Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

The blueberry sorbet I posted about earlier is very blueberry, but the texture isn't up to what I can buy in the supermarket.

Also, my kitchen sink is now somewhat blue. My spurtle may be permanently blue. I hope the shirt I was wearing when doing the washing-up isn't stained, but it may be.

Next time, I'm going to try adrian_turtle's suggestion of using corn syrup instead of sugar and water, to improve the texture. Next time will probably not be blueberry. I can buy a perfectly good raspberry sorbet, for about what I'd pay for the necessary package of frozen raspberries, so that hardly seems worth the trouble.

I'd been going to make ice cream, but the current cold/sore throat thing doesn't seem to like large quantities of milk (at least not as hot chocolate with extra cream), so sorbet.

Ingredients:

1 12-ounce (weight) package frozen blueberries (approx 2.5 cups, per the nutrition information)
Scant half cup sugar [vanilla sugar, because that's what I have]
Scant half cup water
1/2 teaspoon Grand Marnier liqueur

Combine berries, sugar, and water in a saucepan. Bring to a boil. Simmer 30 minutes. Let stand another 30, to cool for easier handling. Blend, strain into a bowl, mix in liqueur, chill (I've set the timer for another hour), freeze in the ice cream maker.

Notes: This was based on poking around online. The simplest recipe I found wanted a quart of berries, and 3/4 cup each of sugar and water. Okay, 5/8 of 3/4 is 15/32, which is a scant half cup for the home cook. This recipe didn't mention alcohol, but most of the sorbet recipes I've seen do, to keep it from freezing too hard. They often suggest vodka, I think on the theory of "neutral spirit," but we don't have that. The orange liqueur has been around for years, literally—I bought it for chocolate mousse, and haven't made that in a while—and seemed a better choice than white wine, sherry, or bourbon. Hmm. One that I looked at earlier (probably where I got the idea of Grand Marnier) calls for this many blueberries and a full tablespoon of vodka; maybe I'll add another half teaspoon of liqueur. (That one also wants a cup of sugar to half a cup of water, and some lemon juice, but the orange is going to take care of citrusness, I think.)

In the course of this, I not only dug out a dusty bottle of liqueur, but a hand-held blender I got as an odd sort of prize from the temp agency I was working through during the Commute From Hell, an apron I almost never use (I thought the blueberry stuff might splatter when blended), and my spurtle, which I found earlier today in the course of putting away my grandmother's shell-inlaid trivet. We have better trivets, for practical use; this is a memory of my grandparents' home. I put it in the baking-stuff drawer.

The ice cream maker is whirring away. This is another "kludge together recipes," in part because when I was looking the other day I found all these recipes that wanted canned pears, and today most of what I found wanted fresh.

1 small (15 ounce) can of pear halves in pear juice
1 cup sugar
2 cups water
1 lemon
a bit of ground cardamom

Mash the pears with a fork to break them up; stop when your shoulder starts to hurt. Meanwhile, bring the sugar and water to a boil, to approximate a simple syrup. Grate the lemon peel. Mix the pears and pear juice, using an electric mixer on the lowest setting, until the remaining lumps are few and small. When the water comes to a boil, turn the light way down. Mix in the lemon rind. Juice the lemon, and mix in the lemon juice. Add the quasi-syrup, try not to worry about thin it all looks, and mix some more. Toss in a half-spoonful of cardamom. Mix.

Pour the result into your ice cream maker. Notice that the cardamom all seems to have settled to the bottom of the mixing bowl, and try to pour it in anyhow (it's a bunch of dark gray specks).

Now, I will wait for it to finish whirring, then freeze it, and maybe run out for heavy cream so I can make lemon ice cream as well.

Later: The result is a bit lumpy, but tasty. I can't taste the cardamom, but I'm not sure if that's because I only used a little, or because it had gotten somewhat old. I think I'm going to try pear juice/"nectar" next time, though.