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I’m happy to welcome K.L. Borges to Salty Inspirations! Today’s guest post features Murder on Fletcher Pass and a little story from Kelly Boyd, a math teacher turned animal rescuer. Pull up a chair, settle in, and enjoy this visit with Kelly!
Biting off More than You Can Chew
Hello, this is from Kelly Boyd, math teacher turned animal rescuer. Most days, I can be found behind my battleship of a metal desk in the front office of RogerDog Rescue, located in Helena, Montana. I run the front office, keep track of all the paperwork and handle the online posts for our adoptable dogs. I am the first person you see if you visit RogerDogs: a shorter woman with silvering hair cut in a pixie style and a warm, welcoming smile.
This post is about a bit of my life outside the rescue, however.
A perfect storm involving Helena’s Fall Farmer’s Market, a local apple producer and misguided beginner’s enthusiasm blew up in my kitchen last weekend while my husband, Boyd, was off on a camping trip with an old buddy.
With time on my hands, I drove to Helena for the last farmer’s market of the season. It was a gorgeous fall day; the sky was a deep blue with no clouds in sight; sunshine was plentiful and warm without being hot; the air itself was deliciously crisp.
Those words, deliciously crisp, blossomed in my mind as I sampled a sliced apple at a table topped with a towering pyramid of freshly harvested red apples. These were the best apples I’d ever tasted! Now, I have never been one to busy myself in the kitchen, putting up summer’s bounty to be enjoyed later in the year, but with the juicy flavor of those apples in my mouth, I lost my head. The seller had printouts of a foolproof recipe for making applesauce “good enough to win prizes at the State Fair” and I was hooked.
I bought two and a half bushels and swung by the hardware store for a couple boxes of ½ quart ball jars in which to store my prize-winning applesauce. I went so far as to buy a roll of pretty red and white checked ribbon to tie in bows around the jars once filled. Oh, I was on fire! I couldn’t wait for Boyd to see the results. The apples and I zipped home and I gleefully jumped into becoming an Applesauce Queen while my heelers, Sadie and Leo, circled at my feet, hoping there would be some sort of dog approved goodies to drop on the floor. They seemed a little puzzled that I was so excited over mere apples.
Who in the audience has ever mass processed apples into sauce? You are most likely laughing at my idea that this would be a fun time. Two and a half bushels of apples is a lot of peeling, followed by even more chopping. My wrists would be sore for days! Cooking all of that processed apple matter into sauce with my single stock pot turned my kitchen into a Turkish sweat bath, even with all the windows open. It was exhausting!
Before I was even a third of the way through, I was flirting with the idea of feeding all the remaining apples to Poppy and Petunia, my two Kune Kune pigs. No one would be the wiser, after all.
I stubbornly didn’t want to give up, even though I had clearly bitten off more than I could chew with this culinary project. I gritted my teeth, wiped my brow and persevered.
It was almost midnight before I poured the last spoonful of sauce into a final Ball jar. There was no enthusiasm left over for decorating the jars with cute bows of red and white checked ribbon. I felt grimly proud as I looked at the rows of filled containers; I had done something new and had conquered, I could quite the battlefield with honor. So there!
I reread the recipe a final time before retiring from the kitchen for the night. There, at the very bottom, were words that I hadn’t noticed when I focused on the cooking directions. “Storage: may be kept for a week in the refrigerator.” Excuse me? My refrigerator doesn’t have enough space for all those jars and even if it did: Boyd and I couldn’t eat that much applesauce six months, let alone one week!
Either I figured out how to preserve my preserves or it would all wind up as pig food, yet. Sigh. A problem for tomorrow.
Sunday found me knee deep in Round Two of the Great Applesauce Experiment: canning, another skill I never learned at my mother’s knee. The thought of using a pressure cooker was terrifying, so I was canning with a water bath. More work in an even steamier kitchen. It seemed like I would never be free of those apples! Johnny Appleseed has a lot to answer, in my book.
In the end, all of the sauce was saved; Poppy and Petunia had to be satisfied with the cast-off peels and cores. I even managed to put the red and white checked bows on the jars before Boyd came home.
Boyd says the applesauce is delicious and I’m sure I will agree when enough time has passed for me to face a bowl of the stuff!
Murder on Flesher Pass (Montana Animal Rescue Mystery Series) by K. L. BorgesAbout Murder on Flesher Pass
Murder on Flesher Pass (Montana Animal Rescue Mystery Series)
Cozy Mystery
2nd in Series
Setting – Montana
Publisher : Camel Press
Publication date : October 14, 2026
Language : English
Print length : 316 pages
Paperback
ISBN-10 : 168492362X
ISBN-13 : 978-1684923625
Digital
ISBN-13 : 978-1684923632
ASIN : B0H1DLX1WV
RogerDog Rescue of Helena, Montana, is operated solely for the benefit of Montana dogs, no transported outsiders allowed.
When a fellow rescuer dies while completing a transport for an infamous Butte operation, Betty Mills, Kelly Boyd and Cici Vargas don’t believe it was an accident. They infilter the Butte group, just in time to partake in a rescue flight from Mexico. Plans go awry and they unwittingly wind up with something that multiple suspicious characters want to get their hands on. Is it the foreign dogs themselves or something else? The body count begins to grow and the danger spreads to other RogerDog workers.
Can they solve the mystery before it is too late?
About K.L. Borges
K.L. Borges, an Agatha Award-nominated author, moved to Montana thirty-five years ago with her husband to raise their three children alongside a series of herding dogs. Prior to becoming an author, she taught math at a private Billings high school (Go, Rams!). Borges is a member of the Billings Gem and Mineral Club and Sisters in Crime. She and her husband are often found enjoying the Montana outdoors with their two blue heelers.
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Thank you to K.L. Borges for stopping by Salty Inspirations and sharing this guest post! If Murder on Fletcher Pass sounds like a book you’d like to explore, consider adding it to your TBR list.
While you’re here, take a look around the blog for more author visits, book spotlights, and cozy inspiration.
As always, thanks for stopping by for some Salty Inspirations! —Michelle❤️
