recipe for a summer supper

The Okanagan Valley is currently enjoying a heat wave and I don't feel so much like cooking. Okay, I don't feel like cooking at the best of times, but this is the socially acceptable thing to say round these parts, so I'm going with it. Yesterday I was especially uninspired, and grew more so the closer the clock ticked to dinner time.

Fortunately, inspiration came home to roost. An old summer staple, from my childhood, would be just the thing - not just for a make-do meal, but a suppertime adventure.

Shady Rest is an old, British-style fish and chip shop that goes back I don't even know how far. My mum used to go there when she was a little girl, possibly on evenings when my Grandma suffered from cookers block as well.

I hadn't been in years, although I've thought about it from time to time and considered it a good idea - you know, maybe down the road.

What started as a cooking cop out turned into an occasion. Since we don't eat fish, Oliver and I headed to the supermarket to pick up some cottage cheese and beans to supplement our chips with. This, after calling Kyle to let him know we'd be picking him up from work so don't take the bus.

Our next stop was Shady Rest. From the outside it looks the same as it always did since, well, since I can remember. Inside, there were a few changes. The place has been repainted a rather passive grey (I seem to recall it being bright orange) and the big step beside the counter, which once enabled small people to peek over the edge and watch their fries - sorry, chips - being made, is gone.

However, still present is the ancient cash register - the kind you'd expect to see in an old mercantile or similar, that pops the numbers up at the top when you push the buttons. And, yes, they still use it. Ditto the old soda cooler, which I believe dates back to at least my mum's childhood days, when she would crack the top off her soda with the strategically placed bottle opener on the side.

I tried to help Oliver envision his Grandma using such a device, but he was much more interested in nicking straws from a box and trying to escape with them through a swinging oak door, probably also original to the place. So it was left to me to appreciate how he was now a third generation customer to this establishment (fourth if you count my Grandma too, but she was already grown).

Anyway, after picking Kyle up, we drove back to the park near our place, threw down a table cloth on the grass, gingerly unwrapped our booty and then saturated the battered halibut (for Kyle) and chips in salt and malt vinegar. Then we launched into our dinner.

They're not the best chips in the world (that honour goes to a little shop in Mousehole, Cornwall), although my mum would contend that their fish has it all over the British fish - not the least because they don't leave the skin on before deep frying. But it was a chance to break with the standard supper, and take a trip down memory lane at the same time. A create your own adventure, if you will. Because what's the point of summer if not that?


Wrapped the traditional way, in news print


Ready to eat