“Thanks.” I sighed. “How was The Jerk?”
“His usual self. I felt sorry for Arch, so I bought some lean ground beef and—don’t kill me—Velveeta and picante to make him some Chile Con Queso. We can have it with chips and vegetables. He always orders it in restaurants, so I figured I’d give it a go for him.”
I laughed. “Great. So much for corpulence. I’ll thaw some halibut steaks for us, too. The queso will be good. I need some comfort food myself, since I had to say good-bye to my van today. It was awful.”
“We will buy you another van.”
“You don’t understand. It was so sad.”
His green eyes searched mine. “Hey, Miss G., y’know how many prowlers I’ve wrecked?” The slight scent of his aftershave made me shiver…. Whose idea was it to have dinner before you went to bed?
I said, “Is this a statistic that’s going to upset me?”
“Six wrecked. Four totaled.”
“Ah.”
“What are you making there, Queen of Cream?”
“Marmalade Mogul Muffins,” I said happily. That was the thing about Tom: You never could stay in a sad mood for very long when he was determined to cheer you up. I removed halibut steaks from our freezer while Tom sautéed the ground beef for his Mexican appetizer. Then I pulled my zester over plump oranges, whirred the fragrant strands of zest in a small electric grinder, and measured out thick, best-quality marmalade.
“Mind if we invite Marla over?” I asked. “All this back and forth to the ski area, I haven’t seen or talked to her. She loves halibut.”
“Okay,” he said as he stirred picante sauce into the lake of melted cheese and browned beef. “Only tell her not to come until six, I need to talk to you first.”
“Sounds sexy. I need to talk to you, too. Suppose we could do it somewhere else?”
He grinned. “Later. Call Marla—”
At that moment Arch screamed from upstairs that he wanted to know who had ruined his experiment! I called back that I had, because he’d left it where someone could trip over it in the hallway. I was rewarded with a slammed door. I sighed. Well, we could all make up at dinner. Hopefully, Tom’s queso dip would smooth over my son’s mood.
“Call Marla,” Tom said calmly, “then I’ll tell you about this artist who filed a complaint against you today.”
“Who did what?”
But Tom was ripping open a bag of chips. I phoned Marla, who declared she was famished, thank you very much, and what kind of wine should she bring to go with the halibut? Not that she could drink any, but maybe Tom and I would, she said. I racked my noggin for a stored tidbit of oenophilic advice from Arthur Wakefield, and told her a full-bodied, spicy white. Marla promised she’d be over in twenty minutes, armed with the vino.
Tom asked: “Miss G., did you pretend to be an undercover cop, and have lunch with a woman named Boots Faraday so you could grill her on the Portman case?”
“Oh, sure, Tom.” The oven timer beeped. I gently levered the crispy cookies onto waiting racks, then put in the muffin cups. “I invited Boots Faraday to lunch and said, ‘I’m an undercover policewoman. Don’t tell anybody. I do have a bunch of questions for you, though. Don’t tell anybody that, either.’”
Tom asked, “Want to make a pasta dish to go with the halibut?”
I nodded, angrily chopped garlic and onion, and tossed them into a pan shimmering with heated olive oil. “I did not pretend to be anything with that woman.” I didn’t want to tell Tom about the collage I’d bought him, because now I was wondering if the gallery had a return-for-cash policy.
“Watch yourself, because that woman has served time for assault.”
“You’re kidding.” I set water on to boil for orzo pasta. Then I chopped a few ounces of smoked ham and a couple of tomatoes, and stirred them along with some whole-grain mustard, Madeira, white wine, marjoram, and oregano into the headily fragrant, sizzling garlic mixture. A spicy pasta dish would go wonderfully with the halibut. When the sauce was simmering, I asked, “Boots Faraday assaulted somebody?”
“Seems she did a series of artworks for a client. Man owned a snowboard store, he used a snowboard as a down payment on half a dozen collages featuring snowboarders. When Ms. Faraday finished them, the guy said he’d changed his mind. He didn’t want the collages anymore, but he told her to go ahead and keep the board. She could even hang the collages in Killdeer restaurants, he added happily.”
“For heaven’s sake.”
Chile Con Queso Dip
1 pound lean ground beef
12 ounces English-Cheddar flavor Velveeta, or regular Velveeta
½ cup medium picante sauce (or ½ recipe of the tomato, onion, and chili sauce from Sonora Chicken Strudel, well drained)
Corn chips and crudités
In a wide frying pan, sauté the ground beef over medium-high heat, until brown but not overcooked. While the meat is cooking, cut the Velveeta into 1-inch cubes. When the beef has browned, add the Velveeta cubes, turn the heat to medium-low, and stir until the Velveeta has melted. Turn the heat to low and add picante sauce or the Mexican strudel sauce. Heat just until bubbly and serve with chips and/ or crudites.
Marmalade Mogul Muffins
½ pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter
1¾ cups sugar, divided
4 large eggs
2 cups buttermilk
4¾ cups all-purpose flour (High altitude: add ¼ cup)
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons orange zest, minced
1 cup best-quality bitter orange marmalade (recommended brand: Harry and David Wild & Rare Bitter Orange Marmalade)
Preheat the oven to 350°F (High altitude: 375?).
In a large mixer bowl, beat the butter with 1½ cups of the sugar until well combined. Add the eggs one at a time and beat well. Add buttermilk and mix thoroughly.
In another bowl, mix together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture. The batter will be stiff. Stir in the zest and marmalade. Using a ⅓-cup measure, divide the batter among 28 muffin cups that have been fitted with paper liners. Using the last ¼ cup of sugar, sprinkle a teaspoon or so over each muffin.
Bake 15 to 20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean.
Makes 28 muffins
“Now, most reasonable people would take their complaint to small-claims court. Not our Ms. Faraday. She drove her Chevy Suburban smack into the guy’s truck. Broke both his legs, which put a stop to his snowboarding that winter. At first, she claimed she didn’t know who the fellow was she’d hit. But since his truck was custom-painted with the words Killdeer Boards, nobody believed that. She spent ten days in the clink. The rest was a suspended sentence.”
“Hmm.” I showered orzo into the boiling water and set the timer. “Did she have any parole-type run-ins with Doug Portman?”
Tom shook his head. “But he was the art critic, and at least half a dozen people have told us she hated his guts because he didn’t review her work favorably. She even tried to get him fired from the Killdeer paper, but they ignored her, probably because they weren’t paying him very much to write his columns.”
“I didn’t interrogate her. For the record.”
“No, I know,” Tom said with a broad smile. “You were probably just being your usual nosy self. Figured that as soon as I got word of the complaint.” He stirred the bubbling cheese concoction; my stomach growled.