Читать книгу Beyond Delicious: The Ghost Whisperer's Cookbook - Mary Ann Winkowski - Страница 26

THE THING I LOVE ABOUT VISITING with all these ghosts is that I get to go to all these neat locations to meet them. I’ve been all over the country helping people and helping earthbound spirits cross over—sometimes I think I should forget the ghost stories and just write a travel book! And even though the bulk of my work has been local to me, in Ohio, I’ve still visited some pretty neat places right here in my own state.

Take Barbara, for example. She lived on a real dude ranch practically in my backyard, complete with cowboy hats and horse wranglers. She raised show horses for kids to show at competitions, and she employed about five or six hands to help her. She’d not been having a lot of problems, but she had actually been seeing a ghost with her own eyes, and her hands had been complaining that they kept bumping into someone in the kitchen, except there was no one there to bump into.

“She doesn’t look dangerous,” Barbara said of the ghost. “She’s sort of, you know, roly-poly. She has scraggly hair and she’s missing some teeth, but she’s always laughing. Looks like she’s having the time of her life!”

“Are the hands seeing her, too?” I asked her when I got out there. I was looking around, but I couldn’t see this roly-poly woman anywhere.

“I don’t think they’ve seen her,” Barbara replied. “But they are pretty wound up about it. They said I had to do something, so I called you.”

“I don’t see her anywhere, Barbara,” I admitted.

“Oh, she’ll be down in the kitchen. My husband, Bruce, is down there now cooking dinner for everyone—that’s usually when she shows up.”

So we went down to the mess hall and sure enough, there she was. She did look quite disheveled but, just as Barbara said, not dangerous. In fact, I’d have said she was jovial, if anything. As soon as she realized I could see her as well as hear her, I got her fully attention.

“What’s you name?” I asked her.

“Tilly.”

“Tilly, do you know anyone here?”

“No, no,” she laughed. “I came up with my horses.”

“You did what?”

“From Tennessee.” She nodded at Barbara and added, “She bought some horses from my ranch and I came up with them.”

I checked this fact with Barbara and she confirmed that it was absolutely true. She had bought some horse from a ranch in Tennessee the year before and she had started seeing Tilly shortly thereafter.

“I was the cook,” Tilly went on to explain. “And that boy there, he misses his home-cooked Tennessee meals.”

The “boy” she was referring to was a ranch hand named Bobby who had moved up from Tennessee for the job. Tilly said he was especially missing real Tennessee corn fritters.

“If I give the recipe to Barbara so her husband can make it for Bobby, will you go into the White Light?” I offered, making a deal I’ve struck many times over the course of my life.

“Those horses are in good hands,” she decided. “So yes, I suppose my work here is done.”

Tennessee Corn Fritters

¾ cup flour

½ teaspoon salt

Dash of pepper

¾ teaspoon baking powder

2 eggs

1½ cups corn cut from cob

Sift together flour, salt, pepper, and baking powder. Add beaten eggs and corn and, if necessary, a little milk. Drop by spoonfuls onto a hot, well-greased griddle or frying pan, and cook until golden brown on both sides. If using creamy canned corn, add an additional 2 tablespoons flour to absorb extra moisture. Serve with warm maple syrup. Serves 6.