You can find the recipe to this over here. Have a great Labor Day weekend, everybody! Mark will be at the Brooklyn Flea tomorrow and then we’re going to try and recover from our painting week and have some family fun days Sunday and Monday before the first official day of Kindergarten for Mia!

I can’t remember ever making a New Year’s resolution, except one year when I vowed to eat more caviar. Or was it truffles? Whatever it was, I didn’t do very well. I’m going to try another resolution right now - a summer resolution, if you will, to make one batch of homemade ice cream or sorbet a week until September. I may miss a week here or there, but I promise to do my best. I made this lychee sorbet last week for the awesome BBQ we went to on Sunday. It’s almost the same recipe I used for many years at the Central Park Boathouse. Lychees are one of the tastiest and most refreshing fruits, and the good thing about this recipe is that there is very little besides the lychee juice to dilute the flavor. I use lychee puree that I order wholesale, but if you can find a lychee juice with about 10% sugar it should work fine.

Lychee Sorbet (makes almost one quart)

1/2 cup sugar
6 Tablespoons water
3 cups lychee puree, or lychee juice (about 10% sugar)

Heat the sugar and water together in a saucepan just enough to dissolve the sugar. Remove from the heat and stir in the lychee juice. Process in your ice cream maker until frozen, transfer to a container and freeze in the freezer for several hours before serving.

I’m not usually a hot weather fan, but I am loving this summer weather we’re having. The girls can finally wear the summer dresses they’ve been pining to wear everyday (yeah ok, me too), and we’ve been passing the time sitting on stoops, on grass, on benches, pretty much anywhere we can stay outdoors. The long weekend was filled with visits from family and friends, guacamole and mojitos, brunch in Dumbo, after dinner ice cream from the artisan ice cream truck in our neighborhood, outdoor meals out on the patio in the burbs, and a little shopping. Hope you had a nice weekend too.

What is a sign of a great cookbook? To me, a great cookbook has a worn-out binding, a frayed cover and food-stained pages. That indicates that the cookbook is in use, rather than one that is just admired. On my shelf no book is more worn-out than this one: Frozen Desserts. I have owned it for over ten years and have used it extensively at every job I have had. The recipes are reliable and tasty and even work well in a commercial ice cream maker. I bought some plums to make ice cream the other day and turned to this book for guidance. I’ve used their recipe for plum ice cream on my dessert menus before. It calls for rosé wine, but I usually substitute with plum wine. This time I replaced it with créme de cassis. It ended up giving it a richer flavor as well as a much deeper color. Make sure to use dark-skinned plums for the best color.

Plum Cassis Ice Cream (makes 1 quart)

1 pound black plums
1/2 cup créme de cassis (blackcurrant liqueur)
1 cup heavy cream
2 egg yolks
1/2 cup sugar

Wash the plums, remove the pits, then slice each into eight pieces. Place in a small pot with the créme de cassis. Bring to a boil, then simmer until the plums are soft - about 8-10 minutes. Remove from the heat and set aside.

Bring the cream just to a boil. Whisk the yolks and sugar together in a bowl, then slowly pour in the hot cream while continuing to whisk. Add the cooked plums. Purée both together until completely smooth. Chill completely before processing through your ice cream maker.

Pastry chefs always seem to get stuck with more extra work than others in a typical restaurant kitchen. Someone in the dining room was served the wrong entree? Give them free desserts. Need something extra for a VIP banquet for 300 people tonight? Have the pastry department whip up several hundred petit fours. It takes superb organizational skills and excellent improvisational skills to be a pastry chef which is probably the main reason they are able to handle such things. Here is maybe the most common example: the chef approaches the pastry chef and says, “I have 3 cases of something that’s going bad - use them up.” That’s an easy one, just make some ice cream.

I always like to think that anything can be made into an ice cream, so whatever extra ingredients you have on hand can be used to whip something up. Since I’ve been making many marshmallows lately, especially for the FiFis last Tuesday, I’ve had lots of extra egg yolks lying around, plus some lemongrass, heavy cream, and even some toasted coconut from something I can’t remember. That sounded like a winning combination, one that I may have even tried before, so I made it using my basic recipe. It had a very smooth, warm tropical flavor and the lemongrass gives it that extra something that you can’t quite put your finger on. If you have an ice cream maker and want to try it, just use your favorite vanilla recipe and substitute plenty of fresh lemongrass and toasted unsweetened coconut for the vanilla. Strain it out and proceed as usual. I have a feeling I’ll be making lots of ice cream this summer.