Cafe owner Lila Macapagal is looking forward to welcoming spring with the annual Big Spring Clean event in her hometown of Shady Palms, Illinois. For an entire month, local businesses, including her Brew-ha Café, will be offering discounts to welcome warmer weather and, hopefully, customers new and old. Her own trio of godmothers—Ninang April, Ninang Mae, and Ninang June, or the Calendar Crew as Lila privately calls them—will be launching their new laundromat in conjunction with this initiative.

Not everyone is happy about the new business. Ultima Bolisay runs a chain of laundromats on the north side of town and is furious at the perceived competition. She’s not the only one to wish the Calendar Crew ill, however. The three women have a reputation for being rumor mongers, raising the ire of more than one person who’s felt victimized by their wagging tongues. When their laundromat is vandalized just ahead of their grand opening, there’s no shortage of suspects. But who would go so far as to murder Ninang April’s lovely young niece and leave her corpse in the back, lying next to the spray-painted warning “MIND YOUR BUSINESS”?

Divina de los Santos was new to Shady Palms, with seemingly no enemies in the area. A few years younger than Lila, she’d recently graduated from art school and was trying to figure out what to do next with her life. Ninang Mae and Ninang June hadn’t exactly been keen on having the young woman around—her departure from the Philippines had been under something of a cloud—so they kept her busy with the laundromat in an effort to keep her out of trouble. Lila had found her personable enough, even if Divina had the bad habit of flirting with other people’s boyfriends.

The local police are quick to conclude that Divina must have been killed by one of the Calendar Crew’s enemies, but Lila isn’t so sure. It isn’t that she didn’t like Divina. She just hates how the police are treating the young woman like a detail instead of an actual person. The more she pries into Divina’s past, though, the more unsavory information she discovers about the local Filipino community, including shocking secrets that the Calendar Crew might never be able to get over. Will Lila’s pursuit of the truth come at a terrible cost to the people she loves the most?

I always thoroughly enjoy the diverse representation in this series, and this installment was no different! Murder and Mamon sees Lila, her family, and her friends continue to grow as they juggle running their businesses with finding justice for a young woman they all knew. As a jaded genre reader, I figured out whodunnit pretty early on, but I greatly enjoyed reading along as Lila and Co. investigated. The descriptions of food and drink were also mouth-watering, whether they be Japanese chirashi bowls, Greek bougatsa, or Filipino mamon, among other dishes.

Luckily for me, Mia P. Manansala provides recipes for four of the dishes mentioned in the text so I can recreate them at home. I decided to try out this one:

Tita Rosie’s Arroz Caldo Recipe

Serves 4

Ingredients

1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, peeled and thinly sliced

½ onion, chopped

1 pound bone-in chicken pieces (drumsticks are perfect)

2 chicken bouillon cubes

1-2 teaspoons minced garlic

1 cup uncooked white rice

2 tablespoons fish sauce (patis)

Black pepper

5-6 cups of water

Toppings (optional)

Hard-boiled eggs, sliced

Fried garlic

Fried shallots

Green onions, chopped

Lemon or calamansi slices

Patis

Instructions

Heat some oil in a pot and sauté the ginger and onions until the onions soften and the ginger is fragrant.

Add the chicken to the pot and sear on high heat until all sides are brown.

Crumble the bouillon cubes into the pot and add the garlic, cooking until the bouillon melts and the garlic is fragrant. Add the uncooked rice, patis, and black pepper, and stir so that the aromatics are evenly distributed and the rice is coated in the oil and chicken fat.

Pour in the water and bring to a boil, then lower to a simmer.

Cover the pot with the lid slightly askew so steam can escape.

Simmer, stirring occasionally, until the chicken is fully cooked and the rice has reached the level of softness and consistency that you like, roughly 30 minutes. If you prefer your porridge thicker, cook until more of the water evaporates. If you like a thinner dish, add more water and adjust the seasonings.

Dish out and serve with your choice of toppings. Enjoy!

This is a great basic recipe for one of my favorite comfort foods! I love the use of the patis here, which really adds a salty, umami piquancy to the porridge. Personally, I prefer to fully cook the chicken first before removing it from the pot and adding all the other ingredients. This way I can let the chicken cool while the porridge cooks, then shred the chicken meat and add it to the pot later, ensuring an even distribution of chicken throughout.

I really appreciate Ms. Manansala’s additional notes on how to adjust this recipe for different pantries and budgets. Arroz caldo and its variants are a great anytime meal for everyone, and I love trying out new-to-me variations on the theme.

Next week, we head to the West Coast to bake up a savory treat while figuring out who would kill for a culinary inheritance. Do join me!

See also: Cooking the Books: Agatha Whiskey by Colleen Mullaney