Why do melons always have big weddings?

We've been buying quite a lot of melon for our small, three-person household because they're so perfectly in season, so wonderfully refreshing, and they just smell so damn good that it's worth the extra weight on the mile walk home from the farmers' market. And, to make room for the new melons, we have to eat up the old ones, resulting in this cantaloupe sorbet from David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop. Some advice:

1. If your melon happens to be less-than-perfectly ripe and flavorful, add another lime. Or, if you like lime, add another lime. For instance, when Lebovitz wrote "1 teaspoon freshly squeezed lime, plus more to taste." I read it as "one lime, plus another one." It might make the sorbet's texture a little coarser, but it will completely overwhelm the cantaloupe's inadequacies.

2. If you need to test the white wine in the back of the fridge to make sure it hasn't turned into vinegar, don't use the mini plastic teddybear cup you found in the back of the drawer because a) the four-year-old watching Toy Story with your dad will want some and b) it's probably covered in 20-year-old lead paint from China.

3. When your mum mentions that her second-hand mixer might run a little different because your uncle tinkered with the motor a bit before giving it to her, that means that he made it go twice as fast and it doesn't have a low setting and it may not be ideal for churning sorbet and you should just put it away on top of the fridge and replace it with the one you got from your grandma, which doesn't know about warp speed yet.

4. Don't leave your lens cap out on the counter.

5. Don't worry too much about the four-year-old angling for that plastic cup of white wine; she's much more interested in raspberries.

Cantaloupe Sorbet [with a lot of lime]

Adapted from David Lebovitz's "The Perfect Scoop"

Chop up the meat of 

One 2-pound ripe cantaloupe

Purée in a blender with

1/2 cup sugar

pinch of salt

the juice of one or two small limes, or if you have a really good melon, maybe just a teaspoon.

Add

2 tablespoons white wine or Champagne

Chill thoroughly, then freeze in an ice cream maker that your uncle hasn't tampered with.  

(Because they can't elope.)

Winos and Fruits

For this post, I'll need the help of my lovely assistant. We're going to show you how to clean out a fridge full of fruit using only two glasses, two pitchers, two extra-large bottles of cheap white wine, a mini four-pack of cheap white wine, some brandy, rum, and maybe some of that raspberry syrup you made the other day.

First peel (optional) and slice all the peaches in your fridge. Save some for the peach sorbet you're going to make in the next blog post, and divide the rest between two pitchers.





One of these pitchers will turn into chilled white wine and peaches. Remember that? We've been drinking it ever since peach season started.

 All the rest of the fruit in your fridge should go into the other pitcher. Probably doesn't matter what kind of fruit it is - we had a few blueberries and blackberries leftover from the most recent fruit picking expedition.

Add sugar, stir around.

Then add a lot of brandy to the mix of fruit.

Then decide you need some more fruit to balance it out, and go to the store to get some plums.

Might as well throw some raspberry syrup in there too, as long as it's lying around.


Then add some white wine.

Add some more white wine.

Stir around.

And let everything chill in the fridge overnight. You can drink it with your pancakes tomorrow morning.

At this point, you've been running around, slicing peaches, buying brandy and plums, and stirring things all day, so you need a drink. Take out that bottle of raspberry syrup you made the other day. See it in the fridge? Mix it with some rum, and pour it over ice.

 You deserve it.

Essence of Raspberry

We went fruit picking again. Remember this pie? All those beautiful berries are from Weaver's Orchard, a bit of a drive from Philadelphia, but well worth the trip. And one of the primary reasons for picking this particular farm was a NYT recipe for raspberry vinegar, discovered by a fellow fruit-picking Philadelphia foodie (say it ten times fast). Turns out it's less of a vinegar and more of a syrup, which only increases its potential uses. Which is good, because this recipe makes a LOT.

(Not that I wanted to share it with any of the free-loading fruit flies that have recently invaded our kitchen)





The pile of raspberries is supposed to macerate in a bit of red wine vinegar for three days. I kept getting distracted (pie! ice cream! internet!) and let it sit for about five. I pretended that this was intentional and improves the intense raspberryness. Maybe it did.

The mixture is then strained through cheesecloth. SUPER MESSY. There was juicy red sweetness on my hands, on the counter, on the floor, and maybe on one of the cats. Luckily some also made it into the bowl.

The reason this is more of a syrup than a vinegar is because the next step involves adding the liquid to a slightly-larger-than-equivalent pile of sugar and simmering it. This stuff is SWEET.



The final step works really well if your housemate has a cool looking empty wine bottle available.

This recipe complimented complemented our raspberries so well. We arrived at the height of the season, meaning the raspberries were extremely sweet and, while flavorful, the individual raspberry taste was not particularly strong. The concentrated syrup, however, is intensely raspberry-y. It's a marvelous accompaniment to pancakes, seltzer, or a little rum. And I'm looking forward to finding more uses for it. It's going to be a lovely reminder of summer once the hot, muggy berry season is past.

Photo credit goes to a lovely lady.

peach-berry pie and vanilla ice cream: a love story