Choco-Nana Shakes

Growing up, my parents had a terrible blender from the 1970s that was olive green and had buttons specific to whatever you wanted to blend. Labels like 'drinks,' or 'soup' or whatever, but the speeds never seemed to vary and I never understood what you were meant to do if the thing you wanted to blend (an iphone, maybe?) wasn't on the list. Nevertheless, we wore that thing out making virgin pina coladas in the summer (still my favourite family recipe) and banana milks in the winter.

What's a banana milk, you ask? Well, I'll do my best to describe it to you, but I'll have to warn you that the inventor passed away years ago and never wrote down the recipe, so it's a bit of trial and error. A banana milk is basically very cold milk, a couple of speckly bananas (preferably frozen), a wee sprinkle of sugar, a lot of cinnamon and nutmeg, and... maybe nothing else? It's sort of like a smoothie crossed with a milkshake, but without any ice cream and, I'm pretty sure, without any ice. You can't dress up a banana milk, because it's the absolute epitome of perfection as it is. Banana milks are the single thing that converted me to (tentatively) liking bananas when I was very young. I used to beg my parents to make me a banana milk-- we even had glasses (horrible, ridged olive green things) that were especially perfect for drinking them, in the same way that flutes are perfect for champagne and old-fashioned glasses best for old-fashioneds.

Despite my partiality to banana milks, I've never been able to stomach the idea of banana shakes from a restaurant-- I always figure they'll arrive at the table dyed an unnatural yellow, flavoured unnaturally with candy-like sticky goo, and not nearly as good as the creamy simplicity of a banana milk.* But when I found this recipe in the box, on a Quik ad no less, I got excited. It might not be as authentic of a Hurm snack as a banana milk, but there's not a lot in the world that I wouldn't try with the addition of chocolate, and the banana shake I'm about to share with you is definitely a win.

I can imagine Eleanor saving this ad from the newspaper to make these shakes for her grandchildren-- me or my older cousins-- all of us beneficiaries of her enormous sweet tooth and willingness to share. I, especially, was extremely sensitive to ads with talking cartoon characters as a child and adored the Quik ads with that dumb brown bunny, so I know I would have loved these as a kid. However, you need not be a child to make this for yourself tonight. Indeed, you might even enjoy it more as an adult, because now it's legal for you to stir a wee shot of Bailey's into your shake and that is pretty much the only thing that I can think of that would make this entire thing better.

These shakes are simple and easy-- the perfect summer dessert on a hot night. The combo of banana and chocolate is the perfect summer pairing that will make you feel like you're on a tropical island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Make them and sit on your porch to sip them while you watch a thunderstorm roll in, and know that I'm jealous from way over here in Scotland, where thunder is a once-a-year occurrence at best.

*Incidentally, this relates directly to the best travel tip I have ever received, and I will share that with you now: if you're ever travelling in Italy and trying to determine at a glance whether a gelato shop is worth it's salt or not, check the banana gelato. If it's creamy and yellow, you know they dye their gelato and probably don't make it on-site. If it's grey and grainy looking, they likely make it on-site with fresh bananas, and their gelato is much better for it.

The verdict:

3 spoons out of five as the recipe was written, but with the changes I note below, this is easily a 4-spoon recipe... especially if you have fancy straws to sip this out of.

The recipe:

Banana Chocolate Milkshake

the directions:

Combine all ingredients in a blender (or food processor, if you're like us) and puree until smooth.
Serve in a frozen glass with a twirly straw for extra enjoyment.

Yields 2 good-size shakes

the ingredients:

2 c milk (you'll like the taste better if you use something above skim, but I did skim and they were still delicious)
2 medium bananas, frozen
4 tbsp chocolate syrup (if you also have to use 'dessert syrup' like me, you might want to add another spoonful)

Lime-Glazed Pork Chops

Pork chops are the stupidest food. I challenge you to come up with a stupider food, truly. You would think a pineapple would be stupider, on account of how dumb they look, but they're not. Only a pork chop is that stupid. And I'd be willing to bet even Eleanor would agree with me (especially based on how few pork recipes I've found in the box so far.

Here are all the reasons pork chops are stupid:

1. You have to cook them until they have the texture of a shoe in order for them to be safe to eat.

2. They taste like leather (see above).

3. They're so thick and so dense that, no matter what you marinate them in, they're never going to soak up the flavour the way a steak or fish does.

4. Also, somehow the awfulness of pork chops is magnified because of how good all the other cuts of pork are. I mean, bacon and lardons come from the same animal! Why would you bother with a pork chop when you could have those?!

When Judson and I had been dating about a year and had just started to learn how to cook together, I moved into an awesome apartment in an old schoolhouse. But when I moved in, the studio I had paid for wasn't ready and so I had to live in a giant unit twice the size of the one I was supposed to be in. Because the unit was so much bigger than I had anticipated, I had no furniture for it except my bed, so the living room was just a giant empty space with hardwood floors and floor-to-ceiling antique windows. It was basically a dance studio and I got to live there for three months at an unreasonably cheap rate until my smaller unit was ready.

Anyway, my first week there, Judson and I decided we'd make ourselves some pork chops. It was about this time of year, and Judson had just learned to cook and was feeling ambitious. So we bought a butternut squash, some pork chops, and some plums and kumquats to cook with the chops. I, however, had not yet unpacked my kitchen, so we had to cook the chops in a disposable pie tin, and halfway through the cooking process, Judson jabbed a hole in the dish with a sharp knife, and we leaked meat drippings all over my fresh clean oven. Unfortunately, we had no idea what we were doing, and it somehow took us over two hours to cook the meal. When it was finally finished (around 11pm on a weeknight), we realised that I had nowhere for us to sit to eat, and so we sat on the floor of my living room, criss-cross applesauce, leaning against the bare walls, drinking cheap beer and eating too-done pork chops off of our laps. That may be the best memory of pork chops I have, and it's not even a great one.

Nonetheless, I find myself with pork chop recipes and a husband who loves nothing better than pig. Luckily, this one involved lime peel, cloves, and grated lime zest, so I thought maybe those ingredients would overcome #1-4 above. Alas, I was wrong.

Maybe it's the lack of a grill (though I feel like any recipe that can't be tweaked to account for the lack of such a rudimentary cooking implement isn't worth it anyway), but we failed at this recipe miserably. I'll say this: it was easy, and cooking these made our entire house smell amazing for an entire day. But the sauce burned in the pan, and even though the chops weren't burned, they still tasted like the burned sauce. Plus, the chops were tough and the flavour didn't really soak beyond the exterior of the meat. I recognise that making these with a grill would keep the sauce from burning, but it wouldn't fix the toughness. Clearly, though, not everyone shares my opinion, so if you love pork chops and own a grill, then this recipe might be right up your alley. And, like I said, your house will smell like a Hawaiian paradise while you're cooking these.

The verdict:

2 spoons out of five. We managed to eat the ones we made, but only because there was nothing else in the house and we've already survived worse in my unending quest to tweak impossible recipes into possible ones in my own kitchen.

The recipe:

Lime-Glazed Pork Chops

the directions:

Preheat oven to 176C/350F.
Mix together all ingredients except pork chops, whisking well to blend.
Baste the chops, then place them in a searing hot pan for 5 minutes on each side.
Baste again, then move them to the oven for another 10 minutes.
Chops are done when there is no pink in the middle.

the ingredients:

1/3 c dark corn syrup (or 1:1 black treacle and golden syrup if you live over here)
1/3 c lime juice from 2-3 limes
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp lime zest, grated
¼ tsp ground cloves
2-4 1-inch thick pork chops

Fruit Pie

When I think of the summers of my childhood, I think of waking up early and swimming in our pool by myself, while my mom sat on the patio doing a crossword and drinking coffee. I think of my mom's chicken salad, which I hated as a kid (it had grapes in it! Come on!) but which I have now spent the better part of a decade trying to re-create. I think of coconut ice cream from a place called The Candy Kitchen on the beach, and I think of bringing home HEAPS of books from the Seminole Public Library, laying on the floor of my bedroom and reading through them one after another-- always excited when I found a new mystery novel. Summers in Florida were pretty amazing—and after we moved to North Carolina, they stayed pretty epic with long beach trips, camp, and visits to Kentucky.

When my mom talks about her childhood in the same town where I grew up, it was a completely different, though equally awesome, story: she would leave her house in the morning on her bike, and spend the day riding around doing whatever she wanted with her friends. As a little kid, her limits were the distance that Eleanor could shout (not as strict as it sounds-- Eleanor had quite a set of lungs), but after Eleanor had surgery on her throat and couldn't shout for my mom and her brother anymore, she took to ringing a cowbell when she needed my mom and her brother to come home. I have a vivid image of Eleanor in my head, standing on the microscopic stoop of their house in a polyester dress, one hand cocked on her hip, a lit cigarette in her mouth, ringing a cowbell with a bored look on her face, completely un-embarrassed at the racket she was making and completely unconcerned with what the neighbours would think. (Where, though, do you think she found a cowbell on the Gulf Coast of Florida?). When my mom got a little older, her limits were farther and farther until by the time she started high school I'm pretty sure she had ridden the entirety of Pinellas County on her bicycle. She and her friends would head to the beach, where they'd slather themselves in baby oil and lay in the sun for hours (these were the days before skin cancer worries, and my mom's olive skin tans like a charm). Anyway, there's not a lot that my childhood summers share in common with my mom's (other than ice cream at The Candy Kitchen), but one thing I think everyone's summers share is the need for summertime desserts. Fruit pies in the summer are just the perfect complement to long days that never seem to want to end, and somehow they're made even better if you happen to have picked the fruit yourself.

Whatever your summers were like as a child, I think there's probably a good chance they were more awesome than your summers as an adult, when work continues, you can't patronise the beach on a daily basis, and real-life doesn't allow you to wile away 5 hours at a time reading books. But you know what doesn't have to change? Your favourite summertime dessert.

The recipe for this pie just calls for '5 ½ cups mix fruit,' so I had a lot of leeway-- but it's summer, so obviously I went with peaches (my all-time favourite fruit) and apricots. Also, the recipe is written on receipt tape, like the kind that used to come out of calculators, and that cracks me up. As a side note, when I told Judson I was making a peach pie, he thought I had invented it myself as he had never, in his own words, 'heard of peach pie, or even knew you could make it.' Sometimes I hate to correct him.

You could definitely make this pie filling with anything that's in season right now, though if you're using a drier fruit like rhubarb or apples, you might want to lower the amount of flour by about 1/3 to accommodate. Bonus points if you combine fruits for new and unique flavours (my backup plan if the peaches weren't ripe was going to be blackberry/cherry/raspberry). I actually wanted to make this an apricot pie, but I couldn't find enough apricots (but if you can, do it-- I made a mini apricot pie with the perfect ones that are in season over here right now, and it was amaaaaazing).

The crust, however, is a giant pain. I have this theory that with most foods, you should try new ones all the time: just because you have a chocolate cake recipe that you like doesn't mean you won't find another that's just as good! But when it comes to pie crusts, all bets are off. If you have one that you like, you should just use it all the time because pie crusts are nothing but a hassle. And this one, although deliciously buttery and perfectly textured, is no exception. As Judson pointed out, it may be because the main ingredient is supposed to be shortening and I had to use Stork because of the infernal lack of Crisco in this country, or it may just be because this recipe is a nightmare, but the crust is insanely sticky and wet, which means it's not super easy to handle. You're not going to get a beautiful lattice crust with this dough, but the buttery layers go perfectly with the filling and I'd still recommend it.

The verdict:

5 spoons out of five. This pie was so good, we all went back for seconds. It's miraculous. Plus, the filling is just insanely easy-- especially if you use berries, which don't even have to be sliced. Make this pie and enjoy a warm slice on a sunny evening-- if you're stateside, you can have it with a scoop of ice cream. If you're over here, pour some cream over it and you're in for a true treat.

The recipe:

Peach & Apricot Pie

The directions:

crust:

Crack egg into a 1-cup measuring cup.
Fill the cup the rest of the way with ice-cold water.
Combine all ingredients, mixing well.
Form into a loose ball and chill while you make the filling.

THe ingredients:

the crust:

4 ½ c flour, sifted
2 c shortening/Stork
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 egg
Water
1 tbs vinegar

Filling:

Preheat oven to 176C/350F.
Mix all ingredients together and set aside.
Divide crust in half, roll out one half and place in pie dish.
If dough is particularly sticky, weigh it down with pie weights or dry beans and parbake for 5-10 minutes until pale but dry to the touch.
Fill pie crust with fruit mixture, roll out other half of dough and lay gently over the pie dish,
Crimp edges tightly and cut vents in the top crust.
Cook 15-20 minutes until crust is golden-brown.

The filling:

5 ½ c fruit, cut into bite-size pieces
1/3 c flour (less if using non-juicy fruits)
1 c sugar
1 tsp cinnamon