Lovely ones, for years and years, you’ve been telling me how much my books make your mouth water and make you hungry and how much you want me to write a recipe book. Well, finally I have put together my first recipe book, and it’s available from today, just in time for Christmas celebrations and gift giving.
What’s in it? My blue ribbon winning strawberry jam recipe, for one. 🙂 These recipes are family friendly, all gluten free by default (but you can substitute your own flour, no problem) and usually dairy free (but you can also substitute your usual replacements). They are highly flexible recipes, made for you to play with. Cooking is creative, after all, so I want my recipes to be inspiring and supporting, as much as they are instructional.
I’ve also included a five-page special event guide on How To Throw A Tuscan Feast. This is a great event for a special occasion, such as Christmas, Easter or (as I did) for a special wedding anniversary. I’ve also included recipes for cakes, cupcakes, icing, cocktails, apple crumble, a hearty chicken dinner, gingerbread and more.
My food stories and recipes are inspired by my bestselling foodie fiction books. For years, I’ve wanted to bring you, my readers, this accessible, family friendly and tested collection of some of my favourite recipes. This is the first volume of recipes, accompanied by behind-the-scenes stories and memories. It’s a great idea for a Christmas gift for a loved one, especially if you can’t catch up in person – you can send this ebook to them, wherever they are.
Yesterday, I used the ‘C’ word online for the first time this year. Yep, I said it: Christmas.
This year, I am kicking off my Christmas cooking with a batch of my finest strawberry jam. And what is the recipe I’m using? Nothing other than my blue ribbon winning strawberry jam from the Royal Queensland Show (the Ekka), 2019.
I had never made jam before that but, as I like to do, I researched my food theme and competitive jam making thoroughly in order to write about a family of jam makers in my novel, The Jam Queens.
Researching is one of my favourite parts of writing a book so I do it thoroughly, that’s for sure. I will always try to do whatever it is my characters are doing so that I can write about it authentically. And I was glad I did because officious world of competitive jam making is staggeringly strict! To say I shocked to take 1st place in a Royal Show is an understatement. Beginner’s luck, no doubt, but still something that was incredibly exciting and fun.
This week, I’ll be using my blue ribbon winning recipe (which is printed in the back of The Jam Queens) to make gifts for loved ones, not for competition. I am a ‘slow jammer’, making my jam over several days. And the heavenly aroma of macerated strawberries is reward enough.
– Winner will be drawn at random and notified via PM from this page or my official Instagram page only. – Entries close 11.59pm (AEST) on Wednesday 31 March, 2021. – Competition is open for delivery to Australian addresses only.
Good luck, loves! I wish I could send you all a hamper.
Honestly, there is not much that is more joyful than the scent of mandarins!
Cool autumn mornings will surely benefit from the refreshing, uplifting scent of mandarin marmalade on toast!
Ingredients
1 kg of mandarins
30 ml fresh lemon juice
30ml of fresh lime juice
1 litre of water
Allow for 1 kg of white sugar (see method)
Method
Place washed, whole mandarins in a heavy saucepan with the lemon juice and water and bring to the boil. Simmer, uncovered for approximately 45 minutes or until the mandarins are soft.
Remove the mandarins from the liquid and reserve the liquid. Coarsely chop the mandarins, including the rind, sizing the pieces to your own satisfaction. This can be quite rustic, with large pieces if you like it that way. Discard the seeds, then return the fruit and rind back to the liquid in the pot.
Measure your fruit and liquid mixture. For each cup of fruit/liquid mixture, measure out 1 cup of sugar, then minus one cup. (That is, if you have 5.5 cups of fruit/liquid mixture, add 4.5 cups of sugar.) Return the fruit/liquid mixture to the saucepan and add the sugar.
Bring the mixture to the boil and continue to let it boil uncovered and without stirring for approximately half an hour, or until you deem the jam is set.
Pour your hot marmalade into your hot, sterilised jars and seal immediately.
I have pretty much written a love letter to Maggie Beer in my new novel, The Jam Queens. My love for Maggie began so long ago I can’t remember when it started but I’d like tell you a little about me and Maggie.
I have watched Maggie’s wonderful television show The Cook and the Chef. I’ve collected and read her books, sinking into her stories about her early years on the orchard and with then pheasant farm with her kids and husband Colin. Just about the only episode I can remember of MasterChef was the one which she was a guest competitor. A friend once offered me a last-minute ticket to see Maggie at the State Library of Queensland, just before Christmas time, and I cancelled everything to get to the sold-out event to hear her speak. She was, as you’d expect, warm, funny, engaging and generous. (I bought one of her books there and stood in line for an age to ask her to sign it but as it was a sold-out event and the line snaked around the terrace I didn’t have time to lavish her with my adoration… probably to her good fortune.) Twice a year every year, my friend Kate and I go on writing retreat together and have often daydreamed and drooled about making the next one an adventure down to Maggie’s Orchard House to cook in her drool-worthy kitchen. My husband works in aged care and we enthusiastically snapped up her book Maggie’s Recipe for Life and encouraged everyone in the company to go buy it too. Maggie’s foodie values–love, family, sharing, sustainability, celebration, honouring the source of our food, and growing food–are values I share and find their way into my books as I write.
You get the drift, right? I’m a big fan.
I suppose it was inevitable that when I decided to set a book in the Barossa Valley, Maggie’s spirit would find its way into my story. One of the driving plot points of the book became the annual jam competition at the Royal Adelaide Show. As my main character Aggie’s family is full of jam queens, they have created a system where one queen may nominate herself to enter in a given year while the others stand aside. But this year, there is an extra incentive to win, with the triumphant jam queen invited to cook with Maggie on her television show. Perhaps then, the rules could be broken just for this year? After all, it is Maggie Beer they’re talking about! Who could resist the opportunity to spend time with her? While it might be Aggie’s turn to enter, her mother Valeria is torn. Maggie is her idol. How could she not enter?
I travelled to the Barossa in 2017 with my husband and then five-year-old son. (The flowers in the valley were well and truly out. Aren’t they gorgeous?) Of course, at the top of my list of things to do was to head to Maggie Beer’s Farm Shop, which we did three times in less than a week. The lake, the olive trees, the grounds, the shop… it’s all gorgeous. (And she has the best gluten free bread rolls I’ve ever had! And I’ve been gluten free for 30 years, so I’ve eaten a lot of them.) I confess I was hoping to simply bump into Maggie by good fortune, but the closest I got was seeing her disappear out through the kitchen door, and it was all I could do to stop myself leaping over the counter to chase her down… which, of course, probably wouldn’t have ended too well for me, so it’s lucky I haven’t been a high jumper since primary school.
This is all just to say, ‘Thanks, Maggie, for nurturing the hearts, minds, bodies and souls of food lovers throughout the country, including mine’ and inspiring a a plot line through my new book. I hope you love it.
With competitive jam makers, a variety of jam, The Ghan rail travel, the Australian outback, the Barossa Valley, Maggie Beer, four generations of women, IVF, grief and new beginnings… The Jam Queens covers quite a bit of territory. Here’s an introduction to some of the inspiration behind these elements.
The food
Deciding which food to pursue is never an easy task for me as there is an endless supply of wonderful foods to explore. I always research my foods as much as I can and I practise making them from scratch (e.g. tea, chocolate, cheese, cakes, jam), with the exception of coffee (in The Gift of Life), which requires a lot of specialised equipment (though I certainly watched talented craftspeople doing it).
My apricot and vanilla jam
I have to love the food in my story as it’s ‘the hero’. In order to write about it with enthusiasm, I need to pick a food I enjoy and and am fascinated with. (For all the wine lovers out there, I’m sorry to say I haven’t yet found enough enthusiasm for wine to take it on.) It was actually my husband who suggested jam and after initially thinking it was too limited, I began to wonder about the whole competitive jam making scene and its place in our modern world and that caught my attention. I taught myself to make jam from the internet and realised I would have to enter shows to truly understand the process. I entered the Royal Brisbane Show in 2019 with my strawberry jam and was delighted (and shocked!) to win first place in the novice category. It was a lot of fun and I got a little bit ‘hooked’ 🙂 I then entered my gluten free Persian Love Cake into the Noosa Show and won second place, and another cake into the Eumundi Show (which one first place) and if Covid hadn’t cancelled everything in 2020 I would definitely have gone back for more. (As an aside, the recipe for the Persian Love Cake is included in the back of The Cake Maker’s Wish.) There’s a lot to be said for country shows and their cookery competitions and there is still more I’d like to explore there in the future.
Location research
My foodie themed novels always come together from ‘the outside in’ and my setting is usually the first thing I decide on. I’m a strong world builder so I want to really know that world well, and that usually involves a research trip. For The Jam Queens, I travelled to the Barossa Valley in South Australia with my husband and young son back in 2017. I wasn’t certain about my food theme at that stage but I was interested in fruit and especially apples. (I’ve had an ‘apple book’ floating around me for years now that just hasn’t quite settled yet… One day I’ll get to it.) While in the Barossa, I was lucky enough to be invited to tour the Trevallie orchard with Sheralee Menz, who took me around the apples, pears and apricot trees on a freezing, windy and grey day. My poor sub-tropical Queensland hide was shaking incessantly but Sheralee charged on with enthusiasm and effortless grit. The highlight was seeing a tree there that was over one hundred years old, majestic and magnetic.
The Ghan
The idea of journeying on The Ghan came to me while I was driving the two hours home from a day trip to Brisbane, when it simply popped into my head. I think it must have swum up from the depths of my sub-conscious because my beloved Uncle Anthony had frequently mentioned his hope of taking the trip and it must have settled into me somewhere as a great bucket list item.
I mentioned it to my husband, who enthusiastically agreed and declared it done (he’s fabulous like that), and told me to take my sister. I have been lucky enough to take Amanda with me on nearly all of my research trips, including to the Cotswolds and to Italy, and she is the best travelling mate. We have a ball. Somewhere on that trip, we found our alter egos in Myrtle and Dolce and those two characters became the ones you find in the book. I adore Myrtle and Dolce and wish them a lifetime of wonderful journeys to come (and hopefully a book of their own!).
The teenage pregnancy
The character of Aggie is a forty-five-year old woman who had her first child when she was seventeen. The origins of that backstory came about because while I was promoting The Gift of Life, a friend came to see me speak and the bookseller mistakenly believed she was my mother. My friend has a great sense of humour and we had a good laugh while she mused what sort of teenage mum she would have been. I was in the early stages of playing around with the character of Aggie and I was inspired to explore this idea of teenage pregnancies. I watched many episodes of the reality TV show 16 and Pregnant and was rather horrified at how dreadful so many of the family members behaved towards the pregnant teen and how, in every episode, the pregnant teen was actually the one holding it all together while people all around her fell apart. From that, I knew Aggie would have been a good and capable mum, especially if she got the right support. I also knew it could be a cause of serious separation between her and her mum (Valeria).
The IVF journey
Early on in The Jam Queenswe discover that Aggie has been through IVF and now finds herself at a crossroads in that journey, along with her ex partner, Gideon. That particular storyline was specifically inspired by a Mamamia podcast called The Quicky, which provides daily news updates followed by a ‘deep dive’ into a particular issue. In this case, the issue focused on the unique position couples find themselves in when they have ‘leftover’ embryos and must decide what to do with them. I was really captivated by this, not having ever considered it before and wondering what I would do in that situation. I was especially interested to consider how a couple would work it out if they were no longer together.
These are some of the themes and issues The Jam Queens explores. Keep an eye out for my forthcoming post on Maggie Beer and how she made it into the novel too!
The Jam Queens is out 13 April 2021 and you can preorder now from all good books stores and online retailers.
PRE-ORDER your copy of ‘The Jam Queens’ from any bookshop (online or bricks & mortar)
 SNAP a photo of the receipt and email it to josephinemoon@live.com.au or PM me via Facebook or Instagram before 31 March 2021
