Curried Lentil Soup Recipe

It has been raining and gray for two days here and since my limit of tolerance for rain is about two hours, I am looking for something to make that is tasty but not fattening. (Given my preference, I'd make hot chocolate and cinnamon toast but that's not going to happen.)
Soup is the obvious choice.
This soup is perfect because when you first put it together, the colors are so bright and lovely. (I have a clear glass stockpot, so it's nice to use it for this.)

Curried Lentil soup

Ingredients:
1 tablespoon oil
1 medium onion, chooped coarsely
1 pound carrots, chopped
2 large leeks, sliced in half lengthwise, cleaned, then chopped
5 cloves garlic
¼ tsp ginger (1 tablespoon if fresh grated)
2 tablespoon curry powder, medium-spicy
1 tsp. cumin
1 cup green lentils, picked-over
6 cups water or vegetable stock
1 dash salt, optional
Directions
Sautee the onion in a large soup pot over medium heat while washing the carrots.
Chop carrots into 1/4″ to 1/2″ rounds and add to onions. Stir. Let them sautee while washing the leeks.
Cut off the root and the thick leafy green part of the leek, leaving only the tender white part. Cut in half. Remove outer layer. Wash. Chop into 1/4″ to 1/2″ half rounds. Add to pot. Sautee while preparing garlic.
Add garlic to pot.
Sautee until leeks are tender. (Carrots should still be slightly firm.)
Add curry powder, cumin and ginger and stir so vegatables are evenly covered with the spices.
Add lentils and 6 cups water or vegetable stock. Cover and bring to a boil. Then reduce heat to low and simmer until lentils are tender.
Add salt to taste. If you are using a vegetable broth that is already salted, this may not be necessary.

Note:  For this soup I use plain old chrome yellow curry powder. There's no need to use fancy (pricey) spice blends.

Judging a book by its cover--Toxic Reality

Sometimes you can just be a little too subtle. I was happy with the cover of my book Toxic Reality, but despite great reviews, it just wasn't selling. Over the weekend, Joy Sillesen at Indie Author Services whipped up a new cover for me and within minutes of it going up on Smashwords and Amazon.com, I'd sold more copies than I had since I first published it. 
Being able to swap out a cover in minutes is one of the reasons I love indie publishing. You can do A/B cover tests. You can goose sales with a new cover. You can play around with multiple covers the way magazines sometimes do. (I remember TV Guide testing covers with Star Trek captain covers--clearly meant to entice collectors.)
I admit it--I'll pick up a book because I'm intrigued by the cover. (But I'll also buy a book that intrigues me even if the cover is awful. And if you were an early reader of Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake novels, you know just the ugly covers I mean.)
I like this new cover. There's nothing subtle about it. But then, the stories aren't subtle either.

St. Patrick's Day Recommended Reading

It's St. Patrick's Day and what better way to spend it than catching up with some Irish mysteries written by women?
Start with Erin Hart's Haunted Ground and its sequels, Lake of Sorrows and False Mermaid. The protagonist of all three books is American pathologist Nora Gavin, who lives in Ireland. Her books blend forensic science, Irish myth and mystery in a wonderful way.
Learn more about Erin at her website
You can follow her on Twitter @Erin_Hart
For a very different reading experience, check out If I Never See You Again, Niamh O'Connor's first novel (she was best known as a true crime writer before). Taken is the sequel. You can read about her here
Here's a link to an interview she did in support of her book Blood Ties, about the real stories behind some of Ireland's most notorious murders.
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Feminist Fiction Friday: Anne Holt

You like Nordic Noir?  Looking around for something to read now that you've hoovered through Jo Nesbo's oeuvre? You might want to check out Anne Holt, a remarkable Norwegian writer whose background includes a stint as a Minister of Justice, a news editor and anchor and a lawyer. She's also a mother.
She made her fiction debut in 1993 with Blind Goddess, a novel that kicked off a series "starring" Hanne Wilhelmsen, a lesbian police officer.
I'm currently reading What is Mine, the first in a series of mysteries featuring Adam Stubo and Johanne Vik.  It's a really dark story involving child-napping and murder, with a subplot about a man wrongfully convicted of the same sort of crime decades ago.
Holt is Norwegian, although she's spent time in both the US and France, and her work reflects the Scandinavian attitude toward sexual equality. In What is Mine, a little girl casually mentions that her grandmother is an electrician, a job that is still, at least in the US, more likely to be man's work. the fthers of the children involved in the plot are all directly involved in their upbringing, and in some cases are more nurturing than the mothers.  Adam is a widower whose wife and daughter died in a horrible accident that's almost ludicrously unlikely, but he is incredibly tender with his grandson and with Johanne's mentally disabled child Kristiane.
From the first time Johanne and Adam meet, there's a frisson of sexual attraction, but it is not without complications. These people are adults and their lives are complex and they have pasts and they have responsibilities, The portrait of Kristiane is an excellent fictional portrait of a child with a mental disability, right up there with the autistic characters in Speed of Dark and Memoir of an Imaginary Friend. No one quite knows what's going on with Kristiane and her mother is driving herself crazy looking for answers.
Holt has written a number of books in the almost 20 years she's been a novelist and she's one of the best-selling writers in Norway.
She's on Facebook
She's got an author page at Simon & Schuster's site..
Here's a podcast where she talks about her new Hanne novel (a locked-room mystery).

L.A. Nocturne II--More Tales of the Misbegotten

My collection of short stories L.A. Nocturne II (More Tales of the Misbegotten) is now up at Amazon. There are nine stories in this collection, some of them written just for the collection and not previewed anywhere else.

Joy Sillesen did the cover through her Indie Author Services, and you should check out her current promotion because she's offering $10 covers for ebooks all month long.  Joy has already created the cover for Misbegotten, which should be out in September.  (Hold me to that deadline.)

One of the stories in the book, "Bear Baiting" introduces two of the characters who are part of the cast of characters of my novel--Detectives Lee Park and C.J. Bowe who work in the paracrimes division of LAPD.  Lee's second-generation Korean-American, C.J. (named for two of my friends) is his long-time partner but they've recently realized there might be something else there. (You know what they say about proximity.)  I really liked writing their relationship.  I'm interested in knowing what you think...  (The two briefly appear in "Fairy Story," which is another "Tale of the Misbegotten.")

Feminist Fictionistas Take Note: Women Talk Sci-Fi

Three writers in Australia (Eugenia, Gerri and Writer X) talk about science fiction. Check out their site here.  They haven't updated in awhile and their "about us" section is sadly lacking, but check them out on Twitter @GENEWS_WTSF

Review of The Sisters Brothers by Patrick De Witt

Death follows in the wake of two brothers headed to California to kill a man for their employer, a wealthy man known as “The Commodore.” 

In The Sisters Brothers, Patrick DeWitt has done a 180 from his first novel Ablutions, a dark, grim story about the denizens of a seedy Hollywood bar.  His new book is a darkly comic Western noir that serves notice with its whimsical title that DeWitt’s west is not the same place as the west you’ll find in a Louis L’Amour novel.

There is a lot to like here.  The story is episodic and reminiscent in some ways of Little Big Man, only taking place in a more focused context.  Eli and Charlie Sisters seem to run across a whole cross-section of Western types (the diligent Chinese house boy, the luckless prospectors, the soiled doves and so forth) that Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) would recognize.  There’s also a tinge of superstition and the paranormal (the weird gypsy) that unsettles us a bit.  What the story mostly reminds us of is a graphic novel, even though this is a fully fleshed tale that doesn’t need illustrations.

First of all, the dialogue is absolutely great.  Eli’s horse-trading when he sells the Indian horse that simply walks up to him is reminiscent of Mattie’s dickering in True Grit, and there are other places where we suspect the writer might have been influenced by the Charles Portis novel, if not the movie(s) of the same name.