A Nice List of Things to Look at This September

I have done a lot of reading over the past few years and recently the staff of a site called Shepherd.com asked me to create a list of top 5 books I’ve read. They have lots of lists by authors who each briefly describe what they love about 5 books that have a unified theme (such as the history of the American West.) While I’ve read some great nonfiction and women’s fiction books, I have specialized in reading children’s and YA because that’s what I write. So I put together a list of 5 children’s adventure books I’d recommend and when it is available on the site I’ll share a link for you to read. The hard part was choosing just 5 books! I thought my heart was going to break with some of the choices I had to make. 😉

To solve the problem of review requests taking time out of my life, I plan to put review copies for my books on an automatic recurring basis with copies available for 2 week at a time. That way I can cycle through all my publications with minimum effort while I get on with writing new books. Books will appear in pairs in each newsletter, correlating to roughly 1 book per week over a 2-week period, gradually repeating over time. BookSprout will only let me seek reviews once for each book on its free program, so I made a quick ARC there for Celestine Princess, since I've never run it through the site before. After that I will send direct download links from somewhere else and will send the books in alphabetical order to keep me from losing track of when they should be posted again.

Celestine Princess Request

Now remember the giant zucchini I mentioned last week? Well, a logical question might be “what did you DO with all that zucchini?” It’s a good question. 😊 When dealing with zucchini there’s only one recipe that’s our go-to and that’s Zucchini Pancakes. You can put zucchini in everything from soups to breads, but we don’t make a lot of those recipes because the zucchini easily gets squishy and we don’t prefer the taste. These pancakes are the only thing we really make with zucchini. They were the reason we grew the zucchini in the first place, although we didn’t plan for them to get so big! So I’ll put the recipe right here if you want to try it yourself. It can be cut in half if you want to serve fewer people. This recipe will make a nice side accompaniment to a main course for five people.

Zucchini Pancakes

2/3 cup biscuit/baking mix
½ cup Parmesan cheese
½ tsp pepper
4 cups fresh grated zucchini
4 eggs
½ cup oil or butter for frying

Mix all together until blended. Heat some of the oil in a saute pan or small skillet (works better than a big one.) Pour spoonfuls of batter onto the hot oil. Turn when brown on the bottom. Might need to turn a couple of times until fully cooked on all sides. These can heat quickly and easily burn, so watch them carefully and don’t let oil get too hot. They should be golden brown, but not black. Replenish oil if needed for second batch. Serves 5 as a side dish.

And there will be more updates.