Banana Slush

When an unseasonably cold arctic front moves through your town, bringing blizzard warnings from the National Weather Service, of course a frozen drink came to mind. We'd never made it for Thanksgiving, but with the highs outside in the single digits, we figured we'd make the world our refrigerator. Turns out it worked perfectly--- it didn't get above freezing for three days, and we didn't have to look for any room in the freezer at all.

I talked about my memory of this recipe in this entry. Drinking this DELICIOUS punch brought those memories crashing back. And with a Thanksgiving dinner that is a serious contender for the most delicious I've ever had, I've added more meaning to this recipe.

Banana Slush
a recipe from Grandma Gubler

4 cups sugar
6 cups water
1 can orange juice concentrate
juice of 2 lemons (preferably fresh)
1 quart pineapple juice
5 bananas
Sprite, Slice, or any other lemon-lime soda

Combine the water and sugar in a pot, and bring to a boil. While it's cooling, add the can of concentrated orange juice, lemon juice, and pineapple juice. Halve the bananas and put them in a blender; add a couple cups of the juice mixture to the blender and blend until only small chunks remain (about a minute). Pour everything into containers for freezing. Freeze until solid (takes about a day). When serving, scoop out a chunk of the slush into a cup, and cover with soda, like a root beer float.

This recipe is absolutely SIMPLE to make, and tastes delicious. It makes a whole lot, so if you're throwing a party or just have a case of Sprite in your food storage that's about to go bad, you can't go wrong with this. It also lasts in your freezer for a few weeks. Although Thanksgiving dinner was delicious with it, I could see how enjoying it outside in the summer could be nice as well.

Rainbow Jello

It's that time of year again--- where the family gathers to cook for hours and hours, spend 30 minutes stuffing their faces, and groan their way through the remainder of the day. I've always liked Thanksgiving, not just because I can eat beyond capacity and not look like a pig (mob mentality rules here), but because it's the time where I get to try to see if I can make a whole meal come together at the same time.

This year, because there are only seven of us gathering (it's the in-laws' turn for my siblings, which leaves us unmarried ones to keep my parents company), my mom wanted to make a few different dishes. One of her favorites to have is rainbow jello. Now Utah of course is famous for their sometimes bizarre jello dishes, but I promise, this one has no miscellaneous vegetables (though it does one of those other Utah staples-- sour cream). I think you could use light or fat-free sour cream, and sugar free jello, and make this dish 'healthy', but hey--- it's Thanksgiving. Bring on the heavy whipping cream.


Rainbow Jello
a recipe from my mom

various boxes (3 ounce or smaller size) of flavored Jello (I use 7: black cherry, strawberry, orange, lemon, lime, berry blue, and grape)
sour cream -- 1/3 cup for each of flavor of Jello (I got 2 16-oz tubs)
water
whipping cream
powdered sugar to taste
vanilla to taste


The jello takes a LOT of time (but you're not completely busy with it so don't fret about spending 7 hours on a dessert) --- one hour per Jello box. I like to use a 13x9 clear Pyrex casserole dish, because by the time I'm done with the seven layers, it completely fills the dish. I also like to do it in rainbow order, because I tend to be a bit OCD and I like how the colors blend together. This of course is not completely necessary, and you can mix and match as much as you want.

I like to have the following things ready for use: a 1-cup Pyrex measuring cup, a 2- or 4-cup Pyrex measuring cup, a 1/3 cup measuring cup, two spoons, and a spatula. Fill the 1/3 cup with sour cream and set aside. Boil a pan of water (you'll need at least one cup of boiling water for each step). Measure out one cup of the boiling water into the 4-cup Pyrex measuring cup. Dissolve one packet of Jello in the water, and stir until completely dissolved. (I start with the purple and work backwards so I end up with the red on top.) Try to avoid making bubbles. Measure out 1/2 cup of the Jello liquid into the 1-cup Pyrex measuring cup. Put the 1/3 cup sour cream into the 1-cup Pyrex cup and mix until all the sour cream is melted. In the other measuring cup with the remaining Jello liquid, add 2 Tbsp. cold water and mix. Scrape all the bubbles out of the Jello-sour cream mixture, and slowly pour into the serving dish. Remove any remaining bubbles from the jello, and cover with saran wrap. Refrigerate for 30 minutes. When you pull it out, make sure the saran wrap doesn't touch the Jello--- it will remove a chunk of it (I know this from experience). Slowly pour the clear Jello liquid over the now set-up layer. I use a spoon, hovering it very close to the first layer, and pour into the spoon, so the force of pouring it doesn't disturb the layer I just made. I've tried all sorts of methods, and this one works best. Cover, and refrigerate 30 minutes. About 10 minutes before the second layer is done, I'll start boiling the water, and mix the second box of Jello up, separate, and mix in the sour cream, which usually puts me at the right time to add the next layer. Alternate sour cream and clear layers until you're done.

It's best to do this dish the night before you serve it, as the more time you allow it to harden after you're done with it, the better it sets up. Right before serving, whip up a bunch of heavy cream with powdered sugar (granulated sugar makes the whipped cream grainy) and vanilla to taste. Cover the jello with the whipped cream, and serve.

This dish has gotten me a whole lot of compliments, and it really does taste good. Your dish will definitely be the life of the potluck, and outshine the other people who dropped into Smiths/Krogers to buy a coffee cake.

Breakfast Rolls (aka Monkey Bread)

Growing up, we used to have these awesome breakfast rolls every once in a while, especially around Christmas and Thanksgiving time. When I found out how easy they were to make, I immediately ran out and bought a bundt pan (just saying bundt reminds me of My Big Fat Greek Wedding). You have to start these rolls the night before, but they're really easy to finish the next morning.

Breakfast Rolls
a Jones family recipe

18 frozen roll dough (I use Rhodes rolls)
1/2 packet of the small box of cook-and-serve butterscotch pudding (MAKE SURE it's cook-and-serve, NOT instant)
1/2 cup-1 cup finely chopped walnuts
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup butter (again, please don't use margarine)

That's the ingredient list. And it's easy to prepare. The night before, put the chopped walnuts in the bottom of the bundt pan, and place the frozen rolls evenly on top of the nuts. Sprinkle the butterscotch pudding on top of the dough. In a saucepan, melt the butter, and add the brown sugar to it, whisking until its completely combined into a syrup. The butter will resist combining, but you need to have a smooth syrup or it'll separate in the bundt pan. After it's in a syrup, pour over the frozen rolls.

Let the dough rise overnight. The next morning, when the rolls are big and puffy, heat the oven to 350, and bake for about 25 minutes, until the rolls are deep golden brown and a toothpick comes out clean. When it's removed from the oven, take a serving dish (let's be honest, most of us will use a big plate), and put on top of the bundt pan; flip it immediately over. If it cools in the pan, it'll be hard to get out, so you want to do that right after taking it out of the oven. Enjoy!

Stuffed Zucchini

My dad can be a bit extreme. Where two or three zucchini plants can provide more than enough zucchini for the average family to not only use, but also as super exciting gifts to eager neighbors, my dad insisted that we plant fifteen hills. Keep in mind: a hill had 3 seeds in it. So what the heck do you do with zucchinis from 45 plants? People started getting smart and locking their car doors--- not to keep thieves from stealing their belongings, but to prevent unexpected bags of zucchini from appearing in their vehicles.

Anyone who has grown zucchini can also attest that if you are not fastidious about checking the plants, they can quickly get out of hand. Even with the one zucchini plant I planted this year, a few days of not paying attention landed me with a 30-inch-long vegetable. Fortunately, years of having extreme excess had gifted me with great recipes for zucchini, and my mom's recipe for the giant variety sounded like the perfect solution to using it.

I called my mom to send the recipe to me, and I promptly (and accidentally) sent it to the trash bin. So, after another call, I got the recipe. It's currently roasting in the oven.

Stuffed Zucchini
by my awesome mom (Denise Jones)

1-2 large zucchini
1 small onion
2 stalks celery
dash of olive oil
1 lb hamburger
1 can cream of chicken soup
1 can cream of celery soup
3/4 cup rice
Italian seasoning (I added this just for flavor)
salt and pepper for seasoning

Preheat the oven to 350. Cut the zucchini in half, and scoop out the seeds. Salt and pepper it, and put it on a cookie sheet covered in tin foil in the oven. (It will need to cook for about an hour and a half, so it's good to get it started early.) Chop up the onion and the celery and soften them in the olive oil in a large skillet. When the onions are transparent, add the hamburger and brown. When the hamburger is browned, add the cans of soup, using 1/2 can of water in each can to swirl out the soup from the cans. Season to taste--- I used Italian seasoning, salt, and pepper, but garlic salt or other herbs could be good. Then add the rice (uncooked) and stir. Simmer for 1/2 hour until the rice is tender.

When the rice/meat is done, pull the zucchini out of the oven and pile the mixture in the hollowed out zucchini. Put back in the oven and cook for another 45 minutes or so, until the zucchini is tender. Cover with tin foil, removing for the last 10 minutes to brown. Serve. Just a note: don't feel obligated to eat the skin--- we would just scrape the zucchini off, as the skin tended to be a bit tough.

Remember, those gigantic zucchinis are still good--- and you don't need to make a ton of zucchini bread with it either. It makes a good main dish that is pretty easy to make and is really tasty. And it brings back memories of the hordes of zucchini that we grew.

Zucchini soup

I went to my cousin's the other day for dinner, and she had made this really good soup. I asked her if it was hard to make--- she said it was really easy. Apparently she'd gotten it from her mother, who had gotten it from a restaurant somewhere in Southern Utah. I'm not sure who to give the credit to, but I really enjoyed it, and enjoyed making it.

Just a note. When you're making this soup, it calls for you to blend it. Use a blender. You might think that if you just used a mixer for a long time, that it would eventually be somewhat pureed. You'd be quite wrong. You would probably end up with a fairly lumpy soup, with the onions not being blended at all, and with bits of soup splattered all over the kitchen. Of course, this is all conjecture, I'm sure.


Zucchini Soup
from Raelene Hall

2 medium onions
3 Tbsp butter
1 1/2 lbs zucchini, peeled and cubed
3 cups chicken broth (2 cans)
1/2 cup half and half
1/8 tsp nutmeg
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp seasoned salt

Dice up the onions, then sauté them in the butter until they are transparent. While they're sautéing, peel and dice up the zucchini into cubes. Put the onions, the zucchini, and the broth in a large pot and boil. Let it simmer for about 15 minutes. After it's simmered, put the spices in, and then blend it all in a blender. (See note above.) When it's thoroughly puréed, pour it back into the pot, and add the half and half.

Taco Soup--- a Jones family favorite

I like to multi-task. Right now I'm on my way to a wedding rehearsal barbecue dinner. Now don't panic: I'm not driving. Like I'd blog and drive. And I'm still trying to figure out what exactly we're rehearsing. Especialy when the bride told me she's wearing a baggy shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. And growing up, we used to call that particular type of footwear 'thongs'. After a rather embarrassing encounter, I now call them flip-flops (though my instinct is still to call them thongs). I hate when people change vernacular on me.

Well that was a tangent. This was a recipe my mom made us because it was so darned good and so darned fast. You basically chuck everything in a big pot and heat it up. What could be more attractive about a dish? And it's fairly healthy (at least healthier than, say, a cheeseburger and fries). This is her version:

Taco Soup
a Jones family recipe

1 lb hamburger, ground
1/2 medium onion, diced
1/2 green pepper, diced
4 14 ounce cans stewed diced tomatoes
2 cans kidney beans, drained and rinsed
1 can whole kernel corn, not drained
1/2 packet taco seasoning
A couple pinches of Italian seasoning
1 Tbsp salsa
Sour cream
Grated cheddar cheese
Sliced black olives
Tortilla chips


In a big pot, brown the ground beef. Then add the chopped onions and green pepper and cook until the onions start to turn transparent. Then add the tomatoes, beans, corn, and seasonings. Cook it until it simmers. Look! it's ready to eat. When serving, add sour creamcheese, olives, and/or crushed chips, whatever your heart's dearest wish is. Beware: you'll probably want seconds.

I'm almost to my barbecue.

Fresh Cherry Cake --- a Swiss recipe

For some reason, this year has been a boom for cherries. The last month or so, I've seen the prices for cherries drop to a dollar a pound. ONE dollar. Naturally, the prudent financial person I am, I immediately bought 6 pounds of cherries, ate a bunch, and then decided I needed to do something else with them before they wasted away in the fridge. I found this cake recipe in my Swiss cookbook, and because it called for two pounds of pitted cherries, I thought that'd be a good way to use some of the excess I'd purchased. And this time, I actually ended up using them all before the mold demons killed them.

Just a note: When I was making this cake, some of the things it asked me to do seemed really strange. I wasn't quite sure why it asked me to do them, but I decided, what the heck, and voilà! it ended up pretty dang tasty.

Fresh Cherry Cake
from Culinary Art and Traditions of Switzerland

500 grams white bread rolls (I used Wal-mart brand hamburger buns, and 11 1/2 buns was exactly enough)
200 ml milk (my pyrex measuring cup has milliliters, but if you don't have one (which you should!) use a little more than 3/4 cup milk
120 g butter, softened -- 1 full stick. Remember, margarine is nasty. Use real butter for cooking.
200 g sugar (1 cup sugar)
7 egg yolks (keep the egg whites, you'll need them later)
100 g almonds and hazelnuts (whole) -- this equates to about 2/3 cup of nuts. I used a full cup of nuts because, well, I like nuts.
pinch of cinnamon
7 egg whites stiffly whipped
10 g baking powder (2 1/2 tsp)
900 g black cherries, stoned --- I used 2 lb 8 oz of unstoned fruit, and ended up with about 100 grams too many (which I used anyway). I'd say about 2 1/4 lbs of cherries should give you about 2 lbs of stoned cherries.
20 g flour (about 3 Tbsp)
100 g sponge crumbs (I used those little sponge cakes they sell for individual strawberry shortcake servings---I used 4 of them.)

First you soak the bread rolls in the milk for at least 2 hours. I tore up the bread into big chunks, and kinda stirred it around every half hour or so. (This is one of the bizarre things I wondered about, but trust me, it all works out.)

Next I stoned the cherries. I learned the hard way that you should not use a shirt you particularly care for while stoning them unless you really enjoy red flecks all over your best clothes. Also, do not keep works of art in the general vicinity--- the cherry juice splatters. Look under my Cherry Clafouti recipe for directions on stoning cherries --- it's really rather easy once you get the hang of it.

At this time I also crumbled up the sponge cake and decided to toast it so it wouldn't be soggy, it'd be more crumbly. I popped it in the oven at 250 for about 10 minutes. Make sure you watch them, you don't want burned crumbs in your cake, I'm sure it wouldn't enhance the flavor. You'll want to make sure to change the temperature of the oven to 350, in preparation for the baking.

Next, I creamed the butter and sugar, and added the egg yolks, one at a time. When I was separating the whites from the yolks, I just set aside the whites for a little bit, and let the whites warm up to room temperature. Apparently when you whip the whites at room temperature they stiffen better. After creaming the yolks with the sugar and butter, I dumped in the nuts and mixed those in (with the beater). I then mixed the dry ingredients together, and beat those into the batter.

Now came the weird part. I put the big pile of soggy bread into the mixing bowl. I sat there and wondered, how do I mix this in? Just put the mixer right in the middle, and start on slow, but mix it all together until the dough is this kind of thickish pasty stuff. The soggy bread will mix in completely and you won't have weird chunks. After that, the recipe splits. If you are making an actual cake, save about half of the sponge crumbs, if you're just making muffins, dump all the sponge crumbs in and mix them all together. Next, *stir* the pitted cherries into the mix (don't use the beaters anymore, you want to keep these whole).

The dough is going to be pretty thick, but that's what the egg whites are for -- to lighten them up. Whip the room temperature egg whites until they are stiff, and fold them into the dough. I couldn't get them to fold very well, it ended up being a mix between folding and stirring, but the egg whites made the batter a lot more fluid once I got it all stirred/folded in. Now you're ready to bake.

If you're doing muffins (it'll make around 24-28), just put the batter until it's slightly over the top of the muffin pan. The batter really doesn't rise a whole lot, so if you only fill it halfway full, you'll get these tiny muffins. Bake that at 350 for about 30 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. You could use the paper, but I got this really nice muffin tray that is silicon, and I love it, because they just pop out. Let them cool, and enjoy!

If you're making the cake, I'd use an 8-10 inch springform pan, make sure the bottom and sides are fairly well greased. I used butter. Then put the sponge crumbs you saved in the bottom of the pan as a sort of base crust for the cake. pour the batter in to a depth of about 1 1/2 - 2 inches (not super thick or it'll take 3 days to cook), and pop it in the 350 degree oven. The book said it would take 30 minutes to cook, but mine took over an hour--- I just kept checking it with a toothpick until the batter was cooked. Let the cake cool, and then run a knife or what not around the edges, so it doesn't stick (it can stick sometimes). When I made the cake version, I ended up using a little more than half of the batter for the cake; that's when I discovered that the muffins ended up being a bit easier to make and handle. So in theory, you could do both.

These ended up being pretty dang good. The cherries tasted super good, against the delicious baked almonds and hazelnuts--- all in all it tastes like a good European type cake. I think they make really good muffins, and I'd make this recipe again.