Cozy Books for Winter Reading

It’s all in the title. I think this must be one of the most efficient ways of combining two of the most common ingredients in comfort food (potatoes + cheese).

You’ll need: boiled potatoes, cornflour, mozzarella cheese, salt and pepper.

Assembling them is pretty easy; just combine everything together and form into small balls, then cook in the air fryer for 12 minutes at 180°. Serve with marinara or some other sauce (I could even see chipotle mayo, maybe).

Here’s the video!

This is the third in the Spice Isle Bakery Mystery series, and while an older version of myself would feel compelled to always start at the beginning, the current iteration of me is very fine with dropping in wherever with cozy mysteries. You can start with Against the Current, in which the main character, Lyndsay Murray, opens the Caribbean Spice Isle Bakery with her family but has to find out who killed a rival baker. Or, you can go ahead with the latest, Coconut Drop Dead, where she works as one of the vendors for the Caribbean American Heritage Festival but has to take a step back from the festivities in order to figure out who killed an up-and-coming reggae singer.

Becca Freeman is one of the hosts of the Bad on Paper podcast and has given us what sounds to be a sweet, holiday-themed story of found family. Every Christmas since college, Hannah and Finn have spent the holiday together. With Hannah’s parents having died and Finn’s disowning him once he came out, the two became each other’s solace. As the years carried on, they added Priya and Theo to their group, and the four were happy for a time. But now Finn’s moving to L.A., maybe even without telling Theo how he feels about him, and Hannah is scared that her self-made family is shattering. As the four of them continue to grow into themselves, they’ll have to figure out how to grow into the relationship they have with each other.

The official blurb of this book calls it “a cozy Holmesian murder mystery and sapphic romance, set on Jupiter,” which I feel hits all the right buttons for a particular subset of people (me, I’m people). Investigator Mossa follows a missing man’s trail to Valdegeld, a place on Jupiter where a human colony’s university is located. A university where Pleiti, Mossa’s ex-girlfriend, works as a researcher. Once Pleiti joins Mossa’s investigation, the two set out on a convoluted path that involves the future of living on Earth…as well as their future together.

Foodie romances are a special kind of soothing, and this one takes place during the Mid-Autumn Festival. Dylan Tang wants to win the festival’s mooncake-making competition for teen chefs for a couple of reasons: 1) to honor the memory of his mother, 2) to publicize his aunt’s struggling Chinese restaurant and hopefully get more business. But the focus he needs to commit to winning keeps getting interrupted by the charming and wealthy Theo, who ends up asking Dylan to pretend to be his date for a Hamptons wedding. Suddenly, Dylan finds himself in a sparkling world of privilege, and maybe even falling for Theo for realsies…

This Regency-era mystery follows the spicy Beatrice Steele, who would rather read about true crime cases in the newspaper than focus on her needlework. So it makes sense that when eligible bachelor Edmund Croaksworth (lol) drops dead during the autumnal ball, it’s Beatrice who steps up to stop anyone else from being murdered while a storm rages outside.

Along this same vein is a series of YA cozy mysteries by my podcast co-host Tirzah Price, the first of which is Pride and Premeditation.