Atlantic Beach Pie
Me & my sister on the front porch of the Mallette St. house. I think we had just bought it. I lived in Halter tops in the summer.
Different babies, same doting mother.
I had never seen these photos prior to this week. Us at a rental house on Fripp Island before my grandparents built theirs. I love these pics so much!
Mom was surprisingly good at ping pong! Lake Champlain, Vermont. Summer, 1990.
Mom’s Duke friends with Dad’s MIT friends. 3 Duke/MIT couples were made. Mom and Dad were the only ones that stayed married, although our families have all stayed fairly close friends. Dad’s new wife, Linda, is in the pink patterned sundress in the center.
My last post focused on what would have been Mom and Dad’s 57th wedding anniversary, and the romance that led up to that. I would feel remiss in not mentioning that Dad has a new romance and actually married again in May of this year. After Mom died, Dad began a relationship with a family friend, a lovely woman named Linda. She was a college friend of my Mom’s who at one point was actually married to a college friend of my Dad’s! They are all in the above photo. As heartbroken as I am about my mother not being around, I am very happy that my father has a companion and someone to enjoy life and adventures with.
Now that I’ve broken *that news*, let’s get back to the minutiae of my life. Ha ha.
I just mowed the lawn in the West Texas desert in July. How’s that for stupid? It had to be done and I was the one available to do it. Dad tried to make me mow the lawn once as a teenager in Chapel Hill. I promptly mowed over a rock, broke the lawnmower, and was never asked to do it again.
This heat has got me thinking about the summers of my childhood and how different things were in the 70s. We used to belong to the UNC Faculty Club, otherwise known as “The Farm”. There were a few pools, some tennis courts, and a playground. Mom used to drop me and my sister off in the morning with $1 each and then come back around in the afternoon to fetch us. These were free range days, for sure. I would use the $1 to buy a Whatchamacallit candy bar and a can of Mellow Yellow and lunch was served! We ran back and forth between the playground and the pool, sliding down the crazy steep HOT METAL playground slide with the low sides (so easy to fall off of!), and then zipping over to the pool to try to soothe our burned butts. Grown ups would complain that we made too much noise. We didn’t care. We played endless games of Marco Polo. Life guards would swing their whistles around their fingers and flirt with each other. We would gawk at the naked old ladies in the changing room and wonder, “is that going to happen to us?!”. (It is.) And, after hours of this frenzied activity, we would stand by the curb, playing with our “Lemon Twist” toys (a rattly plastic lemon on a string that you put on one leg and then swing around and jump over), waiting for our Mom to careen around the corner and fetch us. Now *that*, along with the Mellow Yellow sugar crash, will tire a kid out.
There’s also not anything quite as exhausting as a summer day at the beach. Having skin the color of provolone cheese, I feel like it’s me against nature in a cage match whenever we vacation at the coast. This week I found a bunch of photos I’d never seen, including several of us as kids at Fripp Island in South Carolina and on the Greek Island of Crete. Despite Mom’s best efforts with sunscreen, it seems I always burned anyway. I have pretty formative memories of her putting cold Noxzema on my hot, sunburned back.
I’m Facebook friends with Bill Smith, the former chef of the, sadly closed, legendary Chapel Hill restaurant, Crook’s Corner. He recently posted an article from Southern Living Magazine where he discusses “that stupid pie”. The pie he would be referring to is his Atlantic Beach Pie, which, coincidentally, Mom had in her recipe files. Atlantic Beach Pie is a perfect summer dessert, kind of a cross between key lime and lemon meringue. Perfect for people with sunburns! Here’s Bill’s recipe:
ATLANTIC BEACH PIE
preheat oven to 350
60 saltines [I think it only needs half that many, but adjust butter and sugar accordingly]
½ cup unsalted butter, softened
3 Tbs. sugar
Crush saltines lightly in processor. Add sugar. Knead in butter. Press into 8'“ pie pan. Chill 15 minutes, then bake 18 minutes, until lightly colored.
4 egg yolks
1 can sweetened condensed milk [14 oz]
½ cup lime juice
While crust is cooling, beat yolks into milk. Beat in citrus juice. Bake 16 minutes.
Chill completely
Top with whipped cream and a sprinkling of sea salt.
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