Jodie Bailey – Romantic Destination & Recipe for Romance – Part 1 of 1

Romantic suspense author, Jodie Bailey shares a romantic destination she and her husband visited after he fought in Iraq, a unique recipe for Thanksgiving, & a chance to win her novel, Freefall. Comment on any post dated Nov 19th – 23rd to get your name in the drawing. Deadline: Dec 1, 11:59 pm central time. Here’s Jodie:

My husband and I spent our tenth anniversary apart.  I was temporarily living in North Carolina with our three-year-old daughter and my dad.  He was constantly moving, place to place, all over Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.  I tease him all of the time;  he’s sent me flowers twice in our sixteen-year marriage, and that tenth anniversary was one of those times.  
He came back in August due to an injury, and it was like being newly married all over again.  After surviving that absolutely insane year, it felt like we should do something to mark a new chapter. 
We went to visit his parents in Michigan for Thanksgiving, and we knew we wanted to do something a little bit different.  Since we’d missed our tenth anniversary, and our eleventh was the day after Thanksgiving, we settled on leaving the kiddo with his parents and doing something we’d always wanted to do:  stay overnight at the Bavarian Inn in Frankenmuth, Michigan.  Yeah, it’s a touristy kind of thing to do, but we’ve always loved Frankenmuth, especially in winter.  It’s just gorgeous.  
That night, we treated ourselves to the full-on Bavarian Inn chicken dinner.  Well, I did.  He doesn’t eat chicken, so boy, did he miss out! One of the courses was this amazing cranberry relish with apples.  Oh. My. Word.  We’d have been totally happy to stuff our faces full of that for, oh, the rest of our lives. 
We had an amazing weekend just being together and wandering around town.  There was no agenda, no timetable, and there was no one but the two of us.  We were anonymous together in a very crowded holiday town, and it was exactly what we needed to reset and take in all that had happened while we were apart. 
And now, every Thanksgiving (thanks to Google)… there is Cranberry-Orange Relish on our table. 
Orange-Cranberry Relish:
 1 large RED apple (There’s a reason it’s not Granny Smith.  Cranberries are tart enough!)
1 large navel orange
1 bag of cranberries, frozen
¼ cup chopped pecans or walnuts (we call that optional…)
½ cup sugar, to taste 

1. Wash and scrub the apple and orange.
2. Rinse cranberries in a colander under cold water.  Try not to let them thaw.
3. Core the apple and cut into quarters.
4. Zest the orange, seed it, and toss the orange and its zest into a food processor.  Chop until it’s pretty much pulpy juice.
5. Toss in the cranberries and process just enough to chop them a little bit.
6. Toss in the apples and process until the relish is the consistency you want.  We like it chunky, so we pulse a few times just to bring it all together.
7. Sprinkle with sugar, stir, and let sit for an hour or so.  Taste and add more sugar if you wish.  Allow it to sit for a few hours or overnight. 

About Jodie: Jodie Bailey is Tarheel born and bred. After fifteen years as a military spouse, she’s proud to be a retired military spouse settled back in North Carolina with her husband and daughter. She is the author of the military suspense novel Freefall and is a contributor to Edie Melson’s devotional for military families, Fighting Fear: Winning the War at Home. She was a 2010 finalist in the Spacecoast Authors of Romance Launching a Star competition for her unpublished romance Going in Circles. While not working on her next novel (also a military suspense), she teaches middle schoolers to love writing as much as she does (if she’s lucky that day and they’re actually listening…). Jodie loves to bake, ride the Harley with her husband, and fish the Outer Banks with their daughter. You can find her on the web at www.jodiebailey.com, https://www.facebook.com/writerjodiebailey, and https://twitter.com/jodiebailey.
About the book – Freefall: Master Chief Cassidy Matthews thought she’d left random bombings on the streets of Baghdad.  But when a car explodes in the parking lot of her rigger shed, it blasts a hole into her carefully controlled life.  Her military unit erupts in chaos, her home is invaded…  And she finds her ex-husband bleeding in her coat closet.  The evidence says drug smugglers have her soldiers on their payroll, and Cassy’s been set up to burn if the scheme blows up.  The only person who can help her is the man who broke her heart twelve years ago. 
Will Cassidy trust the man who betrayed her?  Or will she shove him aside in a battle for control?  And will she live to make the choice?
Come back Nov 21st for Ada Brownell!