Cooking With Christie: Pretzel Challah Buns
Inspiration: One of my new-to-me favorite cooking shows is Girl Meets Farm. So much so that when I spotted one of Molly Yeh’s cookbooks on the shelf of my local bookshop, I decided to make a purchase.
Within Molly On The Range was Yeh’s challah bread recipe.
However, the enclosed recipe makes two loaves — which is a lot of bread! Undoubtedly, aware that these loaves are huge, Yeh also offers alternate ways of utilizing this base dough — including prezel buns. Needing more than the line of instructions given in the book, I quickly located Yeh’s recipe here.
And I must admit, though these bakes looked intimidating to make, once you overcome that trepidation, they are pretty straightforward. And, despite my amateurish scoring skills, these buns turned out great!
Learn From My Mistake: This recipe calls for baked baking soda, which is easy to make. However, in this form, it can (and did for me) easily irritate the skin with very little contact.
Moreover, next time a recipe calls for baked baking soda, I will need to wear a mask while transferring it into a container, measuring it out, and before adding my wet ingredients into a mix. Since no matter how careful I was, the fine powder went airborne and irritated my lungs as well.
Agatha Christie’s Canon of Characters: I think Lucy Eyelesbarrow, from the Miss Marple mystery 4.50 From Paddington, would whip up this recipe (with far more finesse than I) for one of her clients. As the challah base recipe can yield at least nine different bakes, allowing Lucy to dazzle her clients with a variety of tasty treats with minimal effort!
My 52 Weeks With Christie: A.Miner©2025
Cooking with Christie: Outtake
I’d two opening photos for the raspberry & lemon cakes I liked, and this is the other one!
Cooking With Christie: Apple Butter Cookies!
Inspiration: With the fridge and freezer now containing homemade apple butter, I took to the interwebs once again. This time seeking a tasty looking apple butter cookie recipe…and, happily, I found one on Dessert Now Dinner Later blog!
Thin, chewy, applely, and filled with warm spices, these were a total hit with the crew at game night! And we ate entirely too many in one go!
Though I must admit I did fiddle with the spices called for in the recipe, since I knew exactly what was in the apple butter. So I added a single pass, on a micro-planer, of nutmeg, 1/16 tsp of ginger & mace — just to give it a little added depth without muddying the hero flavors of cinnamon and apple.
Agatha Christie’s Canon of Characters: Although these cookies aren’t as sophisticated as millionaire shortbread or a petite four, they are tasty enough to tempt Poirot. Especially if Capt. Hastings trys them first! And in a rare bit of overlap, I believe Miss Marple would also enjoy nibbling on them whilst gathering intel over tea!
Cooking With Christie: Outtake!
This oyster mushroom was huge! 4 pounds! I just had to show you all. In the end I ground it up in my food processor and put the bits in some meatloaf and pizza for extra flavor and nutrients.
Cooking With Christie: Apple Butter
Inspiration: A few months back, my better half and I went apple picking. The obvious outcome of this fun-filled excursion was many, many pounds of apples that needed something done with them. One of the most obvious recipes that this quantity of apples could easily handle was apple butter.
Scouring the internet for recipes, I found one I liked on the Pioneer Woman website and gave it a go. (Since I intended to use the apple butter as an ingredient in my bakes, I was not concerned with the comments this recipe garnered. As many of the reviewers took umbrage at the amount of apple cider vinegar the recipe called for. Plus, I enjoy the extra tang of apple cider vinegar, and it helps ensure the end product doesn’t become sickly sweet.)
And let me tell you, the apple butter turned out great!
Though, admittedly, I did need to cook it a bit longer to get my stuff to match the picture.
The literal fruits of our labor!
Helpful Hint: If, like me, you intended to use this as an ingredient rather than simply spreading it on toast, be mindful of the spices you add. If you add a ton of cinnamon, then add the apple butter to another recipe that calls for yet more cinnamon (for example), you could end up with an end product that’s overwhelming (not in a good way) and a tad unpleasant.
Hence why, for once in a row, I stuck to the recommended Tbsp and tsp.
Agatha Christie’s Canon of Characters: I can easily see Miss Maple or Tuppence making apple butter as a treat or to fill their table for a sale of work to benefit their community!
My 52 weeks With Christie: A.Miner©2025
Book Review: Cursed Cocktails
Cursed Cocktails — S.L. Rowland
“Welcome to the enchanting world of Tales of Aedrea, where small-scale stories, low-stakes adventure, and cozy fantasy come to life within an epic, high-fantasy realm.”
This single-sentence description of this series is what originally captured my interest. Well, that and the fact that this book revolves around cocktails, a city’s first real cocktail bar, and magic. As my reviews in recent years have established, I’m a sucker for food-based fantasies.
Fantasy books.
Books.
‘Pulling at my collar uncomfortably like an old actor in a B&W movie.’
In any case….Cursed Cocktails is the first in a series of books all set in the same realm of Aedrea. Each book follows a different set of characters, though an old favorite occasionally makes a quick cameo—for flavor.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
In Cursed Cocktails, we meet Rhoren, aka Bloodbane, an umbral elf and powerful blood mage. Who, after thirty years of defending the North from behemoths and the like, has finally reached retirement. Seeking a place to rest his aching bones, as blood magic takes a massive toll on its user, Rhoren travels south to the balmy shores of Eastborne. Where he seeks and finds the next chapter of his life…Although Rhoren’s past isn’t as far removed from his present as he initially thought.
I really, really enjoyed this read. (In point of fact, I’ve reread it several times since first cracking the spine.)
Rowland describes this series as cozy fantasy, and it is. Unlike Game of Thrones, Cursed Cocktails does not contain far-reaching political machinations that frequently end in an assassination, rape, or torture. However, that does not mean Cursed Cocktails lacks action, mystery, or interest. It just means that you can immerse yourself in the book’s 275 pages without worrying about encountering the aforementioned possibly panic-inducing themes and forget for a few moments that the cat knocked over the Christmas tree again, the pile of ugly holiday sweaters that need a wash, or the fact that your yule log looks more like a rotten stick than a delectable cake.
Akin to many of the culinary- and/or mixology-based books I’ve reviewed, Cursed Cocktails seamlessly weaves the cocktail theme into the narrative. That being said, there’s one element I cannot decide whether adds to or detracts from the story — the cocktail recipes themselves.
Rather than fitting them in at the end of the book, as books of this ilk are wont to do, Rowland places them smack dab in the story. Because of the history of these recipes, which I don’t want to spoil your enjoyment of discovering, it makes complete sense why Rowland did what they did. And while they didn’t toss me out of the narrative, I’m not sure everyone is as keen on reading recipes as I am.
So, my advice? Just skim past and continue reading if they’re not your cup of tea because Cursed Cocktails is such a fun read! So don’t miss out!
My 52 Weeks With Christie: A.Miner©2025
My 52 Weeks With Christie 
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