Beyond Delicious: The Ghost Whisperer's Cookbook: More than 100 Recipes from the Dearly Departed (America's Haunted Road Trip) - Softcover

Winkowski, Mary Ann; Powers, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1578604990 ISBN 13: 9781578604999

Publisher: Clerisy Press, 2011

Synopsis

Mary Ann Winkowski's abilities as a paranormal investigator have offered solace to countless people, either by reuniting them with loved ones who have died or by removing unwanted spirits and negative energy from homes, businesses or possessions. Beyond Delicious: The Ghost Whisperer's Cookbook is a collection of recipes bequeathed to Mary Ann through spirits of great cooks who have passed on. Arranged as two-page spreads, each entry includes a recipe as well as the story of how the author came to learn it.

Beyond Delicious: The Ghost Whisperer's Cookbook is part cookbook and part ghost story anthology; together, these elements create the most entertaining cookbook of the season.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

EXCERPTS

INTRODUCTION

When I first started helping people communicate with earthbound spirits and helping those spirits cross over, I had very little to go on. At first, my grandmother was always with me because I was just a child, but because Grandma didn’t have the same ability as me, she wasn’t really able to give me much insight into how I should go about things. Along the way, I picked some things up myself, was told some things directly by the spirits, and had my abilities extended by whatever Power gave me this gift in the first place.

One of the things I picked up from my own experiences was to always take a notepad and pen with me into every job. It seems so obvious now, but back when I first started doing this in earnest, it didn’t occur to me. Usually the spirits were family members and I could just pass their messages on directly, or they were completely unrelated, and, to be frank, no one really cared what they had to say as long as they said goodbye and left them alone.

Bess was the spirit who taught me to keep a notebook and pen with me at all times, and she was also the first ghost to ever give me a recipe. I’d never thought about lost recipes until Bess either. In hindsight, I should have expected both things: the need for paper and pen, and the need to pass along recipes.

Food is everywhere. We have to eat to survive, if nothing else, but for most of us food defines our days. Morning is the time between breakfast and lunch; afternoon comes before dinner. Yet eating is much more than survival or a way to break up the day. It is a social experience. We conduct business lunches, we raise money with pancake breakfasts, and we share the day’s events with loved ones over dinnerand it wasn’t too long ago that eating was only half the experience. The other half was preparation. The size of the kitchen used to be much more important than how much space the living room had for a home theater. It used to be that an average kitchen had stove tops crammed with pots of simmering soup stock, drying racks holding freshly baked bread, and chopping boards festooned with chopped vegetables.

Times have changed. In this new age of toaster-pastry breakfasts, power lunches, and fast-food dinners, eating has become a chore and cooking is considered a hassle. Even so, most of us still define good times and good memories with food: the cookies a favorite aunt baked, or the chicken soup you always had at Grandma’s. I’m sure somewhere out there, some people even fondly remember the aroma of a nut roll made by a woman named Bess.

Eleanor, the woman who called me about Bess, lived alone. Her husband had been dead for years, and since then Eleanor had become more involved with the church. That’s where Bess first ran into herwhen she was alive, I assumed. Eleanor loved to bake, and her specialty was nut rolls. There was only one problem, as Bess explained when I got to Eleanor’s house: She can’t bake worth a tinker’s cuss.”

Bess must have been 80 when she died and she was actively trying to get Eleanor to stop baking her nut rolls: She’d blow out the pilot light on the stove, she’d steal key ingredients, she’d put the butter that Eleanor had left out to soften up back into the fridgeanything she could think of. I couldn’t fully understand it. Eleanor was actually baking the day I went out there, and the house smelled delicious. She goes around giving those nut rolls of hers away, and everyone just throws them out. I mean, look at them!” Bess offered, motioning to the cooling rack where Eleanor’s signature nut rolls were. I turned and gave them a harder look, and Bess was right. They might smell good, but they sure didn’tlook good. They weren’t roll-shaped, for one thing, and they looked more pasty than golden-brown.

What?” Eleanor wondered, seeing me turn to look at her baking. What’s the ghost saying?”
Fortunately, I do not have to talk with earthbound

Review:

"Whether you believe or not, the recipes themselves look appealing to those of us on earth, who still have use of our taste buds. NewsFeed has to give Winkowski props for originality." - "Time Newsfeed" October 2011
"The stories in Beyond Delicious are quick, interesting reads. There's not a scary ghost story in the bunch. The recipes are old-fashioned family favorites, the kind that typically would be passed down through the generations, and can be enjoyed by believers and nonbelievers alike." - "The Wichita Eagle" October 2011
"This book is excellent and will make you want to share your recipies with those you love and who are alive for countless centuries." - TheExaminer.com January 2012
" If 'all things creepy' is just your style, here's a thought. When you're planning tonight's Halloween supper, why not include a couple of recipes from ghosts? Weird? Well, yeah! But impossible? Not necessarily . . . assuming you're a follower of Mary Ann Winkowski, Cleveland's "Ghost Whisperer." In "Beyond Delicious: The Ghost Whisperer's Cookbook," Winkowski tells tales of more than 100 spirits who had stories to share -- and recipes to go along with them. " -- Joe Crea, "The Cleveland Plain Dealer"

About this edition

• Publisher: Clerisy Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1578604990
• ISBN 13: 9781578604999
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328