We were going to make sorbet at the end of night of salad explosion, but got both distracted and full. Also Kim had brought chocolate cream puffs, which kind of obviated any need for dessert. Cream puffs! I vaguely remember making popovers as a kid, but that's about it for my sweet pastry experience.

This meant we could have the sorbet for lunch the next day. Ok then.

I originally wanted to make plain lemon sorbet, since we had seven lemons lying around. Then we noticed that we had lots of strawberries left even after night of copious eating. Somehow the proportions got switched, so instead of lemon ice with a little strawberry, we made strawberry ice with a little lemon.

Lemon strawberry sorbet

juice of four lemons (a cup)
pint and a half of strawberries
half a cup or so of weak sugar syrup

Sugar syrup needs to be done in advance. Heat up about a cup of water; add several tablespoons of sugar. Cook slowly until sugar is dissolved and liquid is a little reduced. Then put it in the refrigerator to cool for a couple hours.

Juice lemons. Don't use bottled lemon juice here, since it tastes awful. Fresh lemon juice is the only way to go. To get more juice out of your lemons, leave them lying around in the sun for a while first. Strain out the seeds and pulp, then put juice into a blender. You may want to zest some of your lemon halves and add that too. I was feeling lazy and didn't.

Cut the tops off all your strawberries, then add them to the blender. Add the cool syrup too. Blend until everything is totally pureed. Then pour the business into your ice cream machine and freeze it.

Now you can eat it plain, with some crushed mint, or in a glass of white wine.


Variations:
- Use any combination of citrus and berry that sounds good to you: lemon raspberry, lemon blueberry, cherry lime.
- Double the amount of juice and make all-citrus sorbet. Use a much sweeter sugar syrup if you're using lemon yet still want a sweet result.
- Mix berries with a cup of water to make all-berry sorbet.
- Leave half the berries roughly chopped for chunky sorbet.
- Add a few shredded mint leaves to make it ultra-refreshing.
- Add a few shredded basil leaves to make it ultra-confusing. Actually, strawberry and basil is supposed to be good. I just haven't done it. You might want to use water instead of juice as well.
- Instead of the sugar syrup, add a cup of plain yogurt with a couple spoonfuls of sugar stirred into it: tangy creamy sorbet. I also need to try this and see what might or might not happen with lemon juice and curdling. That's the thing, though: the nature of cooking is in experimentation. Do it!