HARD SOUP

Every year for Valentine’s Day Maritime author A.F. Stewart hosts a BLOODY VALENTINE event gathering an assortment of slightly twisted authors who post their fiction and/or poetry all in the name of celebrating love.

This year’s theme is BAD LOVE.

I am taking part in this event and will be posting a piece of short fiction.

And a recipe…

COME and join the BLOODY VALENTINE HORROR EVENT!

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Hard Soup

I have marinated the meat in the best red wine I could afford, five days now, with garlic onion and bay leaf and a little stick of cinnamon, lots of cracked black pepper, and lots of aching tears.

On the fifth day I rubbed it with olive oil and browned it well in a hot pan.  I kissed it for luck.

Crane was right, it tasted bitter.

I carried the meat ceremoniously to a black metal roasting pan that I had beaten with a hammer into the rough shape of a coffin.  I browned a sliced onion in the pan, added more tears, and a little butter for flavor.

Then I deglazed the fry pan with a bit of the marinade, stirring and scraping the caked-on bits from the pan, swilling it into the juice for more flavor.

I poured the contents into the coffin-roaster, covering the meat just a little over half way.  I stuck the coffin-roaster into a slow oven, set to three hundred degrees.  Nice and slow, everything took time, let the hurting leak on out.

I added the insecticide last.

I served the meal in a valentine shaped bowl, bought especially for the occasion.  I set her body in her chair across the table from me.  The freezer kept her when I could not.  Her chest hung open like a secret treasure box.  She had a smile on her face. I’d placed it there, a finishing touch before placing her in the freezer.

Finishing nails.

Then I spooned it up.  Bitter, it tasted bitter, but no worse than finding your wife in bed with your best friend.

Heart meat is hard, unless you cook it properly.

I ate it up, every last drop.

I bit my lip until the gag reflex stopped working, and then I waited to die.

If I had timed it right, they would find us together before she thawed.  A frozen tableau, two hearts, one broken in my chest and one well braised in my belly.

Well done.  Well done.

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This story, HARD SOUP, appears in my e-book collection of dark love stories BAD VALENTINES TWO – which is available today on Kindle for only 99 cents.

 

BUT – just because I love you – why don’t you pick up a free digital copy of my e-book BAD VALENTINES: THREE TWISTED LOVE STORIES today only on Kindle!

PLEASE HELP ME win a Kindle Scout publishing contract by nominating my book and you can earn a FREE Kindle copy of my newest novel KELPIE DREAMS if the book is selected.

Wow – that’s three PSA’s (Public STEVE-VERNON Announcements) in a row. I think that might be a world record!

yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon

 

Two Autumn Recipes

Today I put together a supper of Roasted Cauliflower and Zucchini Linguini.

I thought I’d take a moment and give you folks the recipes.

ROASTED CAULIFLOWER

I set the oven to 400 and cut the leaves and stem off of a medium-sized head of cauliflower. Then I put together a marinade of a cup and a bit of plain Greek yogurt with a bit of lime juice and some garlic and a tablespoon of olive oil and some pepper and salt.

I drenched the cauliflower in the marinade.

That’s the fun part. Nothing better than smearing goop on a big old garden vegetable.

Then, when the oven went BEEP I parked the cauliflower onto the middle of a greased baking sheet and let it sit in the oven for about 40 minutes.

When the oven timer went BEEP again I took the baking sheet out and let it cool for about 10 minutes before quartering the cauliflower into wedges.

Meanwhile – while that was cooking – I got myself a julienne peeler and peeled the zucchini. I kept on peeling until I got to the core of the zuchinni, were the seeds are. By then I had a heap of noodle-like strips of zuchinni.

Then I sliced up a red onion and threw them into a hot pan of olive oil and butter. I threw in some raw shrimp (de-veined and de-shelled) and sliced up the zucchini middles and threw them in too. I stirred them and let them sizzle for a few short minutes and then threw in the zuchinni noodles and dumped in the remainder of the cauliflower marinade to make a sort of sauce. At the end of it I added a heaping handful of cherry tomatoes. I wanted snap peas, but the grocery store didn’t have any.

Remember – cooking is nothing more than creativity served up hot – so if any of these ingredients don’t suit you – alter the recipe. Use peppers or a pesto sauce or pork or chicken instead of the shrimp.

Lastly, open a beer and grab a fork and plate it up and dig in.

I should have taken a picture but I was too darned hungry.

Yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon

Winter Casserole – Steve’s Dead-Easy Cooking

All right – so you’ve blown all of your grocery money on eggnog and stocking stuffers and you’re wondering just what you can do about supper tonight – WONDER NO LONGER!

Let me share with you my recipe for Winter Casserole.

It’s dead easy.

First off, grab yourself a big old roasting pan.

You know – something like this!

You can also use a casserole dish or a big old pot or ANYTHING that will hold a lot of yummy crunchy vegetable goodness and is oven-ready.

I usually start with a couple of onions – because EVERYTHING that is worth cooking usually starts with a couple of big fat onions. Then I grab a cabbage and a bag of carrots. You can also throw in a turnip or some squash or some sweet potato if you’d like. Whatever you’ve got in the fridge – or, if you don’t own a fridge whatever you can pick up at the local grocery store. Think cheap and filling.

Chop it up and layer it into the casserole dish.

Note – I also like to chop up a big fat chunk of smoked sausage – preferably the gooey kind with cheese in the middle – but this dish can easily be made as a vegetarian dish without the sausage.

Once you’ve got it all layered into the roasting pan – (and by layered I mean grab a handful of onion and drop it into the pan. Then a handle of cabbage and a handful of potato and a handful of sausage and keep on handfulling until the pan begins to brim up) then dump in a big box of stock – (I use chicken but vegetable stock is just as yummy and lower in calories) – and shake on some pepper and then slide the pan into the oven.

How hot should the oven be?

That depends on how long you want to cook it.

I usually wind up setting the oven to 350 and let it cook for an hour and a half – but you can also set it at about 200 and let it sit and simmer in the oven for a few hours. Remember – this is nothing but vegetables and (maybe) smoked sausage and stock – ALL ready to eat. So the cooking is just to help blend the flavors.

Cover the pan. Go and watch a movie or read a book or stand by the kitchen window and look serene.

Your family comes home in an hour or two and the entire house is going to smell so heavenly I bet you they set the table with out even being asked. You don’t have a table – hell, they’ll build you one out of two-by-fours and chewing gum.

Serve it with a good chewy beer and grin knowingly when they asked you how long it took to get ready.

yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon