Unrecipes

I really haven't felt like cooking lately.

I mean really. Just thinking about cooking for the last couple of weeks has made me want to take a nap.

But right before this cooking ennui hit, I had bought a fairly ridiculous amount of vegetables and fruit and so I've been trying to prepare them in ways that require the absolute bare minimum of work. Case in point, these roasted green beans.

These were just tossed with a little olive oil and roasted at 400* until they browned.

And I made the absolute easiest blood orange sorbet EVER the other night.

I started with blood orange nectar. Since it's already sweetened, you can dump it right in the ice cream maker without all of those pesky heat juice, add sugar, cool down steps.

I got the whole thing together while the water for my pasta was coming to a boil and it was done by time I finished eating.

This is optional, but makes a big difference in the texture. I find that sorbet gets too icy if there isn't any alcohol in there to keep it from freezing solid.

I used maybe half of that. And about two-thirds of the juice. But whatever. I'm sure more or less of either would work just as well. This isn't exactly complicated.

Then I took a bunch of pictures of the sorbet freezing because I was kind of bored while the pasta cooked and I was worried that it wasn't going to work. I'd had the ice cream canister in the freezer for a while and must have stored a bag of coffee in it at some point because it had some coffee grounds in the bottom. So, like a complete idiot, I tried to wipe them out with a damp paper towel. The towel, of course, shredded and froze to the inside of the canister. I tried picking the shreds off; they wouldn't budge. I swirled a little hot water around inside it, which did work to to unfreeze the paper and rinse out the grounds, but I had to do a couple of rounds of it and was afraid that I had defrosted the canister to the point where it wasn't going to freeze the juice.

It's awfully difficult being me sometimes. Though I think the comments are fixed now. I made a point of talking about Joe Bruno in public yesterday: how he subverts the Peter Principle and that I actually really like how deliciously evil he is. And now my email works. Coincidence?

And the sorbet froze just fine after all. It was great on its own, but even better with a scoop of Haagen-Dazs Vanilla Honey Bee — like a grown-up creamsicle.

Comments

[Natalie]

We have the same ice cream machine. We love it. And yeah, we stored coffee in ours at one point, too, and had the very same problem with the shreds of paper towel--I ended up getting one of my cloth kitchen towels damp and removing them that way.

[Melissa]

Wow, what a great idea for sorbet! I'm going to have to try that...

[Octopus Knits]

Flicca looks great, and so does that sorbet....mmmmmm!

[Gina]

Did you learn nothing from The Sopranos? Do not talk shit about Da Bruno.

[Seanna Lea]

Gosh. Where did you manage to find blood orange nectar? I would love to get my hands on some of that (because I don't want to go to the trouble of juicing that many blood oranges for sorbet).