{"id":1633,"date":"2006-08-14T05:07:00","date_gmt":"2006-08-14T05:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elitemporaryblog.wordpress.com\/2006\/08\/14\/a-reconciliation-with-sorbet"},"modified":"2015-09-24T03:54:03","modified_gmt":"2015-09-24T03:54:03","slug":"a-reconciliation-with-sorbet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orangette.net\/2006\/08\/a-reconciliation-with-sorbet\/","title":{"rendered":"A reconciliation, with sorbet"},"content":{"rendered":"
As a kid, I was no fan of summer. I grew up in Oklahoma, where the season is \u201chotter than h-e-l-l,\u201d as my grandmother likes to say. For me, summer was a sort of sustained misery. The problem was the temperature, plain and simple, which hovers most days in the upper double digits or even lower triples. It\u2019s a still, airless type of heat, the kind that comes with a loud, unceasing soundtrack of cicadas<\/a>. I used to feel sorry for even the family car, sitting as it did out in the sun: it shimmered under a haze of heat, and when we tried to start it, the poor thing would sputter and whine in protest. Not even a machine<\/em> should be made to move in such heat. And if you tried to escape it by, say, going into a store or movie theater or someone\u2019s house, the relief only lasted a minute or two, until your teeth started chattering uncontrollably. In most places, the air conditioning was so cold that it required\u2014quite paradoxically\u2014keeping a sweater on hand at all times, just in case. One word, people: h-e-l-l<\/em>.<\/p>\n But then along came Seattle, with its (mainly<\/a>) 70-degree summers and its warm\u2014not <\/em>scorching!\u2014sun. Here, you can survive without air conditioning, and you can eat dinner outside without dying on the spot. This is a city that knows how it\u2019s done. With each passing year, I find myself settling ever deeper into the happy, trusting, summer stupor familiar to dwellers of such climates<\/strong>, knowing that the season will be kind and gentle and that any errant heat waves will be short and only moderately sweaty. Yesterday, as we puttered around the city with our windows down, I actually heard myself say to Brandon, \u201cI just love<\/em> summer!\u201d I am a changed woman, Seattle.<\/p>\n And it\u2019s not strictly because of matters thermometric: there\u2019s a whole wealth of side benefits too, mainly gastronomical. There\u2019s something about summer in a clement zone, a city where the outdoors and in share the same, easy climate<\/strong>, that inspires in me a likewise easy sensibility about the stuff on my plate. Summer begs for unfussy food, of course, but it also gives it, hand over fist. No other season makes it so easy to eat so well. In the past week, we\u2019ve spent only an hour or two in the kitchen, because, by god, we can<\/em>. There\u2019s been cold carrot soup<\/a>, a few salad<\/a>s, and an entire weekend of <\/strong>corn and tomatoes and fresh cheese<\/strong><\/a>, repeating like a chorus<\/strong>. I love <\/em>summer.<\/p>\n And then there are the blackberries in the backyard<\/a>, which hang from the branches like a few hundred fat cicadas, only quieter. It\u2019s a regular glut out there, the kind of scene that would make any responsible person feel a little panicked, summery stupor or no. So a few evenings ago, in the spirit of the season, we gave the blackberry bush a good, athletic picking, and then we did something really easy: we made sorbet.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Blackberry Bonny Doon Sorbet<\/a>
With a dark, velvety hue somewhere between burgundy and purple, this sorbet straddles the fence, flavor-wise, between wine and fruit. In fact, it contains both, but the former is just a hint: a sophisticated, suggestive finish to a mouthful of mostly unmessed-with berries<\/strong>. It\u2019s the way I like my summers. It\u2019s h-e-a-v-e-n<\/em>.<\/p>\n
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We used Bonny Doon\u2019s delicious \u201cFramboise<\/a>\u201d dessert wine for this, but you could certainly play with using other types, or even a good cr\u00e8me de cassis. Framboise is made from raspberries\u2014hence its name, en fran\u00e7ais<\/em>\u2014and has wonderfully intense, rich, sweet-tart flavor. It doesn\u2019t come through forcefully in the sorbet, but if you look for it, it\u2019s there. Also, the presence of a bit of alcohol helps to keep the sorbet from getting rock-hard in the freezer, which is always a bonus in my book. You never know when you\u2019ll need a spoonful straight from the container.<\/p>\n