Plum Sorbet

I don't know quite when it happened, but I have become extremely frugal around food. My fridge is filled with beautiful organic produce and dairy, high quality meat, homemade condiments and pickles, so it isn't exactly that I'm cheap. I just cannot bare to throw ANY food away. In fact, I never do. Tonight's leftovers are tomorrow's lunch. I save my chicken carcasses and vegetable scraps and make stock. Seriously, we don't throw anything away. But every now and again I am faced with a surplus of something. For example, last week in my produce box I got kale. Well it was like 95 degrees last week and the last thing I wanted was a hearty winter green. So I made kale pesto and froze it. Now some night when I'm tired and haven't planned anything for dinner, I can boil up some pasta and pull out the pesto and Viola! a lovely dinner.

The same thing with some plums. Serena was going to make plum pie (yummy!) but then we got busy and it didn't happen. Honestly, I'd forgotten all about the plums until I was digging through the fridge looking for a snack and there they were, only days from expiration. I had no idea what to do with them, that was until I picked up the next issue of Gourmet, August 1962. And what is on the cover? You guessed it, plum sorbet.

We've got a workhorse of an old Kitchen Aid that my friend Daniel gave us as a housewarming present. In fact it looks exactly like the Kitchen Aid advertisement in that same issue of Gourmet. A couple of years ago for Christmas I asked my mom for the ice cream attachment and now we make our own ice cream. It's really good and easy. As for the sorbet, I followed the recipe pretty closely. (Click on the picture to make the recipe bigger.) I only made a couple of changes. First, I used pasteurized egg whites because I was sure I'd be feeding this to guests. Secondly, following the advice of America's Test Kitchen, I added a bit of booze to the fruit so it wouldn't freeze solid. Good thing I have like a pint of that Luxardo left over.

The sorbet tasted great and my friends ate it up. I will certainly make this again, and will use it as a template for other sorbets. Good stuff.

Maraschino Cherries

If everyone else jumped off a bridge, I probably would too. Over the last few months I've run across a couple of articles on homemade Maraschino Cherries--one in The New York Times and one on NPR. What's weird is that I hate Maraschino Cherries, but for some reason these have been calling to me.

The recipes are really simple: take some berries and dump some booze on them. I used the recipe where I heated the booze up. And I sterilized the jars, as you would for canning. Including prep time, the whole project took about a half hour and yielded about 5 pint jars. Although easy, it was expensive for all those cherries and that big bottle of Luxardo. I'd never really had a call for cherry liqueur before this, but I still have half a bottle of this stuff left over, so if you have some suggestions, let me know. Perhaps I'll use it to make ice cream.

The end result is beautiful and homemade, but the thing is I'M SCARED TO EAT THEM. They've been in my fridge three weeks now. The should be ready. Foods that "cook" or are preserved without heat freak me out. I feel this way about ceviche and cold smoked pork as well. I should just eat one. How much harm could it do?