Tag: Frankie Bow

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Two-Ingredient Super Healthful Tomato Beef Bone Broth

I’m very lucky to have access to meat (and other products) from grass-fed Hawaii cattle. Once in a while soup bones become available at the local grocery store. If you see these, buy them. Six big pieces, if you can get them.

Some say bone broth is good for joints, digestion and general health. What I can say for sure is that the bone, meat and marrow will make your soup taste rich and delicious. Now for the second ingredient: Arrabbiata Sauce.

Napa Valley Bistro - Arrabbiata Pasta Sauces

You should always have a few jars of this in your pantry. (I happen to like Mezzetta, but the SF Chronicle’s taste testers preferred Rao’s. Safeway Select is a good inexpensive choice if you have that available.)

Put the bones and sauce into a slow cooker with enough water to reach the top. Add some salt, because you just watered down the sauce. Cook for 12-24 hours.

You’ll get a lot of meat from the bones, and some of the marrow will soften and dissolve in the soup.

The bones are going to fall apart so make sure to fish out the bone pieces before you serve this. You don’t want to get hit with some ungrateful dinner guest’s dental repair bill.

[OPTIONAL THIRD INGREDIENT: A BAG OF FROZEN VEGETABLES]

Asparagus Stir Fry

After you take out the bones, you can dump in a bag of mixed mushrooms or Westpac asparagus stir fry and cook until the vegetables are done.

Obligatory Spam mention: cut up leftover Spam into cubes and boil in the soup for extra flavor.

This is wonderful for a cold day. (The temperature here has plummeted to 71 F /22 C.  Brrr!)

 

 

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The Musubi Murder Cover Reveal!

Mahalo to my publisher, Five Star/Cengage, and to Ed and Deirdre at Encircle Graphic for a fabulous cover design!

A book cover has to grab your attention, and in a fraction of a second, tell you what kind of reading experience you’re in for. This cover clearly and colorfully signals a lighthearted murder mystery set in Hawaii. There’s a skull, which portends a murder, but the way it’s drawn, it’s not a super- scary skull. The foliage, fruit, and (of course) Spam musubis convey the lush abundance and the eclectic culture of the Hawaiian islands. The sushi grass poking out from under the musubis is a nice visual counterpoint to the palm fronds on top.

If I were browsing, I would definitely pick this one up! 

The Musubi Murder is available for preorder now from Amazon.

Hardcover design
Cover Design Contains Actual Spam Musubis!
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Recipe: Turkey Carcass Stock

In my quest to bring you the easiest (laziest) recipes possible, I present: Thirty-Second Stock. (Thirty seconds to get started, that is. The part where you pick the meat off the carcass at the end takes significantly more time.)

Sure, you could go online and find a respectable recipe like this one, but maybe you don’t want to spend a lot of time chopping celery and quartering onions and trying to figure out where the heck you’re going to find “sprigs of thyme.”

A bonus: You’ll get a lot more meat. When the turkey cooks to the ideal temperature for eating, the legs and breast are perfectly done, but the meat nearest the bone is still tough and hard to remove. When I did this last night (of course my recipes are all kitchen-tested, you think I’m making this stuff up?) I liberated another four cups of meat (!) from our sixteen-pound turkey.

Here we go:

1) Upend the turkey carcass and stuff it into a big pot. It might stick out the top a little. Wash your hands and mash it down if you can. Otherwise, don’t worry about it. It’ll loosen up and collapse as it cooks.

Excelsteel 16 Quart Stainless Steel Stockpot With Encapsulated Base, 4.5 stars on Amazon
Something like this one.

2) Sprinkle lots of Montreal Chicken Seasoning all over the carcass.

Contains sulfiting agents, so if you're allergic, just use garlic and onion powder instead.
Contains garlic, onion, orange peel, red pepper, and a bunch of other stuff I’m glad someone else put together so I don’t have to

2a) Optional: Add turmeric for color and brain health. Throw in the giblets if you have them.

3) Fill the pot with water and cook on a low boil for at least 3 hours.

4) Wait for it to cool off so you don’t burn your hands (at least a half hour). Lift the carcass into a baking pan or a big platter, pick the meat off and save for later. Strain the broth into a container.

I like glass containers, because I don’t really trust hot liquid and plastic.

4a) Did you remember to throw in the giblets? Now you can eat them! Consuming the heart of the turkey is said to endow the eater with the bird’s legendary bravery and cunning. The liver is delicious. And if you want to do some fancy gizzard thing, more power to you.

5) Obligatory Spam mention: Serve with a side of fried Spam.

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THE MUSUBI MURDER August 2015 Amazon / B&N /Powell’s /Audible / iTunes

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Education should be run “more like a business.”

Right?

And the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.

For-profit schools spend more on marketing and recruiting than on instruction.  (Amateurs.)

22.7% of those who had attended a for-profit college had defaulted on their student loans three years after the loans became due. At public institutions  the rate was 11%.  For students who had attended private nonprofit schools it was 7.5%.

“While students at for-profit schools make up only 10 percent of the college-going public, they consume almost a quarter of all federal financial aid.”

Publicly traded companies operating for-profit colleges had an 
average profit margin of 19.7 percent, generated a total of $3.2 billion in pre-tax profit and paid an average of $7.3 million to their chief executive officers in 2009. So what’s the problem?

Frankie Bow’s first novel, THE MUSUBI MURDER , is available at Audible.com, Amazon.com, and iTunes.

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Recipe: Bacon Coconut Spam

Inspired by Leslie at Custard and Clues, I’m going to start posting my favorite recipes. Of course, Leslie is a gourmet chef and I am a lazy (and also terrible) cook, but I do know how to make a few things, and this thing is delicious .

1) Buy Bacon Spam. Not the regular blue can kind, and absolutely not one of those awful low-sodium/chicken parts abominations. Bacon Spam in the red can.

2) Cut it into matchsticks.

3) Fry it in coconut oil on low heat until the edges are translucent

4) Bring it to a potluck and watch it disappear. Try not to eat the whole pile yourself.

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THE MUSUBI MURDER August 2015 Amazon / B&N /Powell’s /Audible / iTunes

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The Musubi Murder audiobook now in production!

The audiobook of The Musubi Murder is now in production!

My original plan was to draw on our local theatrical talent (much of which is truly world-class!) to record the audiobook. However, I was not able to find a facility locally that would be available for the many hours of recording and production required.

So I put the project up on ACX and reached out to several local voiceover artists. All of the auditions that came in were quite good, and each artist brought something special to the reading.

In the end, I made an offer to Nicole Gose, and I’m thrilled to say that she has accepted and started production.

Voiceover artist Nicole Gose

Molly Barda, The Musubi Murder’s narrator and main character, is a big-city girl from the mainland who finds herself living and working in rural Hawaii. Nicole portrayed Molly perfectly, capturing Molly’s fish-out-of-water situation with humility, humor, and a touch of snark. Nicole also accomplished the impressive feat of switching back and forth between mainland pronunciation and Hawaiian Creole/Pidgin, giving each character a distinctive and believable voice.

Nicole was born and raised in Hawaii and is now living on the West Coast. She is an accomplished voiceover artist, with a client list that includes Apple, Disney, and Dish Network. Nicole has voiced national and international commercial and radio spots, as well as political campaigns.

We are working toward an early December release so that the audiobook will be available for holiday gift giving. The Musubi Murder is the perfect gift for Hawaii expatriates, disillusioned academics, and anyone with a really long commute.