablespoons cilantro
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper
1/4 teaspoon cumin

Black Bean & Corn Salsa
1 15.5 ounce can black beans
1 15.5 ounce can corn
1 12 ounce jar roasted red peppers
1/2 red onion, diced
1/4 cup cilantro, minced
1 jalapeno, seeds & ribs removed, minced
1 tablespoon cumin
2 tablespoons lime juice (from 1 lime)
salt and pepper to taste

Chimichurri Dressing & Salad
1 cup packed fresh Italian (flat) parsley
1/2 cup olive oil
1/3 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 cup packed cilantro
2 garlic cloves
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 heads Boston or Bibb lettuce
4 ounces of cheddar cheese, shredded
crumbled tortilla chips for garnish

1. Combine marinade ingredients in a medium bowl. Cover and refrigerate for 1 hour.

2. Combine salsa ingredients in a medium bowl and set aside. I started with 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon black pepper. It's pretty flavorful already so it doesn't need much.

3. Adjust oven rack to top third of the oven and preheat the broiler. Cover a cookie tray in aluminum foil and arrange marinated chicken slices in a single layer. Broil for 5 minutes, flip using tongs and broil for an additional 3 minutes.

4. Add dressing ingredients to a food processor or blender (minus the lettuce, cheese & tortilla chips) and mix until combined.

5. Tear lettuce into pieces and distribute among four plates. Top with 1/2 cup salsa, 1 ounce shredded cheese, 1/4 of the chicken, a few crumbled tortilla chips and about a tablespoon of the dressing. All ingredients can be made up to a day ahead and refrigerated. This chicken is just as good cold as it is hot.

Disclosure: I received Party Lines from the author for review purposes. We also converse frequently via email and Twitter.

Private Politics Ben's Chili Bowl Copy-Cat Chili Dogs

[Elisabeth here. I gushed so effusively about Liam, the hero of Emma Barry's latest DC-set romance, that my husband pestered me until I let him read it. I asked if he had any thoughts he wanted to include in my review. As it turned out, he had lots of thoughts. So I just let him write it. I'll pick back up with the recipe after his thoughts about the book.]

If you had told me two years ago that I would be an avid reader of romance novels, I would very likely not have believed you. And if you had told me, right after Elisabeth persuaded me to start reading my first romance novel (for the record, Hard Day’s Knight by Katie MacAlister) that I would be writing a romance novel review for her blog, I would have definitely been skeptical. But my wife knows me well, sometimes better than I know myself. She knows that I like a good story, even though I wasn’t much of a fiction reader when we first met. To borrow a phrase from the Most Interesting Man in the World, I don’t often read fiction, but when I do, I demand good stories and fully-rounded characters. The romances Elisabeth has steered me towards definitely meet that criteria, and today’s review, Private Politics by Emma Barry, is no exception.

Private Politics is the second of a series of romances by Barry set in contemporary Washington, DC, but it can be read as a stand-alone. The heroine, Alyse Philips, is the daughter of a wealthy New York City family who is forging her own path in DC as the star fundraiser for a non-profit. She wants to do something with her life that she finds meaningful instead of the plans she suspects her family has for her (move back to NYC, settle down with an ambitious up-and-comer alpha male, and follow the typical socialite life). But her plans start to go awry when she discovers some suspicious discrepancies in the charity’s books during an annual audit. Torn between protecting her perceived reputation (including her prospects for continued DC employment and therefore independence from her family) and the growing doubts about the legality of her current employer, she ends up working with Liam Nussbaum to get to the bottom of things.

Liam is a political blogger and budding investigative journalist. He’s an acquaintance of Alyse’s, and has been nursing a crush on her for six months. However, he considers her unattainable – she’s beautiful, successful, and desirable, all qualities he believes he lacks. From the beginning of his involvement with Alyse’s problem, Liam is torn between his natural desire to help her and help set things right, and his struggle to hide his growing desire for her. As the case gets deeper, and Liam and Alyse get more involved with the scandal and each other, she starts to key into Liam’s better qualities – his honesty, his enthusiasm, his political street-smarts – and begins to develop a crush on him as well. At which point… well, I won’t spoil the details, but it’s a romance novel. You can work out the end results.

So what made this book in particular so intriguing to me – enough so that I agreed without hesitation to write this review? First, I immediately related to Liam. He’s definitely not your typical Fabio-body-Greek-tycoon-expense-account-Casanova-charm mutant hero found in many romance novels. (Or so I’m told – Elisabeth has fed me on a steady diet of novels with quirky heroes). But he’s probably the character who has come closest thus far to being someone like me in real life – someone who doesn’t have six-pack abs, isn’t rich, and is actually somewhat in awe of the lady love of his life. I got his point of view immediately, even the bad parts (he wavers between holding himself aloof from Alyse to doing the emotional dump truck on her and back again). Which brings me to the second point – the sexual relationship between them looks (and reads) real to me. They don’t immediately go from zero to mutually-assured-simultaneous orgasms. Their first encounters are, well, messy, and it takes them some time (and conflicts) to work through that. Third, the tension ran right up to the end of the book. In fact, the conflicts in Private Politics were painful enough for me to have to take short breaks afterwards to reorient myself, but in this case it didn’t seem too forced. The final resolution fit quite well with who Liam and Alyse are shown to be in the story – and being able to craft a story that honors the personalities of the characters is a great thing.

In short, I liked Private Politics very much, and heartily recommend it. So I guess, counter to all of my prior expectations, I am a romance reviewer after all. But there is one thing I am NOT, and that is a first-class chef. So for the food porn side of the post, I will turn things back over to my lovely Elisabeth.

Hi! Elisabeth again! That was fun, huh? I can't promise you'll see him a lot, but I thought his perspective on this one was even better than mine. I also really loved the book. I've been gushing about it to anyone who would listen, actually. But to get to the recipe, before three weeks ago, I hadn’t eaten at Ben’s Chili Bowl in 10 years. It’s one of those things you do a lot in your 20s when you live in DC, but eventually you get a decent apartment with a good kitchen and you stop going out drinking five nights a week. However, thanks to this review, the staff at the new Arlington location now know me on sight. I’ve eaten there four times in two weeks.

The process behind coming up with this recipe was completely whackadoodle in case you hadn’t figured that out already. I'm obsessive and this recipe played right into that. I Googled around, hoping that someone had come up with a reasonable approximation for the chili sauce Ben’s serves on their half-smokes. I was kind of surprised when most of what I found didn’t seem to match what I was seeing and tasting. But then, I’m really not an expert at this restaurant copy-cat recipe stuff. So what you’re getting here is my best guess.

As for what I ended up with, for one thing, half-smokes are not hot dogs. They’re half beef, half pork smoked sausages. I don’t know if they’re seriously a DC thing or what, but I had to go all the way to Eastern Market to find them as my local Northern Virginia butchers were completely unhelpful. German sausages? Oh yeah. Eight types. Half-smokes? Nope. But I bet if you ask your local butcher for some kind of smoked sausage, you’ll be happy enough with the result.

Most chili consists of some combination of beef, tomato product, beef stock, chili powder, onions, garlic and other spices. My normal everyday chili has actually already made an appearance here on the blog for Molly O’Keefe’s Never Been Kissed. But the Ben’s Chili Bowl chili sauce doesn’t have beans in it. In fact, it doesn’t seem to have anything healthy in it at all. I’m pretty sure the onions are of the dried sort, the garlic is likely garlic powder and the 80/20 ground beef really isn’t optional. What the recipes I found online did get me was the addition of masa harina, which is a cornmeal product used to make corn tortillas. There’s definitely something corn-related in it because I can taste it and rubbing the sauce around on a plate yielded some undissolved lumps of it. Most grocery stores have it in the Latin American section, but if yours doesn’t, I suppose you could try using fine ground cornmeal?

As for the rest, I used this Youtube video as a jumping off point and then guessed and tasted, and tasted and guessed from there. I honestly think I came up with a pretty reasonable approximation as I tasted my version and Ben's side-by-side. Nevertheless, it’s a pretty flavorful chili sauce, so even if it isn’t exact, it should make a decent dinner.

And when Alyse and Liam grow up, they can move out to the suburbs and make it at home instead of having to drive all the way into the city (well, except to buy the damned half-smokes).

Ben's Chili Bowl Half-Smokes with Chili Sauce
adapted from Tom's Test Kitchen
Serves: 6 reasonably, 4 obnoxiously


1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
3 tablespoons dehydrated onion
2 teaspoons beef bouillon powder
3 tablespoons chili powder
1 tablespoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon red curry powder

1/2 teaspoon turmeric

1/4 teaspoon cayenne
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
3 tablespoons masa harina

1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon tomato paste
3 cups water, divided
1 pound ground beef (80/20)
sea salt to taste

6 mild half-smokes
6 white hot dog buns
French's yellow mustard
1 small onion, chopped

1. Mix the first 10 ingredients together in a bowl. Whisk in 1 cup water, making sure all the spices are evenly distributed and there are no lumps.

2. Put the ground beef in a pot with remaining 2 cups water. Stir the beef and water to break up the beef into very fine bits. You don’t want any ground beef chunks. Bring to a boil.

3. Add the spice mixture, bay leaf and tomato paste, stir to combine well. Turn down the heat to low and simmer [4/25/15: uncovered] for 60-70 minutes or until chili sauce is still loose, but not liquidy with unabsorbed water. Adjust salt to taste, keeping in mind that the half-smokes are pretty salty on their own. I didn't add any additional salt.

4. With about 15 minutes left in the cooking time, put your half-smokes on the grill. I don’t have a grill so I do what I usually do with sausage, which is to put the half-smokes in a frying pan on the stove with about 1/4 inch of water in it over medium-high heat. Cover and allow to steam for 5 minutes. Remove cover for remaining 10 minutes, allowing the water to boil off and the sausage to brown, turning once. They should be black on two sides when ready to serve.

5. Place a hot dog bun on plate. Add one sausage, about a tablespoon of chopped onion, a drizzle of plain yellow mustard and about half a cup of chili sauce. It will be very messy. Serve with ridged potato chips for scooping up extra chili sauce that falls out.

Disclosure: Private Politics was given to me by the author for review purposes. The author and I also have a friendly relationship on Twitter.