Friday Night

 

Happiness is a home-grown tomato!

The garden…

**… and the slicer tomatoes are coming along. I can pick one here and there, but I’m getting impatient for the green ones to turn red or yellow-orange or whatever color the heirlooms called Copia will be when they ripen. The photo above is of a Nebraska Wedding heirloom.

**Gardening is all about a level of hope that borders on insanity, and I’m extremely hopeful that enough tomatoes and cucumbers are ripe at the same time to make Gazpacho.

**If not, or if I’m too lazy, I’ll just eat bowls of fresh veggies. They don’t need much adornment, but some Garlic and Herb Vegetable Dip is nice. I even stirred some sour cream into what was left of a container of garden vegetable flavored spreadable cream cheese, and that made a good veggie dip, too.

**I seem to have created a hybrid cucumber-cherry tomato jungle. Sorry, not sorry.

**The zucchini are coming! One or two at a time so far, but I’m armed with this list from The Archives, and this recipe I’m hoping to try out this week.

Reading…

**If you don’t hear from me for a while, come and check to see if I’ve been pinned under To Green Angel Tower. It’s a big book.

**I might start something quicker this weekend, perhaps The Miserable Mill, part 4 of A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket. What can I say? I like series.

Recent deliciousness…

**Pizza with Basic Basil Pesto, home-grown cherry tomatoes, and three cheeses: feta, mozzarella, and parmesan

**Sweet corn is at its peak! No need to do much but eat it right off the cob.

The Day Job

**The one work-related text I love getting on a Friday evening: “I will work tomorrow’s open shift.” Saturday, here I come!

Happy birthday to my brother, Jon!

One year ago: Cherry Plum Crisp

Mocha Sorbet

 

There are so many drippingly sweet things out there right now that are just delicious in desserts, or even just eaten by themselves to satisfy a sweet tooth. You want to be very careful, however, to avoid neglecting your old friend chocolate for the whole summer. Both you and the chocolate deserve better.

While it’s not hot outside as I’m writing this, it was recently and it could happen again any time, and this super-chocolatey, bitter-sweet Mocha Sorbet is a fabulous way to cool off, and to celebrate both summer and chocolate at the same time. Oh, also, you can celebrate your other great friend, coffee, while you’re at it.

Eating this sorbet is like eating the darkest chocolate, but somehow that chocolate was melted, then chilled to freezing, while still maintaining some of its meltiness. It really does make me think of a frozen café mocha espresso drink, but there’s no dairy here, just bittersweet chocolate, cocoa, and espresso.

Of course there’s plenty of sugar, too, which is not only necessary to make a palatable flavor, but also to get the appropriate scoop-able consistency. Water just won’t freeze into an ice cube with this much sucrose dissolved in it, and that’s what we want. The sorbet isn’t exactly creamy, but has the quickly-dissolving-on-your-tongue grainy texture of cocoa solids.

The darker the chocolate the more intense the sorbet, and I used a very dark one for mine. You could leave out the espresso and have a quite good bittersweet chocolate sorbet for sure, or, if you don’t want the caffeine, you could use a decaffeinated instant coffee or espresso. For me, coffee, chocolate and frozen dessert all in one modest scoop is what after dinnertime is all about, no matter what other fabulous sweet treats are out there. Come to think of it, I’ll take all of the above, please.

Mocha Sorbet

Adapted from Cooking Light Magazine

2 ½ cups water

1 ¼ cup sugar

½ cup cocoa powder

3 ounces bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 tablespoons instant espresso powder

1. In a medium-size saucepan, bring the water to a boil. Add the sugar and cocoa powder, whisking well to combine. Reduce the heat and boil gently for 5 minutes, stirring frequently.

2. Remove from the heat. Stir in the chopped chocolate, vanilla, and espresso powder. Continue stirring until the chocolate is completely melted and the mixture is smooth. Pour into a bowl, cover, and refrigerate until completely chilled.

3. When the mixture is very cold, freeze in an ice cream maker according to manufacturers instructions. The process is complete when the mixture appears like soft-serve ice cream in texture. Cover and freeze for at least an hour, or until firm.

Makes 6-8 servings.

Other recipes like this one: Rich Chocolate Ice Cream, Chocolate Mint Ice Cream with Andes Mints

One year ago: Lentil Salad with Curry Lime Yogurt Dressing

13 Favorite Stone Fruit Recipes

Stone fruit. Kind of a hard, cold name for a soft hand-held delight with warm juices that run down your arm as you plunge in to take a sweet bite of yielding, pulpy flesh. The name, of course, refers to the hard pit at the core, present in various sizes from tiny cherry stones to peach pits the size of walnuts. I don’t care about those hard stones, however, except for getting them out of the way so I can enjoy the tasty part of the fruit.

I’m most familiar with apricots, peaches, nectarines, plums, and cherries, and have recipes that feature each of those somewhere in The Archives. There are more examples, too, many of them hybrids developed to feature the best characteristics of their genetic parents, such as pluots, and several others I can’t think of at the moment. (Apri-doodles? No, that can’t be right.) Most of my stone fruit celebration is baked into something sweet, but there are a couple of salads in The Archives as well, and some other delicious summertime treats.

 

Here is a list of 13 favorite recipes featuring stone fruits and links to their respective posts. Let’s go ahead and start with those delicious baked goods, shall we?

Muffins and cakes:

Poppy Seed and Plum Muffins with Almond

Peach Pecan Muffins

Plum Upside-Down Yogurt Cake

Cherry Almond Loaf Cake

Tarts and Pies:

Apricot and Raspberry Tart with Crumble Topping

Apricot Strawberry Tart

Plum and Grape Galette with Almonds

 

And other desserts:

Cherry Clafouti, Cherry Plum Crisp

Cold Sweet Cherry Soup

But don’t forget:

Easy Apricot Jam

And these two salads featuring nectarines:

Couscous Salad with Nectarines and Chickpeas, and QuinoaSalad with Nectarines, Pineapple, and Mint

 

A perfect peach, plum or cherry is fabulously wonderful treat just eaten by itself. Quite often, however, if you aren’t in the right place at the right time, the perfectly delicious stone fruit can be all too elusive. I have found that the essence of halfway decent fruit is still quite wonderful when the fruit is used in a recipe, and there are soooo many recipes with which to test this concept.

If you can’t get enough of these lovely, lovely fruits, I would not feel so all alone. Everybody must get….stone fruits.

Another post like this one: 10 Favorite Summer Fruit Desserts