by Meg Tilly
½ teaspoon salt
2 slightly rounded teaspoons cinnamon
5 to 8 shakes nutmeg (depending on your preference)
¾ cup to 1 cup raisins (depending on your preference)
Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. (If you have a convection oven, you can use it to make the cookie edges even crispier.)
Mix together the butter, both sugars, vanilla, and egg. Using a blender, combine the almonds and pecans. Zap the nuts until they are around the size of barley. (If you have one of those pain-in-the-ass blenders with a million parts that take forever to clean, then you can just mince with a good old-fashioned large knife on a cutting board.) Add mixed nuts to the butter mixture and stir.
In a separate bowl, combine the flour, oatmeal, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Then blend the dry ingredients into the butter mixture. When it’s completely blended, sprinkle in the raisins. (You could forgo the raisins altogether, leave out the cinnamon and nutmeg, and stir in a cup of semisweet chocolate chips. Personally, I prefer raisins. However, that’s the joy of being the cook. You get to decide these things.)
Mix in the raisins (or chocolate chips) so they are evenly spread throughout the dough, then drop rounded teaspoons of the cookie dough onto a greased pan (greased with butter of course!). Smoosh the rounded balls slightly with the palm of your hand and bake for 8–12 minutes. (The time all depends on how hot your oven runs. I have two ovens. Both take different amounts of time to cook with the exact same dough.) The cookies should be golden brown all over, crisp on the outside, and have a slightly soft chewy center.
Cool slightly on a cookie rack if you have it, just until they firm a little. (If you don’t have a cookie rack, not to worry; they will still taste yummy. They just won’t have quite the same crisp on the bottom.)
And then gobble a couple of them while they are still warm, with a nice cold glass of milk! Don’t feel like you have to eat the whole batch in one sitting; they are really delicious cold, too.
*Another trick I use—now that the children have left home and I am baking cookies only for my husband and me—is I bake only what we will eat that day. The rest of the cookie dough I store in the fridge. This way, every day I can make a couple of freshly baked cookies for each of us to devour.
Acknowledgments
I have been very blessed to have help and input from my wonderfully talented editors, Cindy Hwang and Kerry Donovan, who helped make Cliff’s Edge shine.
My thanks to the design teams who created the wonderful cover and the interior look.
I am grateful for the dynamic marketing team at Berkley. Erin Galloway, Jin Yu, Ryanne Probst, Jessica Brock, and Fareeda Bullert, thank you for your superhuman efforts in getting the word out about my novels.
My thanks also go to Nancy Berland, Cissy Hartley and the Writerspace team, as well as Kim Witherspoon and Jessica Mileo at InkWell Management for all that you do and have done.
I feel so fortunate that three extremely talented New York Times bestselling authors, Jayne Ann Krentz, Kat Martin, and Mariah Stewart, carved time out of their busy lives to read my novel. They then gifted me with glorious blurbs. My profound thanks to these amazingly generous women, and to my friend Mary Bly for her friendship and writerly encouragement.
An enormous thank-you to my husband, Don, who encourages me, makes tasty food, and cheers me on every step of the way, and to my beloved sisters and my family and friends. I love you all very much.
And last but not least I’d like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to you, my readers, and all the booksellers and librarians who have championed my novels and other authors’ books as well. Thank you for making all of our lives a little more beautiful.
Thank you!
Don’t miss Meg Tilly’s third gripping contemporary romantic suspense novel
HIDDEN COVE
Available from Jove in fall 2019.
When Solace Island gallery owner Zelia Thompson’s close friend Alexus Feinstein of the prestigious art gallery Feinstein & Co. dies of a “drug overdose,” Zelia’s intuition sounds an alarm. The Alexus she knew didn’t do drugs and had everything to live for.
As Zelia begins looking into the circumstances of her friend’s death, what she uncovers will put her life in imminent danger. Will Zelia—with the help of the reclusive crime fiction novelist Gabe Conaghan—be able to unravel the mysterious happenings surrounding Alexus’s untimely death? Or will she become the bloodthirsty artist’s next victim?
About the Author
Meg Tilly may be best known for her acclaimed Golden Globe-winning performance in the movie Agnes of God. Other screen credits include The Big Chill, Valmont, and, more recently, Bomb Girls and the Netflix movie War Machine, starring Brad Pitt. After publishing six standout young adult and literary women's fiction novels, the award-winning author/actress decided to write the kind of books she loves to read: romance novels. Tilly has three grown children and resides with her husband in the Pacific Northwest. She is currently at work writing the third Solace Island novel.
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