Today we have fellow Down & Dirty author CR Moss with us to share one of her favorite recipes, along with her story in the anthology, Keep You Safe!

A stalked artist. A sexy wrangler. She’d watched over him once upon a time. Now it’s his turn to keep her safe.

Keep Her Safe Blurb:

I’m Professor Arianna Perez, and I’ve been asked if I’ll ever trust, let alone love, another man again. After dumping an abusive boyfriend, I doubted I would. At least, that’s how I felt until fate had sexy wrangler, Kian Bishop, reappearing in my life in a way I never expected.

Against my better judgement, I fell hard for the cowboy, believing everything he said, including how he wanted to treat me like a queen and keep me safe. Little did I know, though, that the circumstances that’d brought us together could also tear us apart…and possibly claim my life.

Purchase Links:

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B3X69KL/

iBooks: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/down-dirty/id1331942239

Nook: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/1127784443 

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/down-dirty-10

Recipe Intro:

I have a thing for potatoes. I have thing for soups, too. Put them together and… Yum! So one day when I was craving some Olive Garden Zuppa Toscana, I started searching the web for a copy cat recipe. I came across this link: https://happyhooligans.ca/zuppa-toscana-olive-garden-knock-recipe/ The recipe looked easy enough, and the author’s claims seemed interesting. I figured I’d give it a go. And, OMG! So good! There was one day that I bought enough items to make a super huge batch, and I ended up having to grab one of my husband’s beer brewing pots to be able to fit the soup in to cook it. Luckily, the five-gallon pot fit on the stove! After we gorged ourselves on the soup, we froze the rest. It’s a nice surprise to find containers of soup out in the garage freezer when you’ve forgotten you have them. LOL! Below is the original recipe from the link I provided above. After the recipe I’ve shared my tweaks to it. Enjoy!

Recipe:

Zuppa Toscana

Ingredients:

    1 lb spicy ground sausage (I often just chop up 3 jumbo sausages.  I like the “medium-spicy” ones, but use mild if you’re opposed to heat)

    1 large white onion, diced

    4 slices fried, chopped bacon

    3 cloves garlic, crushed

    9 cups water

    1 cup heavy cream

    5 cubes of chicken bouillon (or as much liquid bouillon as you’d need for 9 cups of liquid water)

    3 large potatoes, peeled and cubed

    2 cups fresh kale, chopped

To make your soup:

Sauté your sausage in a large pot until it’s cooked through.  Drain the grease, and remove the sausage, and pop it into the refrigerator.  You won’t be needing it for a while.

Leave a little bit of grease in the pot (maybe a tbsp or so).

Now you’re going to fry your bacon in this pot.  You want to use the pot that you just cooked your sausage in because it has all that flavourful sausage goodness in there.

Sauté your bacon until it’s half-way cooked, and then add your onions and garlic, and continue to cook over LOW heat until the bacon is fully cooked and the onions and garlic are soft.

Add a bit of your water to deglaze your pot, and then add the rest of the water and the bouillon, and bring it all to a boil.

Toss in your cubed potatoes, and cook over medium heat until the potatoes are cooked.  This generally takes about a half-hour.

Stir in the cream.

Add your sausage and chopped kale, and heat through.

Serve your amazing Zuppa Toscana with a crusty loaf or my easy bread-machine dinner rolls.

My tweaks that help to save a bit of time…

I use a package of ground hot sausage (example: Johnsonville All Natural Fresh Italian Hot Ground Sausage) and cook it as one would do ground beef. Then I drain all the grease and put the meat aside. The onion is sweet. Bacon… Well, I like bacon, so I usually go overboard with it. I tend to buy the pre-cooked kind that you can microwave in a few seconds (example: HORMEL® BLACK LABEL® Fully Cooked Bacon). This I’ll cut up and throw in the pan, let it cook a bit and then add in the onion. As for the water & chicken bouillon, if salt/sodium is an issue, I found that doing about 4.5 cups of water and 4.5 cups of chicken broth works just as well. These amounts you can play around with as you make batches to see what fits your tastes. Potatoes – I’ve used regular baking potatoes, and I’ve used red potatoes with their skins left on (peeling red potatoes is not fun, IMO). Again, depending upon your tastes you can use what you want. Granted, if you go with red, since they’re usually smaller, I suggest cutting up about six to seven. The kale I use is pre-chopped, bagged organic. After I’ve done most of the prep work and got the soup going, I’ll work on plucking the hard, thick stems from the leaves and just use the leafy bits in the soup.

Author Bio:

Hi everyone, my name is Casey, and I write under the names C.R. Moss for erotic and mainstream romance and Casey Moss for mainstream dark fiction (horror, suspense, urban fantasy) and sometimes the stories have an erotic flare to them. My professional bio for C.R.: An eccentric and eclectic writer, C.R. Moss pens stories for the mainstream and erotic romance markets, giving readers a choice of sweet, savory or spicy reads, usually within a sub-genre or two — paranormal, sci-fi/fantasy, time travel, or western flare. The bio for my other persona: Casey Moss delves into the darker aspects of life in her writing, sometimes basing the stories on reality, sometimes on myth. No matter the path, her stories will take you on a journey from the light-hearted paranormal to dark things unspeakable. What waits around the corner? Come explore…

Author Social Media links:

Website – C.R. Moss: https://crmoss.com/  

Website – Casey Moss: http://caseymossbooks.com/  

Blog: https://caseymscorner.wordpress.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CRMoss

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/author_crmoss/

Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/dl_rin

Amazon – C.R. Moss: https://www.amazon.com/C.R.-Moss/e/B002DBE49W

Amazon – Casey Moss: https://www.amazon.com/Casey-Moss/e/B0080RC9DQ