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)

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