I HAVE THE ONE AND ONLY DEE DAVIS ON MY BLOG TODAY & WITH ONE AUDIO FREEBIE.

Dee, thank you so much for consenting                          

to be on my blog. It's such a thrill to have such
a popular author grace these pages.

Gads! I'm acting like a teenage fan. Sorry. I'll slap myself upside the head and fly right.

And you are giving one commenter today a free download of your audio book. How great is that folks?

But first, tell us all about your love of cooking.

I love to cook.  Anything and everything. Give me a recipe and I’m in.  And I particularly love to try and recreate a great dish I’ve eaten somewhere else.  It’s a challenge of identifying the separate parts and recreating the mouth-watering whole.  So it follows that eventually I’d write a book about food.  Well, at least about another woman who loves it as much as I do. 

 My love affair with cooking started, like a lot of people, with my grandmother.  She loved to cook. And always made it feel like an event.  Then there was my very first cookbook.  The Peanuts Cookbook.   Lucy’s Lemon Squares were my favorites.  Along with Linus’ cinnamon toast.   I could make a pretty mean pudding pie, too.  My daddy’s favorite was butterscotch and I still think of him when I make a pie.  

 Cooking became a serious hobby when I graduated from college and had my own apartment and kitchen.  I was determined to entertain as well as my grandmother.  I remember for my very first dinner party I went out and bought a fry-daddy just so that I could serve homemade sopapillas with the meal.  I wanted it all to be perfect. 

 My first job was doing, among other things, cooking demonstrations for Lone Star Gas Company.  I’d travel around central Texas demonstrating the marvels of cooking with gas.  I even had my own demonstration kitchen and a quarterly segment on a local television show.  I was totally hooked. 

 Of course not everything always goes as expected.  For my first official Thanksgiving as a new bride, my rolls failed to rise, the pie crust drooped, and the fruit salad I’d made sat in the back of the refrigerator totally forgotten until the next day.  

 When we lived in Vienna—finding familiar food became an obsession.  To the point of tracking down a rumored source for corn tortillas.  A man named Gunter Gonzales who made them in the basement of his apartment building.  He only sold them in batches of a hundred, but hey, tortillas freeze.   I still remember the warm tortillas in my hands as we rode back from Gunter’s on the bus.  Exhilaration ruled the day.

 Back in Texas, I settled in to cooking with my favorite ingredients.  And I still remember walking into an HEB and marveling at an entire aisle of Mexican foods.  A whole shelf of salsas.  Grocery stores overseas are a lot smaller than ours, but bigger than the ones in Manhattan where finding ingredients was sometimes something of a scavenger hunt.  Now that I’m back in the real world—Connecticut—I’m happy to say there are huge grocery stores everywhere!  Which I’ve got to admit is a little bit of heaven.

 But the latest development in my obsession with food has got the be the advent of cooking TV.  The Food Network.  Bravo.  Alton Brown, Ina Garten, Bobby Flay.  Chopped.  And of course the chef competition shows.  Top Chef, Iron Chef, The Next Food Network Star.  If I’d been born in a different generation, I suspect I’d have longed for a show of my own.

 Which is why, Andi Sevalas, in the newly re-released Set-Up in SoHo, got a show of her own.  What’s Cooking in the City is my attempt to live vicariously through my character.  And I hope you enjoy reading Andi’s story as much as I did writing it.  For a recipe featured in the book (and one of my personal favorites) check out www.deedavis.com.

 

When Andrea Sevalas’ long time boyfriend announces he’s seeing someone else, Andi’s thrown for a loop—well, actually, down a cellar.  Head throbbing and nose out of joint, she’s rescued by one of New York’s finest – attorneys that is.  Ethan McCay is the Upper East Side heir to the kingdom of Manhattan.  But Andi isn’t interested in princes.  At least not the uptown variety.  She’s a downtown girl with no time for Park Avenue royalty.
So what’s a fairy godmother supposed to do? Well, if she’s Andi’s Aunt Althea (the infamous Manhattan matchmaker) a little manipulation is in order. After all, even Cinderella needed a little prodding to go to the ball.  And with a little help from her friends, Althea’s plan goes charmingly – until the clock strikes midnight and the truth is revealed.  Certain that she’s been betrayed by the people she trusted the most, Andi runs for the safety of Soho.  But matchmakers don’t give up that easily, and with Althea at the helm, Andi will discover that love comes in all kinds of packages, and that sometimes, all it takes to recognize the fact is opening your heart to the possibility.

 

This re-release sounds like a fun read for us romance lovers.

 

Tell us about the audio download you are offering to one commenter today

 

 

Years ago while vacationing in Scotland, Katherine St. Claire believed she’d found the love of her life. She shared a night of passion with a stranger, in a hotel castle called Duncreag. But come morning, her lover had disappeared. And she has spent the last eight years trying to convince herself it was all a dream... Living in the 15th century, Iain Mackintosh remains haunted by the memory of his greatest love. Eight years ago, she disappeared, leaving behind a cairngorm earring as the only evidence of her existence. Iain’s family wants him to stop pining for this fantasy woman and submit to a sensible marriage. But Katherine suddenly returns to him and reveals to him where—and when she’s from... The re-release of Dee Davis’ award winning Debut novel.

 

And one lucky winner will be picked.

Check out all of Dee's novels on her page at

AMAZON PAGE

 

Thanksgiving will be here in a few days so from both of us

 

Dee would love to hear about some of your favorite food memories.

And you know we love comments. Please say hi to Dee below.