Kitchen witch Mia Malone is seriously thinking about quitting her day job as catering manager for the Lodge, the renowned local ski resort. She’d originally taken on the position when the Lodge decided to stop outsourcing its catering gigs to independent businesses like her own Mia’s Morsels, making it much harder to keep her small business afloat. Although she has her trusted employees Abigail Majors and Christina Adams running the show while she works at the resort, she’s getting really tired of her boss, Frank Hines, constantly belittling and undermining her.

Frank’s terrible attitude isn’t at all improved by the news that Mia’s Morsels has just landed a lucrative contract to host the Magic Springs Harvest Queen pageant as part of their town’s annual fall festivities. He’s certain that she used insider information to give Abigail the scoop on the Lodge’s bid, allowing her employee to undercut the bigger company’s efforts. Mia strenuously denies this–not only is she a woman of integrity, but she honestly wasn’t that enthused about bidding for the gig in the first place. While most of the world sees the pageant as a cute, small-town affair, Mia knows that it’s one of the local witching community’s biggest events of the year. This, of course, carries with it a commensurate amount of drama.

Mia’s life is eventful enough without inviting other people’s histrionics into it–though even she has to concede that the gig is lucrative and could lead to a stable financial pipeline for her company if they can pull it off. She’s just not thrilled about getting even more involved with the powerful local coven sponsoring the pageant. She’s much happier working on the coven’s outskirts and leaving most of the politicking to the better-connected Abigail.

Things take a darker turn when Mia starts finding potion bags left around the grounds of the historic school building that houses both her business and her apartment. No one will admit to having placed them there, even before tragedy strikes and one of the budding pageant queen’s mothers seems to suffer a stroke on the premises and dies. Mia would be more than pleased to call the whole thing off, but the coven is insistent that the show must go on. Besides, it looks like the deceased accidentally fell victim to a trap of her own making. Despite her better judgment, Mia allows the pageant to proceed, little suspecting that a killer is waiting to strike again.

There is a lot going on in the sixth installment of the Kitchen Witch Mystery series, as Mia juggles her professional responsibilities with her personal life and the lives of her friends and family. Christina, for example, has really blossomed from the awkward goth girl she was when she fled her family home to live with the woman that her brother had just dumped instead. Christina and Mia are as close as sisters, and it is heartwarming to see their bond continue to grow despite the curveballs life keeps throwing at them.

There was one recipe included with this book, and it’s a good one.

Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup

Instructions

In a large stockpot or Dutch oven, put the carcass of a roasted chicken and any leftover meat from the chicken. Add a roughly chopped onion; two peeled, roughly cut carrots; a teaspoon of minced garlic; and salt and pepper. Cover the ingredients with water and simmer for 30 to 45 minutes or until the meat is falling off the bone.

Drain the liquid into a bowl, then return to the empty stockpot.

Clean the meat off the chicken carcass and shred it.

Return the meat to the stockpot with the liquid (off the heat). Chop any onion and carrot bits into bite-sized pieces and return that to the broth as well. Add enough store-bought chicken broth to have approximately eight cups of broth (probably at least 4 more cups).

Put back on the heat and bring broth to a boil. Salt and pepper to taste. You can also add ½ teaspoon dried thyme and ½ teaspoon dried oregano if you’d like.

Add [12] ounces of egg noodles[.] Boil until noodles are done, then serve.

Lynn Cahoon also includes a recipe for homemade egg noodles, but I just used store bought. For the chicken soup recipe, I had the half-worked-over remains of a rotisserie chicken to toss into the stockpot, though really any roast chicken carcass will do. I also chopped up baby carrots instead of whole ones because the leftovers are easier to feed to my kids. I highly recommend adding the thyme and oregano too, as they add a delightful complexity to the dish.

I do think that I should have probably added much more than just four cups of chicken stock to this, as the noodles wound up absorbing a lot of the liquid later on. It was still very delicious, but my leftovers were definitely more chicken pasta than soup.

Next week, we travel back to the East Coast to whip up another chicken dish while navigating family drama turned deadly. Do join me!

See also: Cooking the Books: Death Scene by Carol J. Perry