Ladies' Book Club Murder by Lorelei Jones

Author:Lorelei Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cozy mystery, cozy, mystery, vegan, animal, animal myster, woman sleuth, sleuth, dog, pet
Publisher: Lorelei Jones
Published: 2017-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

With the bookstore not officially locking the doors until half an hour after close, both women were exhausted when they finally climbed the stairs up to their shared apartment. Ellie’s feet ached and her mind was spinning from taking sale after sale all afternoon, but she had a smile on her face.

“You relax,” she told her grandmother while Beau circled their legs. “I’ll go make us some dinner.”

“You sure?” Ma’May asked, but she was already dropping down on the couch as she said it.

Ellie chuckled and said, “Yes, Ma’May. I’ll whip something together.”

Whipping something together might have been a bit of an understatement. When Ellie opened the fridge, she realized that with all the excitement over the last week, neither woman had thought to do any of the grocery shopping. In the large stainless steel fridge sat a head of cauliflower, a brick of tofu, a shelf of half used up sauces and condiments, and a couple cartons of coconut milk, but not much else.

The freezer wasn’t much better. A mostly finished bag of tater tots and an unopened bag of frozen corn were waiting for her inside. In less skilled hands there wasn’t going to be much to eat, but after years of having to essentially scavenge for good meals while in college, Ellie was pretty sure she could turn the bits and pieces into a decent meal for the two of them.

“What would you say to some buffalo cauli wings?” Ellie called to her grandmother.

“I’d say ‘Yum’!” Ma’May called back to her.

With that ringing endorsement, Ellie got to work on dinner. Her first step was taking the tofu out of its watery packaging and laying it between some paper towels and two cutting boards. She’d accidentally left her fancy press behind in Chicago and hadn’t been willing to make the trek back into the city to replace it, so she had to do the work manually. With the cutting boards in place and Ma’May’s heavy duty cast iron kettle on top, she left the tofu to squish down while she got to cleaning, slicing, and saucing up the cauliflower.

Once the cauliflower was ready for the oven, Ellie laid it out on a greased cooking sheet and then scattered some tots along with it. With twenty-five minutes on the timer, she put the sheet in the oven and moved back to her tofu.

Tofu had once been Ellie’s least favorite food. The only way it was served in the college cafeteria had made her believe that it could only be bland, watery, squishy, and pretty much gross. No one ever did anything with it more creative than throw it in a little vegetable stock to soak up some flavor. All in all it had always been pretty terrible.

But then Ellie learned how to cook for herself, more out of necessity than desire. Thanks to the internet she learned the best – though definitely not the healthiest – way to cook her tofu was by pressing out all the water and then throwing it in a frying pan with some hot oil.

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