Not The Right Season

     The past two days were all bright and sunny.  On Friday it was warm enough to run shirtless at Track, and spend the evening walking the neighborhood with my friends before we went to see The Hunger Games (which is one of the best book based movies in awhile).  On Saturday, Mom spent all day working in the yard, and Cy, Dad and I walked to the park with a 5-gallon bucket of water balloons and a sling-shot.  With hopes of more warm, sunny weather, I set out today with a plan.  I was going to make basil lemonade, and cinnamon-orange sorbet, and paella.  But instead, the sun deigned to peak out from the clouds today, so we've got a summery meal, and a gray sky.  There's just a little hint of sun behind the clouds, a point that's a little bit brighter than the rest of the sky.


I started early this afternoon, making the lemonade.  The recipe was from the New York Times, Mark Bittman's food column.  I juiced lemon's, strained the juice, and steeped the rinds with basil and sugar before mixing it all together.  Once the lemonade was chilling in the fridge, I moved onto the ice cream.  From the same NYT issue, it's a cinnamon-orange sorbet.  I put sugar, a cinnamon stick, and and orange zest into orange juice, cooked it until the sugar dissolved, and threw it into the ice cream maker.  A few hours later, we got started on the paella.  It too, is a Bittman recipe, (uh-oh is this turning into another Bittman tribute dinner?)  It's a chorizo and clam paella, and is proving to be a little troublesome, though it should still be good.

     Wow. The paella was really good, the chorizo, onions, clams, rice and peas created an amazing flavor, not really something I can describe, it was far to complex for me.  Let's just stick with, "It was good," and say that the only disappointment was that the clams weren't quite done when the rest of it was.  The basil lemonade was just as amazing, with a complex flavor not usually seen in lemonade.  It was incredibly sweet, and layered beneath the lemonade flavor, was just a little hint of basil.  It would have made great popsicles, and is definitely a recipe I want to remember for this summer.  The ice cream was also amazing.  Somehow, it was creamy despite being just 2 parts orange juice, 1 part sugar, a cinnamon stick, and some orange zest.  It was orange ice cream at it's very best.  Also a recipe to remember for the warmer months.  All told, an amazing, complex dinner, but maybe not the right season.