BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

As you are all well aware, E K  and I celebrated our 22nd anniversary on Halloween this year. Many of you already know there is a long and involved story behind the courtship, wedding, and our forgetting that costumed kiddies would be knocking on our door during the ceremony – the ceremony and reception were both held at our house. For those of you who may be new to this blog, you can read about it here (if you so desire) – The Mahwage Blogs

The other thing you long time readers know is that I am the cook in the family and that the kitchen is my domain. On our anniversary we usually go out for dinner, but sometimes circumstances dictate that we stay in for the evening. Such was the case on this recent Halloween 2009.

But, stay in or no, we are talking about Evil Kat here and a celebration of my 22 years of indentured servitude to her redheaded evilness, so obviously dinner needed to be something special or terrible and horrible things would happen to me.

So, I fixed a dinner fit for an Evil Redhead and all was good. After said meal,  being ecstatic that I would live to see another day, I posted the following Facebook status update:

Much to my surprise comments were flying left and right with folks jokingly begging invites to my house. However, among the comments were also requests for the recipes, and one of them came from Reverend Alicia Lyon Folberth who wanted to know if she could include them in an upcoming cookbook being produced for her temple.

Since many of my dishes are created spur of the moment, I didn’t necessarily have a recipe at hand and wasn’t quite sure where to start, especially since a good portion of this particular meal relies simply on knowing how to cook a steak. However, after ruminating a bit I managed to jog my memory enough put something on paper for her. And, since there were many others who won’t have access to the cookbook proper, I thought maybe I’d post the recipes here.

Besides, if her supreme evilness decides she wants this again I might need to refresh my memory with my own blog…

E Kay’s 22nd Anniversary Dinner

Irish Whisky Marinated Ribeye Steaks with Crab, Feta, and Herb Butter
Grilled Vodka-Lime Portabello Mushrooms
Steamed Broccoli

(Serves 2 – adjust ingredients as needed for larger group)

INGREDIENTS:

2 Good Quality Trimmed Ribeye Steaks – I prefer Black Angus, dry aged

2 Large Portabello Mushrooms

1 Large Head Fresh Broccoli

1 6 oz Can Lump Crabmeat (Unless you have access to fresh)

1 4 oz Container Crumbled Feta Cheese

1 Large Head of Garlic

Sun Dried Tomatoes

1 Fresh Lime

¼ Lb Sweet Cream Butter (1 Stick)

2 Tbsp Sweet Cream Butter

Olive Oil

Worcestershire

Vodka

Pepper Vodka (Optional)

Bushmills Irish Whiskey

Dark Brown Sugar

Salt

Pepper

Paprika

Basil (Dried)

Onion Powder

INITIAL PREPARATION:

The following should be done 2 to 3 hours prior to cooking

For The Crab-Feta Mixture –

Soften ¼ Lb (1 stick) butter. Drain crabmeat and place in bowl with softened butter and 4 ounces of crumbled feta cheese. Add dried basil, 2 minced garlic cloves, 1 Tbsp minced sun dried tomatoes. Mix until fully incorporated. Refrigerate.

For The Portabello Mushrooms –

Remove stems and gills from mushrooms. Clean and rinse in cold water. Pat dry. Place in bowl. Add juice of one lime, 2 minced garlic cloves, and ¼ cup olive oil to cup and mix well. Pour over mushrooms, seal bowl and refrigerate.

For The Broccoli –

Rinse, chop into florets, peel and chop stem. Rinse again, drain, refrigerate.

For The Ribeye Steaks –

How far ahead you do this step is entirely dependent upon the level of flavor you are seeking from the whisky marinade. I suggest 3 hours, however, I have done it at 30 minutes for a milder flavor or even as long as 8 hours for a stronger flavor.

Mix 3 Tbsp dark brown sugar with 4 ounces Bushmills Irish Whisky. If necessary, microwave for 10 – 15 seconds in order to gently warm and fully dissolve sugar. Place steaks in a shallow dish and Spoon one fourth of the mixture over steaks. Flip steaks and spoon another one fourth of the mixture over them. Reserve remaining Whisky marinade. Cover and refrigerate steaks unless you are going to be cooking them right away.

COOKING:

Remove all items from refrigerator 30 to 45 minutes prior to cooking.

Place broccoli in steamer basket and steam in covered pan with 2-3 inches of water. OPTIONAL: Add an ounce of pepper vodka to the water as well. Melt 2 Tbsp butter. When finished steaming, drizzle broccoli with melted butter, salt and pepper to taste.

Heat a grill pan or stainless steel skillet and add 2 to 3 tablespoons olive oil. Using tongs, sear mushrooms in hot oil, approximately 5-7 minutes per side. Remove mushrooms to shallow dish. To the hot skillet add remaining marinade from bowl and 2 ounces vodka. Deglaze pan. Allow to reduce by ¼ and pour over mushrooms.

30 minutes prior to cooking drizzle both sides of ribeye steaks with Worcestershire. Season liberally with onion powder and paprika. Salt and pepper to taste. Drizzle with remaining whisky marinade. Preheat Oven to 500 degrees or use broiler if you prefer.

Quickly sear steaks in cast iron or all metal skillet, approximately 3 minutes per side. In the center of each place a generous dollop of the crab-feta-butter mixture. Place skillet in oven or broiler and cook to desired level of doneness.

Allow steaks to rest 5 minutes before serving.

Quickly, while meat is resting, separate oil and grease from the liquid in the skillet (I have a separator cup I use). Discard grease and oil. Place skillet over high heat, return juices and 1 ounce bushmills to pan and deglaze. Reduce by ½ and pour over steaks immediately before serving.

Notes:

Multitasking is a pre-requisite, as you will end up doing all of the above simultaneously.

Mix tall vodka tonic with twist of lime for your spouse and one for yourself.

Eat your dinner.

Clean up kitchen.

Hand out candy to trick or treaters while working jigsaw puzzle with wife and daughter.

Have pre-purchased Ben ‘n Jerry’s for dessert.

You will likely have some of the crab-feta-butter mixture left. I generally will use it for a crostini or on crackers.

More to come…

Murv

This is a typo. This is a typo on drugs… Any questions?

Today’s missive is just a quick Public Service Announcement. Granted, it is as much for my own sanity as it is for serving the public… Actually, it might not serve the public that much… Maybe not at all… But, I’m pretty sure it will make me feel better, so I’m going to do it anyway… (and, as it turns out, it’s nowhere near as quick as I thought it was going to be…)

So, anywho… Long about once each year I receive an email from someone who is itching to tell about “it.” I mean literally, they want to tell me about the word “it.” In particular, the possessive form “its” and the contraction for “it is,” that being “it’s.” You see, these folks are under the impression I don’t know the difference.

To be fair, I can see where they may believe this to be true. I’ll explain that in just a minute. But, moving right along…

Sometimes these folks are exceptionally rude and pedantic about “it.” They have even been known to call me names and write very uppity, nasty, holier-than-thou missives, talking down to me from their crumbling pedestals – I say crumbling because it never fails that the folks who elect to be nasty about “it” send letters and email that are riddled with other typos and horrendous grammatical errors. To their credit, however, they do get “it” correct. But, credit or no, I think these people should seek counseling for anger management and learn to interact with others sans the attitude.

Now, on the other hand, some folks are very nice about it. While the belabored point is still very annoying to me, I can appreciate folks who are nice and to them I raise a glass. Hell, I actually take the time to answer their letters and emails about “it.”

The nasty folks, not so much…

At any rate, time has rolled around again for me to receive an email about “it.” This time the young lady was very nice about it and we exchanged a few notes, played with pencils on the group W bench, and generally had a good time. So, no problem there…

Still, in the interest of trying to make this whole thing go away – which I never, ever will I’m sure – not that I won’t keep trying – we have today’s blog entry.

Around a decade ago, my first novel landed on bookstore shelves. Harm None: A Rowan Gant Investigation. Not my best work… I mean, hell, it’s a first novel. Even so, it’s pretty damn good – in my opinion, anyway. Good enough that it is in its umpteenth printing at this point. But, I’m not here to brag on Harm None. I’m here to apologize for an error that in and of itself is a comedy of errors. A sad, tragic, and painful comedy, but a comedy nonetheless. Both the publisher and I have apologized for this screw-up countless times. However, I suspect I will continue to do so for the rest of my life when I receive my annual complaint email.

You see, it’s like this – As is often done, a manuscript will see a rough layout and be bound with basic cover art, all for the purpose of rushing it out to reviewers. These ARC’s (Advance Reader Copies) are usually either imprinted with the above acronym, the words themselves, or “stickered” as such. This way the reviewer knows that the book is likely to have typos, formatting anomalies, and even grammatical errors which haven’t been fixed yet. The reason this is done is that most all review publications and reviewers are so swamped that it is necessary to provide them with a review copy 4 to 6 months in advance of the book release. Often times the editing process is only just entering its stride at this point, and is far from over.

And so, this brings us to the sad, sad comedy of errors that has plagued me these last 10 years…

When I wrote Harm None I was using an ANCIENT DOS based word processing program, with a very buggy, “freeware”, auto-correcting third-party spelling and grammar checker. Unfortunately, you get what you pay for and while the programmer who wrote this bit of freeware was good with code, s/he wasn’t so stellar with grammar. And so, all of my “its” became “it’s”.

I neglected to double check things after running the checker. My bad.

No biggie though. Editors fix these things, and in fact, the “it’s” that needed to be “its” were corrected. But alas, the tragic comedy still wanted its day in the sun.

Through an unfortunate mix-up, the uncorrected ARC files were mounted when the first print run was scheduled for Harm None. The presses whirred, paper flew, ink splattered, and before anyone caught it, close to 2000 copies of the novel were printed using the wrong signature and cover files.

No worries… The presses were stopped, the proper files mounted, and the process began all over again.

Of course, the not so funny comedy wasn’t through yet.

Through mis-communication, overly efficient workers, and not so divine providence IMHO, books printed from the improper files – which had been set aside to be destroyed – were instead bound, trimmed, stacked, packed, and then shipped.

Shipped to distributors, stores, and the four winds.

The dark and tragic comedy laughed as it watched bookstores, distributors, and even me sell the flawed books to unsuspecting readers, all the while unaware of the ugly practical joke fate was playing upon us.

Then, we found out. Unlike the comedy itself, we did not laugh. In fact, I cried, as did my publisher, publicist, and even some of my friends.

So, there you have it. Something on the order of 1800+ horribly flawed copies of Harm None have been in circulation for 10 years now, and it seems that many of them have found their way into libraries. And, as will happen, I get my annual email/letter from someone who wishes to lecture me – or, more rarely, simply point out in a polite manner – the difference between “its” and “it’s.”

For the record, I know the difference. And, also for the record, you have my most profuse apologies for this horrible error that has been perpetrated upon you, me, and the rest of the reading public. If I could make those 1800 flawed copies go away, I would. But, I cannot. My Kung-Fu just isn’t that strong…

So, in closing, here is an easy way for you to know if you or your library is in possession of one of these flawed copies of Harm None:

If the cover on your copy of Harm None looks like the picture above, with a delineated grey panel down the center, and a grey box on the back, you are holding either an original ARC or an ARC that should never have been. If this is the case, please don’t email me with a lecture on grammar, spelling, “its vs. it’s”, or any other complaint about formatting or even coffee stains for that matter.

If the cover looks like this one, then you are in possession of a proper and/or later printing. This is not to say you won’t find a latent typo. One or two squeak by now and again, no matter how good the editor. But, look at the copyright page to check the date of the reprint, because reported typos are always fixed in subsequent printings.

On a next to final note – The cover art for Harm None might be changing. I have recently been informed that the Mass Market Paperback editions of the first three Rowan Gant Investigations novels – the only books in the series to have been released as Mass Market originals – are to be discontinued when the current stock runs out.

However, do not fear – the books will remain in print.

They are simply being re-formatted to a 6X9 Trade Paperback size to match the rest of the RGI novels. In making this format switch, it is entirely possible fresh cover art will be employed.

Personally, I’m looking forward to seeing what they do, as I am constantly amazed by the cover art they come up with for all of their titles, not just mine.

Now, for the final note – regarding the flawed copies themselves. I have heard – though I have only the words of some eyewitnesses – that at least one of these flawed copies sold at a charity auction for nearly $200 due to its “rareness.”

Personally, I won’t consider it truly rare until I stop receiving the complaint emails, but hey, if $200 was raised for charity then I am willing to say this tragic comedy had itself a happy ending.

Of course, that note probably isn’t as final as I’d like, because I suspect I’ll be writing about this again just one short year from now, just like I have for the past decade…

More to come…

Murv