Food Friday–Frigid Spring edition

This morning at services some of us were in down coats. Some of us were wearing spring coats with sweaters and scarves.  One of my friends was complaining about the April chill  and Marty responded with these lines from Robert Frost.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

It’s very nice to daven each morning with an English professor. Even without today’s perfect lines of poetry Marty makes morning minyan into something quite wonderful.

My son offered to make the chicken and the ribs for tonight’s dinner. I have not taken photos of his handiwork. I do want to say that the house smelled so good that I ought to have charged people to stand in the hallway and inhale. I probably could have covered the costs of my youngest son’s meal plan in college before the meat was finished cooking.

Given that so much of my time was freed up I decided to concentrate on dessert.

I decided to make a pear sorbet. I roughly chopped the pears and put them in a pot along with

the zest from one lemon which I chopped up before tossing into the pot.

I  thought about which flavors are buddies with pears. I Think that aside from lemon, pears play well with ginger. So I chopped some up.

A parve ice cream also needs a bit of fat in it. Usually I use olive oil. This time I used a heaping tablespoon of coconut oil.

I also added some sugar.

I then simmered everything until the pears were soft. I added a few lavender buds because they would add a bit of mystery to the flavor.

Towards the end of the cooking I added a tablespoon of potato starch. I still had some left over from Passover, but cornstarch would work fine. I just want to finish the can of potato starch before next Passover.

After the starch had boiled for a bit I let it cool and put everything into the food processor. I suppose I could have just smashed everything through a strainer if I were in the mood to do that.

I then put the pureed mixture in the ice cream maker.

Depending on the light the pear mixture either looks like a lively light chartreuse or like snot. It is hard when a food looks distressingly like snot. I plan to serve the sorbet with fresh raspberries.

 

One of our guests is bringing salad and cardamom scented rice just finished cooking. We are all set for Shabbat.