The e-book version of CHRISTMAS CINDERELLA can now be pre-ordered on amazon. If you order it now, it will arrive on your e-reader on 6th October.

It should be up on the other e-book sites very soon.

The official publication date is 6th October.

The paperback version is currently in production. I’ll let you know when it becomes available.

There is also a new method of buying the paperback, which I hope will be faster and more efficient than things were with A Bride For Marcus.

I explained the system in my newsletter yesterday, and will again when the paperbacks become available.

In my “sad farmer” story — no I still don’t have a title yet — my heroine has learned to bake bread in the “Dutch oven” over hot coals, and now she’s moving on to making pies and tarts — sweet and savory. At the moment (in my story) having learned to gather wild spring greens, she’s making a tart with eggs and cottage cheese and spring greens. Sounds yummy, don’t you think? I hope so.

My Irish grandmother was a big fan of feeding us a range of wild spring greens —some of which were quite bitter. She claimed it “cleaned the blood” after winter. I’m not so sure about that, but in  soups or in stews they were quite tasty — though dandelion leaves (of which she was particularly fond) were quite bitter. She claimed the bitterness was doing us good.  :(  She also loved cooking up nettles, but they disappeared quite well into vegie soup. 

I only occasionally gather wild spring greens. My adult students — mainly southern European and Chinese — showed me the best greens to collect. I don’t go out of my way to gather them, but when I do, I feel slightly virtuous. My favorite way to eat them is in the Greek dish, “horta” which is just a range of greens, lightly simmered with garlic, salt and pepper and dressed with olive oil and lemon juice. Yum yum. There’s a recipe for horta here.

Here’s a youtube video that demonstrates the pie-baking process. It refers to American colonial times, but these techniques were also in use in England and Australia. Also, in the video he makes a beef pie and then on his second tasting, adds some mushroom ketchup. Naturally I was intrigued by this, so looked up a recipe for it.

Have you ever baked pies or tarts in a Dutch oven? Ever gathered wild spring greens? Eaten horta? Made your own ketchup?

A friend just sent me this photo of the tulips that are in flower today on her back porch. She has renovations happening, so she’s taking a quiet few moments sitting in the morning sun, drinking tea and listening to the peaceful sound of the birds before the construction chaos begins. Nice, eh?

I saw a little video on FB the other day of a young American woman who’s been living in Australia for the last two years,  saying how much she’s going to miss “this” when they return home to the US.

And when she stopped talking all you could hear was the sound of her surroundings. The “this” she was talking about was a quiet morning in the sun, drinking her morning cuppa and listening to the birdsong. Apparently there’s no morning birdsong where she lived in Texas. 

Where I am, I usually get a good variety of birdsong —  lorikeets chattering and screeching, doves cooing, the mournful call of currawongs,  the tiny birds that twitter and sing and hop, but my favorite sound is the glorious call of the Australian magpie (not related to the UK or US magpies — called magpies originally because they are black and white.) You can hear a range of Australian morning birds here. . 
Here’s wishing you a peaceful morning.