Frozen Creamy Fruit & Nut Pie

A "no bake" pie for the hot days of summer...

Shortbread pie shells should easily be found in your local supermarket. 

Ingredients:

2 shortbread pie shells (9 to 10 inch)
1 can (14 ounces) sweetened condensed milk
1 container (8 ounces) whipped topping 
12 ounces crushed pineapple, drained
11 or 12 ounce can mandarin oranges, drained
1 banana, peeled and chopped 
pistachio nuts, whole, halved or chopped
fresh cherries, seeded and halved (or maraschino cherries)

It's best to let the whipped topping thaw first. Mix together the condensed milk and the whipped topping. Drain the pineapple well in a sieve over a bowl and do the same with the mandarin orange segments. You can save the juices for drinking. Add the various fruits and the pistachios to the milk mixture and fold it in gently, so as not to break up the fruit or to discolor the filling. I used fresh dark cherries, so some juice is bound to make some small patches of color on the filling. Pour the filling into the pie shells and smooth it over. Cover with the lids provided with the pie shells and secure them with the folded over edges of the pie pans. Put into the freezer (make sure the pies are level) for several hours, until completely frozen. If you'd like, you can slice the pies and put the slices onto serving plates and give them just a couple of minutes to soften just a little.   

WORD HISTORY:
Dense/Condense-This word has an unclear origin, although it seems to have ancient connections to Indo European, and transliterated Hittite, an Indo European language, had "dassus(h)," which meant, "strong." Ancient Greek had transliterated "dasys/dasus," meaning, "thick with leaves/foliage, or hair." Latin may have borrowed the Greek word, or perhaps it already had its own form, "densus," an adjective meaning, "cloudy, crowded, thick." English borrowed the word in the first half of the 1400s, certainly with reinforcement by Latin-based French "dense." The more figurative meaning, "not easily penetrated," developed in the 1700s (see the Hittite form above), and this led to the further meaning, "dumb, slow on the uptake," in the first half of the 1800s, from the notion, "slow to penetrate the brain." It is also the main part of the word "condense," a Latin-derived word, with the prefix "con" seemingly used as an intensifier, and the word meaning, "to make dense, to make thicker, to compact." This was borrowed in the 1400s from French "condenser" ("to make dense, to condense, to reduce to a compact form," which came from Latin "condensare," with the same meanings.