Sorbet For Dinner

One of the great things of all time is eating what you want for dinner. Yep, in my 40s and still reminding myself that's okay. I had a late lunch of some homemade split pea soup (the perfect thing to make with a left over ham bone) and wasn't too hungry when dinner time rolled around.
Seeing as the husband was on the air working for the evening, it was a great opportunity to cozy up to the Christmas tree lights in my PJs, plop in my Netflix oldie "Mildred Peirce," scoop up some pomegranate-lime sorbet and a couple of cookies and enjoy.

In one of many diversions from my cookbook project, I made this tasty sorbet last week. My pomegranate centerpieces from Thanksgiving needed some attention. I ate the seeds out of one fresh. And I just don't enjoy pomegranate seeds that way. I suppose they are okay in a salad or other side dish, but the mini-pit of each small seed is too bothersome. They scratch my tongue, they taste funny.....I try about once a year and it's time to give up. So I opened up 5 ginormous pomegranates, popped out their seeds and used a large pestle to push the juice through a sieve. It was fun in a get your aggression out kind of way.

I threw in left over fresh gimlet ingredients (minus the gin/vodka of course). Well because those gimlets were just so good I could have drank my way into a frenzy over the next several weeks. I took the left over lime and simple syrup and threw it in with the pomegranate juice after I'd cooked it down a bit with some sugar.

It may have been a cookbook diversion, but using up left over ingredients to make something new is definitely something I learned from my mother. Can't let anything go to waste after all...

Pomegranate-Lime Sorbet
makes a quart

• 3 or 4 cups unsweetened pomegranate juice (fresh is always best so if you have time press the seeds from the fruit).
• 1 cup sugar (some sorbet recipes have a 1:1 ratio of juice to sugar; I don't like mine too sweet, but if you do, you can add more sugar here).
• lime juice
• simple syrup
• 1 egg white

1. Dissolve the sugar in pomegranate juice in a saucepan over medium heat.
2. Let cook for a while. You could use a candy thermometer to ensure the liquid heats to 225 degrees.
3. Take off heat and add a mixture of lime juice and simple syrup (equal parts of each). I honestly just did this to taste with my left over gimlet mixture.
4. Leave in refrigerator overnight.
5. The next day add to ice cream machine and let it mix for about 20 minutes. Or follow manufacturer's directions.
6. Pour in a container and set back in to the freezer.

Got to mention the cookies. They taste great, but they didn't really bake well; I messed up the part where you roll them in sugar after they bake. Either I baked them too long or this part of the recipe needs to be re-examined. It could very well be me; I did throw them together in a hurry, so I rushed things quite a bit.

You can hardly blame me, it was a Saturday in December. I was busy getting through my to-do list, which has been laden with holiday musts, and we were dashing out to meet a friend to enjoy the luminarias around Greenlake. The cookies were the Citrus Snowballs from the Seattle Times cookie recipes I ordered last year. It's still not to late for you to order this years and an arsenal of the recipes from the past. They arrive nice and tidy and already three-hole punched for binders.