Lemon Yogurt Cookies

I love citrus fruit. My favourite time of the year is tangerine season (but only if you can get good, juicy Florida tangerines), and if I could only smell like one thing for the rest of my life it would be orange blossoms. If a recipe calls for lemon zest, I always double the amount. I even like citrus peel, and eat it as a snack anytime it comes in a drink or on the side of a salad (much to Judson's chagrin).

I think it all stems from one afternoon when I was a baby, and my parents took me out to lunch with my grandmother. Halfway through lunch, I got fussy, and without even breaking the conversation, Eleanor fished the lemon slice out of her water glass, picked the seeds out, and handed it to me. My mom tried to stop her, and I winced when I first gummed down on it, but then I happily enjoyed it for the rest of the lunch, sucking and gumming at it like there was no tomorrow.

And there you have it: an addiction was born. Maybe it was that, or maybe it was growing up with a grapefruit tree, a lime tree, an orange tree, and a tangerine tree in our backyard, but either way, the fact remains that if there's a citrus option on any menu, I'm bound to be interested. So naturally when I found the below recipe for Lemon Yogurt cookies, I knew I had to make them, and soon.

This recipe comes from an article entitled 24 Cookie-Jar Favourites from the September 1977 issue of Better Home & Gardens, and all I have to say about that is that I am sure glad that the page Eleanor ripped out only included 6 of those favourites, because I do not have time for 24 recipes from the same damn magazine. Unlike most recipes in the box, though, you could fool yourself into thinking this one is 'healthy' because hey, at least it includes yogurt?

Plus, the tiny size of the cookies HAS to count for something when it comes to portion control, right?

Anyway, this is an easy recipe that comes together in a cinch-- it's practically a one-bowl recipe (if you're careful), and if you have a well-stocked pantry, you probably already have all the ingredients except the yogurt and nuts. The texture is fluffy and cakey without being too soft, and the cookies themselves have just a hint of lemon-- enough to brighten up an otherwise boring cookie, but not so much that it distracts from the flavour of warm homemade treats.

And, seriously, this should not have been such a lightbulb moment for me, but as it turns out you can make powdered sugar glaze with literally any liquid! It doesn't have to be milk+powdered sugar+food dye-- you can use yogurt! Or (probably) juice! Or honey! Or (maybe) applesauce! My eyes have been opened and now I feel that the possiblities are endless. But shhh: don't tell anyone. Let's keep it our little secret, and then when people are impressed with our frostings we can just nod knowingly and think about how awesome we are.

The verdict:

3 spoons out of five. They're easy, they're delicious, but they don't hold up well overnight, so you have to eat them fast (not a problem, exactly, because they are delicious). Honestly, though, I wanted the icing to have a bit more zing than it did, and so I added some lemon juice to make it happen but that threw off the texture so I added more powdered sugar and then it wasn't zingy anymore. You know what I mean.

The recipe:

Lemon Yogurt Cookies

the directions:

Preheat oven to 190C/375F and lightly grease two cookie sheets.
Cream sugars, butter, shortening, egg, and vanilla until light and fluffy.
Stir in flour, salt, and baking soda, blending well.
Scrape sides of bowl and stir in ½ c yogurt and ½ c almonds.
Drop from a heaped teaspoon in 10pence/quarter-sized dollops onto the cookie sheet, approximately two inches apart. (The size will look small, but they puff up a lot, so you won't want them bigger).
Bake 8-10 minutes until light golden-brown.
Let stand for 30 seconds before moving to a cooling rack.
Let cool completely before frosting.
While cookies are cooling, sift together the remaining yogurt and powdered sugar and stir until thickened.
Frost the cookies after they've cooled completely, and sprinkle with additional chopped and toasted almonds.

Yields 2 dozen cookies.

the ingredients:

½ c sugar
¼ c brown sugar, packed
¼ c butter
¼ c shortening
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 ¼ c flour
¾ tsp salt
½ tsp baking soda
¾ c lemon yogurt, divided
¾ c almonds, toasted and chopped or flaked, divided
2 c powdered sugar, sifted

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