International Potluck Blogfest - Babaganough

International Potluck Blogfest
Do you have a favorite recipe? A dish everyone loves?
Share it with us! 

Today Beth Fred, Medeia Sharif and I are hosting the International Potluck Blogfest.  

Here are the rules:

~ Put the bloghop badge on your post.
~ Post the cover of a book you love (it can be your own) with a food and/or recipe from the book, or a food from the MC's region, or any food you just like!
~ Link back to Beth, Media, and Lexa. All three of us.
~ A copy of Beth's Finding Hope, Medeia's Snip, Snip, Revenge, and Lexa's Soul Cutter, plus a $10 Amazon gift card will be given away via Rafflecopter! (The Rafflecopter is at the end of the post)

Soul Cutter

YA Horror/Romance

     The Soul Cutter is hunting again.
     Seventeen-year-old Élan spends her free time videoing psychic scams and outing them online. Skepticism makes life safe—all the ghosts Élan encounters are fakes. When her estranged mother disappears from a film shoot in Egypt, Élan puts her medium-busting activities on hold and joins the search.
     In Egypt, the superstitious film crew sucks at finding her mom. When a hotel guest is killed, whispers start—the locals think their legendary Soul Cutter has come back from the dead. Élan's only ally is Ramsey, a film-crew intern, but he’s arrogant, stubborn—and hiding dangerous secrets.
     When Élan discovers the Soul Cutter is no scam, she finds herself locked in a deadly battle against a supernatural killer with more than her mother’s life at stake.
     Élan is fighting for her very soul.


My novel, Soul Cutter, takes place mostly in Egypt, so my recipe is Egyptian (Middle Eastern).  It's a dip called Babaganough, made with eggplants and sesame paste -- it's yummy and healthy!

BABAGANOUGH
(Appetizer for 8-10 people)

4-5 medium eggplants (about 3 pounds)
1 small bottle of tahini (sesame paste) 200 grams/8 oz.
1/4 cup (60 ml) lemon juice
3 garlic cloves, finely minced
3 tablespoons oil
water if necessary (it usually is)
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley leaves
1 tablespoon chopped fresh dill

1. Cut off eggplant stems. Prick with fork on two sides. Place on baking sheet and bake in 400-degree oven for 1 hour, turning the eggplants every 15 minutes so they don't burn. They should be soft and mushy at the end. If not, continue baking until they are. Remove from oven. Let cool for 1 hour.
2. Cut eggplant in half and gently peel the insides out of the skin and chop into little pieces (or mince in a food processor). Place in bowl.

3. P0ur tahini in a separate bowl. (If there is thick paste adhering to the bottom of the bottle, pour in the lemon juice and a little hot water and mix to loosen.) Add the garlic, lemon juice, and oil. If the tahini is dark, thick, and mealy looking, mix in a small amount of water until the tahini lightens in color and looks creamy.
4. Add salt, pepper, cumin, parsley, and dill. Mix thoroughly.  
5. If there's excess liquid in the eggplant bowl, pour it out, and add the eggplant to the tahini bowl. Mix.
6. Babaganough can be eaten with pita bread, crackers, breadsticks, carrot sticks, or cucumber slices.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Egyptian Comics & Celebrate

This week I'm celebrating ...  
Putting a smile on your face!

And my 150th blog post. :)

Have a great weekend, everyone!

This post is part of VikLit's blog hop, Celebrate the Small Things. To be part of this blog hop, all you have to do is follow the link and put your name on the Mr.Linky list, and then be sure to post every Friday about something you're grateful  for that week.  It can be about writing or family or school or general life.  This is the funnest and easiest blog hop ever! 

Radio Hope & Celebrate

Today, I'm happy to have Sean McLachlan's guest post about Egypt and its connection to his new book, Radio Hope!  Take it away, Sean!

Image from Dennis Jarvis via Wikimedia Commons

Ancient Egypt and the Apocalypse

By Sean McLachlan

Don’t worry about the title, I’m not about to start talking about how aliens built the pyramids and left a secret hieroglyphic code predicting the end of the world.  If you want New Age archaeology, watch cable TV.

Instead I’m going to tell you about the first time my mind was blown and how that indirectly affected my writing a post-apocalyptic novel twenty-four years later.  For some reason the Discovery Channel didn’t want to do a documentary about that.

Back when I was twenty-year-old archaeology student, I visited Egypt. I spent a wonderful month traveling up the Nile seeing every ancient site I could along the way.  The most impressive by far was the temple complex at Karnak.  At its heart is the Grand Hypostyle Hallway in the Precinct of Amun-Ra.  It’s a forest of towering columns all covered in hieroglyphics.  I sat in there the entire morning, awed, watching the light and shadows move over the ancient writing.

I’ve been to hundreds of archaeological and historical sites since then, but that place has always remained vivid in my memory.  Its grandeur, its mystery, its sheer size, all made a permanent impression.

In my post-apocalyptic novel Radio Hope, the action takes place barely a century after the fall of civilization, and yet that civilization seems almost as remote to my characters as ancient Egypt seems to us.  Only the very old had grandparents who remembered when cars sped down highways and the skies were full of airplanes.  Only a few settlements have electricity and virtually no one has seen a functioning computer.  In fact, most younger people think all the stories of a global communication network that brought libraries and movies into people’s homes are just fairy tales.  Sure, the Old Times were great, but the people were only human, not miracle workers.

And yet, there’s something magical about the ruins from the Old Times.  In this new toxic world the largest “city” has only three thousand people, while the ruins of the Old Times looked like they could house tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands.  Stories that the bigger cities had populations in the millions are exaggerations, of course.

And what will the great-grandchildren of my characters think?  By then all the computers will be dead, the photovoltaic panels degraded, the old magazines all faded away.  How much more mythical will those old ruins seem then?  If they wander through the rubble of London or Los Angeles, will they even recognize that human beings had built these great cities?

Maybe they’ll think up aliens to explain it all.  It will be a post-apocalyptic version of New Age archaeology.  At least there won’t be TV shows about it.

Sean McLachlan is an archaeologist turned writer who is the author of several books of fiction and history. Check him out on his blog Midlist Writer.

Blurb:  
In a world shattered by war, pollution and disease. . .
A gunslinging mother longs to find a safe refuge for her son.
A frustrated revolutionary delivers water to villagers living on a toxic waste dump.
The assistant mayor of humanity's last city hopes he will never have to take command.
One thing gives them the promise of a better future--Radio Hope, a mysterious station that broadcasts vital information about surviving in a blighted world. But when a mad prophet and his army of fanatics march out of the wildlands on a crusade to purify the land with blood and fire, all three will find their lives intertwining, and changing forever.

BUY LINK:  AMAZON

CELEBRATE THE SMALL THINGS

This week I'm celebrating:

1) I only wrote 2k on my WIP this week *facepalm* but 2k is better than nothing, right?  And there's always next week to try, try again.
2) I finished a guest blog post for Tara Chevrestt's blog Book Babe.  She does a special feature every week on a strong heroine from a book. So if you have a book with a strong heroine, TARA WANTS YOU to write a piece about her.  For more details, go here: Book Babe: Seeking Strong is Sexy Heroines for 2014.
3) A lovely 5-star review popped up on Amazon from Lori at Contagious Reads Reviews.  Normally, I don't crow about my reviews here, but since I just did a HUGE read-for-review giveaway on Library Thing, and Lord knows what will be coming down the pike in the next few weeks *cowers in the corner* I'm going to celebrate this great review now!

Do you think an author should read reviews on their book?  What about strong heroines -- do you write them or like them in the books you read?

This post is part of VikLit's blog hop, Celebrate the Small Things. To be part of this blog hop, all you have to do is follow the link and put your name on the Mr.Linky list, and then be sure to post every Friday about something you're grateful  for that week.  It can be about writing or family or school or general life.  This is the funnest and easiest blog hop ever! 

"E" is for Egypt

I'm not an official A - Zer, but I couldn't resist Celebrating "E" for Egypt!

Egypt was ruled by Pharaohs from about 3000 B.C. to 350 B.C.  After that, Egypt was occupied by a succession of conquerors:  Persians, Greeks, Byzantines, Romans, Mamluks, Napoleonic French, Ottoman Turks, and finally in 1882 by the British.  Egypt became independent in 1952.  As of 2013, the county's population is 85 million (compared to: US = 312 million, Britain = 63 million).

There are over 100 pyramids in Egypt, built between 2700 - 1500 B.C.  (Later, pharaohs were buried in secret underground tombs to foil grave-robbers.)  The largest of the three pyramids of Giza is one of the “Seven Wonders of the World” and was built in 2550 B.C.

From a distance, it’s hard to grasp its true size.  But when you're close, it's mind-boggling!

The Great Sphinx is the oldest and largest statue in the world.  Built around 2550 B.C., it lost its nose in 1348 A.D. when a Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr hammered rods into it and broke it off.  The man was hanged for vandalism.

Over the centuries, the Sphinx was buried in sand almost to its neck until fully excavated around 1925.

No one knows who ordered it to be constructed or what it was called because no mention of it occurs in any ancient documents of the time.  That’s the mystery of the Sphinx.



I love where I live.  <3  What's your favorite thing about where you live?

This post is part of VikLit's blog hop, Celebrate the Small Things. To be part of this blog hop, all you have to do is follow the link and put your name on the Mr.Linky list, and then be sure to post every Friday about something you're grateful  for that week.  It can be about writing or family or school or general life.  This is the funnest and easiest blog hop ever!

The Red Sea

Used with permission from Windgirls. com

I live on the Red Sea, one of the most beautiful places in the world. The water is a gorgeous turquoise and stays warm almost year-round. Unfortunately, I'm not a sun worshiper, and as far as water goes, I'm kind of a cat -- splashing around just isn't my thing. 

However, I have friends who go out on boats, swim, snorkel, scuba dive and even take trips in glass-walled submarines. They tell me tales of swimming with dolphins, seeing schools of clown fish, and seeing brilliant coral reefs.        

I may not be scuba diving anytime soon, but I sure like to look at pictures!