Fiona hails from the tiny Western Australian town of Pingaring, three and a half hours from Perth, and her stories are so vivid with small town and country life you can taste the wheatstalks. The Family Farm was her first hit and a wonderful story about following your dreams. Heart of Gold, with its honest hero and heroine and excellent portrayal of the stones life can throw at us, followed The Family Farm into best-sellerdom. Fiona’s much-awaited third novel, the evocatively titled The Road Home, releases at the end of March. Let’s take a peek…

THE ROAD HOME

When your life is at a crossroads, how do you find the road home?

Lara Turner has a boyfriend, a nice house in the city and a chance at a big promotion. So when her brother calls asking her to come home, she hesitates. Can she face the memories that inhabit the beloved place of her childhood? And how does she feel with the news it’s to be sold? Is she the answer to saving the family farm?

Jack Morgan has memories of his own to contend with. A falling-out with his family and a bitter end to a past relationship have left a big chip on his shoulder. When his best mate’s beautiful sister arrives on the scene, he finds himself deeply conflicted.

Lara and Jack have a powerful attraction but are constantly at odds. Will their love of the same land keep them apart, or grow into a love of a different kind?

From the bestselling author of The Family Farm and Heart of Gold comes a heartwarming novel about finding your true place in the world, and the healing power of the land.

 

I am so looking forward to getting my teeth or, rather, my eyeballs, into this one!

And now I bring you….FIONA!

 

Thanks Cathryn for having me, I love reading the Friday Feast blogs. I love cooking shows too, I just don’t like cooking! I love EATING especially anything with chocolate. So you could imagine I’m loving and hating the fact that Easter is just around the corner. Easter chocolate for some reason is just yummo and the kids and hubby know that their eggs are always in danger if they sit opened in my fridge for too long. I call it the ‘mummy tax’.

So for that reason I’m going to share with you a chocolate chip crunch bicky recipe my mum gave me. She told me she got it from one of my Auntie’s but when I told my Aunt about the awesome bicky recipe of hers, she had no idea what I was on about and said she’d never made them. Ha. So the whole origin of this recipe is unknown. Who cares where it came from, I’m just glad that I have it. I don’t make it that often as I can’t seem to stop eating the mixture, before and after cooking! Hey, when we were kids out on the farm with my cousins we would all make a raw cake to eat, and buy the time we actually cooked what was left no one was hungry.

This recipe is really simple. (It has to be for me to use it lol) Sometimes I use Cornflakes and sometimes Special K, depending on what’s in the cupboard.  And once they are made, and cooled I put them in a ziplock bag and freeze them. The kids just take them straight from the freezer to eat. In summer they are really nice frozen, they don’t go hard, but are nice and cold. I just love the crunch factor. Oh and the chocolate…did I mention that bit?!

Choc Chip Bicky’s

250gms butter/marg

1 cup castor sugar

Cream together, then add 2 eggs and mix

½ teasp vanilla

2 cups S/R flour

4 cups of cornflakes/special K slightly crushed.  (I just pour it into my hand, crunch it and drop into the bowl)

Mix through and add Choc bits (I like to use a whole packet but it’s up to you. Me, chocoholic remember!)

Put onto a tray in small balls. (I have been known to make huge size ones…you get more choc bits that way)

Bake 180º 15-20 mins or until starting to brown.

I have doubled this recipe and frozen the whole lot so I have a huge supply for the kids school lunch boxes.  (I hate having to cook again, so if I’m turning my oven on I like to make the most of it and do a big cook up)

Well I hope you enjoy these as much as I do, and big thanks to Cathryn for having me.

Also I’d love to offer up a signed copy of my new book The Road Home which is due out 21st March.  Please tell me something you used to eat when you were younger, like my raw cakes or sometimes when we were craving a sugar fix my cousin had taken a packet of jelly and we ate that! (This is back when TimTams weren’t readily available in cupboards!)

 

Thanks so much, Fiona. Love the way you can freeze these biscuits. Very handy and a very delicious treat in the summer I imagine. As for teenaged snack-fests, I found culinary heaven after the delivery of our first microwave. This is going to sound gross, but after school sometimes I’d come in and unwrap a whole stack of cheese slices – those really plastic-y ones because proper cheese didn’t work the same – tear them up into pieces into a cup then zap it until it turned all gooey and luscious, then gobble it up with a teaspoon. Poor Mum used to do her nut over how the cheese slices kept disappearing. In the traditions of good sisterhood, I blamed my brother.

So come on Feasters, Fiona and I have shared ours, time you shared your naughty and not so naughty eaty-secrets. There’s a wonderful prize up for grabs.

Entries close midnight Tuesday, 13^th March. Open internationally. And please provide a way for us to contact you in case you win!

If you’d like to learn more about Fiona and her fabulous books, please visit her website. You can also connect via Facebook and on Twitter.

 

Fiona’s giveaway has now closed. Congratulations to Jenn, the lucky, lucky winner of a signed copy of The Road Home. 

Thanks to all who entered and for your wonderful comments. I bet there’s been a few tubes of condensed milk purchased thanks to Fiona’s visit!