In The Last Thing He Told Me, Hannah tries so hard to win over her stepdaughter, Bailey, including going to great lengths to replicate a dish Bailey liked at a restaurant. Here’s my take on the Whole Wheat Linguini in a brown butter sage sauce–sans burning.
“It’s the linguine that you had at Poggio,” I say.
The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave
She gives me a blank look, as though Poggio isn’t her favorite local restaurant, as though we weren’t there for dinner just a few weeks before to celebrate her sixteenth birthday. Bailey ordered that night’s special–a homemade multigrain linguini in a brown butter sauce. And Owen gave her a little taste of his Malbec to go with it. I thought she loved the pasta. But maybe what she loved was drinking wine with her father.
Hannah gets a mysterious note from her husband–”Protect Her.” Her husband, Owen, is now missing and Hannah attempts to keep his daughter, Bailey, safe while finding out why Owen would leave. The hunt leads Hannah and Bailey to secrets about Owen’s identity and into new dangers.
The Last Thing He Told Me is fast-paced, twisty, and a perfect thriller. I listened to it in a single day and absolutely could not stop. While the pace lagged a bit at about 75% for me, I still loved Hannha’s doggedness. The relationships make this book–the flashbacks to Hannah and Owen’s meeting and short marriage, as well as Bailey and Hannah finally overcoming their fraught relationship in an effort to find Owen.
To recreate the dish Hannah makes for Bailey, I made my own whole wheat pasta. I rolled out the dough and cut it using my KitchenAid pasta maker attachment, which I love! I’ve had my KitchenAid mixer for over a decade now and I use it all the time.
The brown butter sage sauce comes together in about 10 minutes!
When was the last time you tried to make a special dish for something and failed?
Novel Bakery 
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