Lemon balm sorbet for Sybille

I made this last weekend, my first ever attempt at making sorbet. It was remarkably successful, given that it was done at the last minute, with no special equipment and a tiny and overcrowded freezer to make it in.

Darina Allen's Lemon Balm Sorbet

For four people; small, delicate servings

110g sugar
300ml water
1 large handful of lemon balm leaves
freshly squeezed juice of 1 1/2 lemons

Bring the water, sugar and leaves slowly to the boil, then simmer gently for 2-3 minutes. Allow it to cool, then strain into a freezeable container and add the lemon juice. Put it in the freezer.

After this, the instructions will depend a lot on your freezer. Mine left it still completely liquid after 2 hours, so I went to bed. In the morning, it was fairly solid, but I scraped it up with a fork until the ice was granita-textured, then put it back in the freezer. I did this a couple more times during the day - it never got as hard again - and it seemed to be quite a nice texture by the end.

Optional Twiddles:
I added a small slosh of elderflower cordial at the same time as the lemon juice, but that's just because I like elderflower in practically everything.
Darina Allen suggests folding in a stiffly beaten eggwhite when it is almost frozen, but a) I don't know how you know when that point will be without spending hours opening the freezer to check every 15 minutes and b) it seemed to work ok without.
Lemon verbena would work just as well as lemon balm.

Those seventies housewives knew a thing or two

Luckily it didn't occur to me till after the fact that the cheese fondue is surely the dish of the film The Ice Storm. It's one of my favourite films ever, but mostly because it makes you not want to do anything the characters do EVER.
Anyway, we were having people to supper on a weekend when the Accomplice was around, so I asked her if there were anything she would like to see on the menu - Cheese Fondue came right back at me.
Then the Man said his favourite dish recently had been the vaguely oriental salad with lamb chez M+K last week, so we decided to do a carnivores and adults only course of Thai beef salad - Tigers' Tears, it's always called in fancy Thai restaurants. Pudding occupied most of the decision-making time. Creme caramel? Since I learned how to do it without a pressure cooker, I have been longing for another opportunity to show off, but we thought perhaps after cheese fondue, a rich cream and egg pudding wouldn't be ideal. How about a veggie version of my favourite fruit jellies - little clear mounds of jelly with sparkling jewels of raspberries inside?
Well, that's what it looks like if you make it with gelatine and raspberries. With agar agar flakes and blueberries, it looks like a misshapen grey rubber ball and tastes not dissimilar.
So back to the drawingboard, or rather the windowbox. My one gardening success this summer has been a pot of lemon balm, which turned into delicious sorbet. Accompanied by strawberries, this turned out to be easy and delicious.
You may be thinking this sounds like an extremely odd menu - cheese fondue, thai beef salad, strawberries with lemonbalm sorbet - and you'd be right, but it seemed to work very well.
The cheeses were Cotherstone and Ardrahan - it took a good half hour of consultation and tasting to find suitable vegetarian cheeses for fondue - and I think I overdid the white wine in the sauce, but it was very nice nevertheless. Following instructions in the Joy of Cooking, I tore a loaf of bread into bite-size bits to dip in it. Steamed broccoli was also effective, as were teeny tiny new potatoes but nobody touched the beautiful red and yellow peppers I sliced to scoop up cheesy goo.

Signs of summer

I am always impatient for the seasons to change. I love the liminal, the edge seasons of spring and autumn, but what I like most is the changing, spying signs of a difference, leaves, flowers, fruit, that weren’t there yesterday. A tang in the air as autumn approaches or the realisation that the watery sunshine now has some power in it.

One of my favourite signs of summer is the creamy white blossom of elderflower. Even in London it paints the gardens, parks and hedges a lovely green and ivory, scenting the air with its particular sweet powdery smell.

For the last five or six years I have gathered elderflowers in Abney Park Cemetery, a nineteenth century burial ground for non-conformists, penultimate resting place for the likes of William and Catherine Booth, Generalissimo and consort of the Salvation Army, several prominent abolitionists and (my favourite) Victorian menagerists Frank and Susannah Bostock, commemorated with a gorgeous marble lion. It is now maintained as wildlife reserve (butterflies, not lions)and yields a wonderful crop of blossom if you don't mind making polite conversation with suspiciously idle young men with very tight t-shirts.

The elderflowers I bring home and make into elderflower cordial, with which I make cocktails and ice-lollies and give to friends and family to drink the taste of summer.

Elderflower cordial
3 1/4 lb sugar
2 1/2 pints hot water
25 heads of elderflower, picked on a sunny day
2 lemons chopped
2 oz citric acid (this can be bought in many places,including my local Turkish grocery where it is labelled ‘lemon salt’)

Pour the water over the sugar and stir until dissolved. Add the rest of the ingredients and let stand for two days (or more, if convenient!). Strain through muslin and bottle.

I use the kind of glass bottles that have ceramic lids held on with thick wire. In hot weather, I have known plastic bottles blow their lids off, sending sticky stuff all over the entire flat. It comes off easily with water, but before you get it all, you’re already invaded by ants. Sigh.