To celebrate the upcoming release of A DANCE WITH SEDUCTION, I’m hosting another Goodreads giveaway! This time, 5 autographed copies of IN BED WITH A SPY are up for grabs. The giveaway only lasts a week, so be sure to enter soon!
Giveaway ends July 15, 2017.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
I’m thrilled to announced a giveaway on Goodreads of The Smuggler Wore Silk! In celebration of the third book in the series, A DANCE WITH SEDUCTION, which releases on July 24, autographed copies will be sent to 5 readers. The giveaway ends on June 23, 2017, so be sure to enter soon!
Giveaway ends June 23, 2017.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
Please join me in welcoming Gina Conkle, author of Georgian and Viking romance (with a foray into contemporary romance with WAITING FOR A GIRL LIKE YOU releasing just last week)! Gina, so glad to have you visit today.
Thank you, Alyssa, for hosting me on your blog. I’m sharing one of my adventures—eating like a Viking. Last summer my family took a dip back in time with my Viking garden and Viking recipes.*
We learned a lot. One point of interest: Vikings ate a lot of kale. Another interesting point: Reading about seasonal foods and how the Vikings solved those problems.
The Cheese Alternative
Dairy products were the midsummer answer to food shortages. By spring, regular Viking folk would’ve plowed and planted their fields. Winter stores of dried and pickled veggies and whey treated meat would’ve dwindled. Fresh fish would be the answer in some places, but even large schools of herring don’t pass through southern Scandinavian waters until summer’s end.
Enter Cheese Lovers
Milk products from goats or cows would’ve been the protein mainstay, but the wise farmer made sure the kid goat and calf gets their fill first. People got leftover milk to drink and make into cheese. Yes, even hearty Viking warriors guzzled milk. Here’s a snippet from the Sagas:
Tables were brought forth and they were given food: bread and butter. Large boxes with skyr** were also placed on the table. Bard said: “I regret much that I have no ale to offer you, though I would have liked to.” You will have to suffice with that which is here. Olvi and his followers were very thirsty and drank the skyr. At that Bard brought out some buttermilk and that they drank as well.
~Egil’s Saga
Viking Cheese
The process is like making mead: a little labor intensive at first with well-timed follow ups. This is how I made my Viking cheese.
~ 10 cups whole milk in a pan and cook on medium heat (stirring it often) until the milk reaches 39 degrees Celsius (102.2 deg. F)
~Stir in 1 tbsp. of rennett, cover the pan, and let this mixture sit for 30-40 minutes.
~When you lift the lid, you’ll see a lumpy white-ish, yellow-y mass with watery edges. That watery liquid under the coagulated mass is whey.*** Grab your ladle and remove all the whey into a separate container. Nothing’s wasted. Vikings used everything.
~Now here’s the interesting part. You keep pressing the curds (even punching them!) to get the last of the whey out and to form your cheese. I tried punching my cheese, but a flat wooden spoon worked better.
~ Cover your cheese with a plate, a pan lid, whatever works, and let it sit for 6 hours.
~For 3 days you’ll turn your cheese over once in the morning and once in the evening, patting it with a little salt and wrapping it in fresh cloth. Keep the cheese at 17 degrees Celsius (62 degrees F).
~Days 4-28 turn your cheese twice a day like before, wrap it in a clean cloth, but NO salting. At the end of the month, you’ll have fresh Viking cheese. My cheese turned out like a crumbly version of mozzarella. I’ll have to keep practicing to perfect a firmer block cheese.
*This “Eat Like a Viking” adventure started when a history writer sent me a link to this book, An Early Meal. Two historians studied seven Viking archaeological sites for clues to what Vikings ate and how they prepared their foods. It was nerd-vana for me.
** Skyr (pronounced skeer) is a type of Icelandic yogurt that seems to be catching on worldwide now. Cattle and goats were scant in Iceland’s early days. The prized animals were a sign of wealth, thus, consuming their milk was preferred. By the late tenth century, horse was actually a favored Viking meat.
***Whey is the thin watery part of milk. Vikings used it for meat preservation among other things. Vats big enough to hide a man were commonplace on Viking farms. In fact, there’s one saga tale of a Viking warrior on the run. He’s being chased and ends up on a farm. One of the women agrees to help by hiding him in a vat of whey.
And now a bit about one of Gina’s Viking romances, To Find a Viking Treasure.
Survival’s in his blood
Rough-souled Brandr’s ready for a new life far from Uppsala, but the Viking has one final task —protect the slave, Sestra. Her life’s been full of hardship…until she learns the location of a treasure.
Saving others is her purpose
With war coming, stealing the enemy’s riches will save lives, but only one man can watch over Sestra —the fierce Viking scout, Brandr. The two have always traded taunts, now they must share trust. Passions flare as secrets unfold, leading one to make a daring sacrifice that changes everything on their quest To Find a Viking Treasure
Gina Conkle writes Viking and Georgian romance, with a recent foray into contemporary romance. She grew up in southern California and despite all that sunshine, Gina loves books over beaches and stone castles over sand castles. Now she lives in Michigan with her favorite alpha male, Brian, and their two sons where she’s known to occasionally garden and cook.
Find Gina online!
For those of us growing up in the Midwest of the US, subways, undergrounds and mass transportation are just not a part of life. Sure, the downtown areas might have buses, and if you go to Chicago or Detroit, there are trains or subways. But where I live, everyone still has a car. If I didn’t have a car, I would have no way to get to work. Mass transportation just doesn’t come out to the rolling fields of farm country.
So imagine my terror of using the London Underground. Sure, everyone in London does. Sure, it’s clean, safe, easy—well, mostly. If you don’t have any idea where in the city you are, it’s a bit tricky to figure out the different lines. I can’t tell you how often I stood in a tube station for a good fifteen minutes staring at the map on the wall.
Or using this one:
Which made me really look like a tourist (as if the camera hanging around my neck didn’t do the trick), so sometimes I would surreptitiously used this one:
Which, as you can see, was well-loved and ended up in multiple pieces.
Still, navigating the Underground made me feel very independent. I got lost repeatedly, but I always found my way to my destination. Eventually I was competent enough switching lines at the stations that I fancied myself indeterminable from the locals.
Ha. The camera. And, really, I’m very American-ish. They picked me out without me having to say a word!
Anywhoodles, I was utterly terrified the first time I stepped onto the Underground. I kept reading signs that said “Mind The Gap”, and I thought for sure I would be the one to fall into the gap and get run over by a subway car.
Headline: Stupid American Author Didn’t Mind The Gap!
Newspaper headlines and overactive imagination notwithstanding, it was lovely to ride the tube and then change my mind regarding destination partway through the trip. Traveling alone means that if you decide to take a detour, there is no one to consult but yourself.
April 15, 2016
8:30 am
Breakfast
. . .
For now, it is time to put my big girl panties on and brave the Underground!
. . .
9:25 am
On the Underground
Apparently going the right direction.
I love the signs. “Mind the Gap” on the door. Also, there is an advert that says “Love Your Ladyparts. Text Ladyparts 2 to #####”.
What would happen if I texted Ladyparts 1?
. . .
4:00 pm
Chandos Pub
Trafalgar Square
The Underground—no idea why I was so scared! Easy-Peasy-1-2-3sy! Minus the fact that I switched trains and went the wrong direction. Oops. So it took me 3 stops to figure that out, at which point I got off, hemmed and hawed, then found my route.
But partway to Charring Cross for the National Portrait Gallery, I suddenly decided to go to Westminster. I mean, I was so close. [According to the very small map. Turns out when you shrink the city onto a 5¾ x 11½ inch piece of paper, things are not as close as they seem!] So I got off at the station, pulled out my map to figure out where I was.
I step out, and there was the bleepity-bleep Big Ben. OMG. It’s BIG. So I start to take pictures, walk around and Holy. Hell.
Westminster this moning was utterly divine. It was mostly cloudy, just shy of rain, in fact. The building was utterly amazing. The architecture was so detailed, so exquisite, it was nearly impossible to believe it was real. It was like looking at a fairytale building. Gargoyles, saints, crazy-pretty carvings.
First, who dreams this? Second, who builds it?
Gargoyles
Crazy Pretty
Saints
That, my lovelies, was one of the thoughts that ran over and over in mind that morning. I thought not of the architect so much as the builders. The stonemasons. The carpenters. The laborers. The men who shifted stone into place, who fell from the highest heights—because you can’t tell me they were tied and buckled to the building. Someone had to have fallen to their death. For as many people who have trod the stones of Westminster, so, too, has blood been spilled there in the name of beauty.
I felt sort of like I was at the Beast’s castle in Beauty and the Beast—minus the police and men with machine guns.
Selfies!
A bit off-putting, to say the least. [But as the first bombing in Brussels occurred just a few weeks before, Europe was on high alert.] And I’m sure they all thought I was nutty, snapping a selfie or otherwise taking pictures all across the building.
But there I was, totally nutters, wandering at a snail’s pace, zooming in on every bit of architecture I could. God, it was divine. Utterly, utterly divine. I can’t wait to look at the pictures.
Anyway, I wandered, snapped, wandered. Then I saw a building in the middle of Westminster that was clearly Middle Ages. Clearly. And the sign in front said “Open Daily.” Naturally, as it was a day, and I was here, and it was Medieval, I went. But more later on that.
First, I walked in a little park south of Westminster, took some selfies, met some pigeons.
And I found some little white and yellow flowers. I took a picture. Why? Aside from the fact that they were pretty, in Hyde Park [the day before] I came across an Arabic woman probably about my age. She was taking a picture just as I passed. She said to me, a little sheepish, “They are pretty flowers.” And I said, “I thought the same thing this morning!” I had. I’d looked at them during my initial walk through the park and thought how pretty and cheerful they were.
So there we were, she and I. Me in my Old Navy clothes, windblown and sweaty, she in her traditional garb and with an English accent, both of us marveling over pretty yellow and white wildflowers. That’s a moment I’m not likely to forget soon. Continents apart, and yet human in the same way—we stopped to smell the flowers. Or take a picture, anyway.
It’s more or less the same thing when you think about how few people ever stop.
Later that day I toured the Medieval building, St. Margaret’s Cathedral, and the National Portrait Gallery (more later on all that, of course, as I’ve loads of history to share). When I left the NPG, I went to Chandos Pub on Trafalgar Square for a pint and to journal. I met a very nice man there at the counter next to me, who directed me to the Charring Cross subway station. It was, apparently, right on Trafalgar Square (which was actually a roundabout). If I just went counter-clockwise, I would find it.
Yeah. I went around the roundabout three times. In the pouring rain.
If I just went counter-clockwise… Pshaw.
Still, soaking wet or not, I will always remember the woman in Hyde Park. Have you ever met a kindred spirit? One that you just knew you’d met in another life? (Assuming there is such a thing, which I have yet to rule out). She and I looked down at those flowers and I knew we were kindred spirits, 3,700 miles apart.
Adventures of an Author in Europe: If you haven’t read the beginning of my adventures, you can start here.
After my little foray into Hyde Park, and going around and around the same roundabout a few times, I finally got to the Victoria & Albert Museum. Of course, as per usual, I was very loud when I walked in. Why? Because as security was checking my bag for explosives (Europe was on high alert after Brussels) I was looking around for the ticket counter.
Me: Where do I buy a ticket?
Security: There are no tickets.
Me: [very loudly] You mean, it’s free? I can just come in and wander around for as long as I want?
Security: Yeah. Don’t get lost.
Me: [even louder] Oh, this is going to be GREAT.
And just imagine my squeal of delight when the very first room I see is the historical fashion display.
Oh, oh, oh, it was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen—except maybe for the Three Centuries of French Fashion exhibit I saw a few days later in Paris. We’ll get to that. But first, the fashion.
I took pictures of Every. Single. Item. Far away shots. Close up shots. I looked at stitching on hems and gloves so closely I fogged the glass. I can’t possibly put every picture here or describe every item, but I have so much fodder for future historical clothing blog posts my heart goes pitter-pat just thinking about it.
STAYS!
And when I found the extant stays, I literally shouted “Stays!” and made the people around me laugh.
What makes me so excited? Certainly I can look at historical fashion books where the details are enlarged and I don’t have to fog the glass. The V&A also has a lot of images online, which I’ve used for research purposes in the past. I’ve seen some of these items already.
But it’s not the same. It’s just not. You can’t understand sizing, texture, color from a photograph. The people of the past really were smaller than us. I kept thinking the men were the same size I was, and some of the women’s gowns seemed impossibly small. And some impossibly large!
How the heck do you sit in that?
The shoes were much narrower than I expected. No way would my big ol’ wide feet get in them.
The fans were exquisite in their detail, and I could just imagine a workman standing over them with a teeny-tiny paintbrush. My eyes hurt just thinking of it.
The other reason I love fashion exhibits like this—and why I like antiques in general—is because someone wore those clothing. They woke up one morning, put on their undergarments just like we do, then their outergarments, then their accessories. They lived their life, just like we do now. Just because their clothes and society were different doesn’t mean they didn’t laugh and love and cry. More, they came before. Who we are now is because of who they were then. Every day of my life is built on the days and lives of others no longer here, but who left a legacy.
And when I see those gowns and morning jackets and horrifically narrow shoes, I think of where they wore them, and what they did in them, and how their actions shaped my life. Maybe some statesman drafted a world-altering law while wearing that jacket. Maybe the woman carrying this parasol fought for women’s equality.
Or maybe they lived, married, bore children, touched the lives of others, and left a legacy in that way.
OK, so now that I have waxed poetic about historical figures, on to the marble statuary and jewelry sections!
I took lots of pictures of the marble statues because I find it interesting to know what people looked like in the past (see me waxing poetic above). Put a face to the name, so to speak. And because marble is so white and pure, there is something both sad and beautiful about them, even when the faces are smiling.
Now, onward and upward! On the second floor of the V&A was a really cool room full of jewelry. The room was dark, with lights only on the jewelry so they sparkled in the cases. It was almost like walking into a night club—dim, dark floors, dark walls, with the flash and blink of lights here and there. Naturally, I start to take pictures, and what do I hear?
“Ma’am, no photography. Ma’am. MA’AM!”
I was busy photographing and didn’t hear him at first.
“MA’AM, there’s no photography!”
Oops. Turns out there was a really big sign next to me that said NO PHOTOGRAPHY.
So I apologized profusely, stumbled on my words, stumbled on my feet. And the security guard/porter—we shall call him Fred to protect his identity—came over to tell me about the display I was stupidly photographing. It was the Townsend Jewel Collection, which had once contained the Hope Diamond. [Fred the Porter thought it was interesting that the Americans got the Hope Diamond and Britain got the rest]. The jewels were arranged in a swirling circle, with the hardest jewels in the middle (diamonds) fading to the softest on the outside (opals, etc.). They were also stunningly beautiful! So wish I could have posted a picture, but I think the one I took might be slightly illegal.
Fred the Porter then showed me their computer system and how I can view all of the items in the jewelry collection online. (GO HERE AND DROOL) Then he filled my head with fact upon fact upon fact about stones. He was a font of information, and I was a willing listener. A few of those facts are in my journal entry below.
The conversation then briefly drifted to history, the discovery of the Americas, and a few other subjects I’ve forgotten now. It was fascinating to get the world view of a man so enamored of stones and gems. He was my first of many interesting conversationalists on the trip! And if you ever are so lucky as to go to the V&A and find Fred (which of course you can’t, because I changed his name), ask him to tell you about the stones. The V&A couldn’t have picked a more perfect person to guard them!
Obviously, I have no pictures of the jewelry except a couple of illegal ones I took before Fred the Porter stopped me and we had our lovely conversation. But I can tell you that aside from famous jewels, there were displays going as far back as Ancient Greece. There were lover’s eye brooches, French chatelaines, 1970’s bangles, gorgeous medieval girdles, tiaras worn by princesses, death rings—oh, how I wish I could have taken pictures!
But at least I know—thanks to Fred the Porter—that I can see these all online!
April 14, 2016 3:30 pm
Courtyard of the V&A
I have now been here 4 hours! I think I’ve seen everything now but the paying exhibits.
I’m sitting in the central courtyard at the little wading pool. There are perhaps ten children running and splashing and shrieking. I find myself wanting to join them, though I fancy the American would be taken up as crazy. [I took the pictures after the kids left to protect them.]
Since I left the fashion area, I’ve seen many marble statues and took pictures. Busts, statues in the classical style and a few funeral pieces that were at once a celebration of life and so very sad. The girl on the couch had the most lovely poem on the side of her statue.
And the Finch family effigies, with father and mother, and the names of all twelve children was very interesting. It was commission when he died, but his died a decade later. What must it be like to look on your husband’s cold stone face every day?
Then I found the jewelry. Oh. My. God. From Ancient Greece to 2000. I also got yelled at for taking pictures. Stupid American! But Fred and I spent a pleasant half hour discussing jewelry and history and the Americas and all sorts of things.
Notes from the jewelry collection:
The Townsend jewels; part of the Hope Collection.
The Londenderry jewels brought back from India
The green stones (chrysoprase?) that were for Charlotte’s wedding day
A rough cut green diamond – green from radiation a billion years ago
Death and love rings from the Middle ages
Girdles!
Chatelaines!
Tiaras from the 1800s
Steel that was intricate and black
Apparently much of the collection is online. Just need to find the jewelry page.
Also, Fred the Porter said that we are part of the earth, and all of the things inside stones—iron, magnesium, oxygen, radiation—they are all part of the earth as well. I would add they are all also part of the Universe, as are we.
Oh, and when tourmaline gets hot, it creates and electrical shock. They used to use them in Geiger counters!
After jewelry I looked at silver and gold stuff, mostly religious, but then I found the portrait gallery. I only spent about 15 minutes there, taking pictures of anything from my time period so that I can study hair and clothing. [That shall be a historical blog post for another day!]
Then I found the tapestries! My God, they were huge. 20 feet tall? 40 feet wide? More? They were from the 1500’s, mostly religious in nature. So intricately woven they were amazing. [Another post for another day—but these things were COOL].
Oh, and I bought a book about underwear. 🙂 All historical. 1500s to 2000 it seems. £10
Now I shall look at the architecture in the courtyard, watch the children, drink my water and figure out where to go next. The temperature is dropping and I’m starving. And tired as well. My poor feet! [Remember, I had walked Hyde Park that morning too!]
There you go then. My Afternoon at the Museum.
But it wasn’t the end of my day. I made another stop that brought me to tears. You’ll have to wait for that one, though. (How’s that for a cliffhanger?)