Roasted Apricot Sorbet (Page 861)

RECIPE #792

• Date: Monday, July 14, 2008 -- 5pm
• Location: Somerville, MA
• Kitchen: Matty's Apartment
• Dining Companion: Matty
• Recipe Rating: C+
  

If someday in the future I find myself in a reality TV cooking competition and the challenge is to make something that tastes more intensely like apricot than an apricot itself, I will be grateful that I made this sorbet. Until then, not so much. After the first bite of this sorbet Matty only said, "Wow." After bite number two he said, "It tastes like you pureed some apricots and froze them in the ice cream maker, except somehow with more apricot flavor..." Then he set down his spoon. Now I like apricots as much as the next person, but you have to REALLY like apricots to like this dish. The apricot intensity comes from two sources: fresh apricots which are roasted, peeled, and pureed, and dried apricots which are chopped, soaked, and pureed. The roasting made the fresh apricots very intense, and dried apricots, by their very nature, pack a big apricot punch. The net result: some wildly flavorful apricot sorbet. Neither Matty nor I particularly enjoyed it, and it is a bit difficult for me to imagine who would... Maybe someone who likes apricots so much that they have bowls full of those plastic apricots as decorations in their house, and an apricot-of-the-month calendar on the wall. Maybe that person. If you aren't that person, I would pass on this one. (On the upside, the texture of the sorbet was nice!)

Here is the recipe.

Today is my brother's birthday. Happy Birthday to Spencer! My brother is almost two years older than me. Growing up, we didn't get along so well. Ok, that's an understatement. My mother admits that she didn't dispel the wisdom, "You will be friends when you are older" to us because we fought so much it seemed possible we would continue to hate each other as adults. To this day when kids behave badly in my extended family my aunts and uncles say, "Stop it -- you are behaving like Spencer and Teena." I would defend the two of us, and say that the stories have been blown out of proportion, but they haven't. On many occasions my family would take two cars to go places because Spencer and I couldn't be in the same car without causing trouble.

People who know the two of us as adults never believe me about this. For one thing, Spencer and I get along beautifully now. We are great friends, we visit each other as much as possible, etc... Also, we just don't have the personalities to make the stories plausible. My brother is an extremely mellow guy. Very, very mellow. I am not as mellow as him, but also not prone to confrontation. So how was it that we were so awful to one another? It's a mystery. And a little sad. I don't have many memories of us having good times together between the ages of 8 and 18 (Well, that's not exactly true. We did have some pretty spectacular fights, some of which make me laugh to this day... And some of the stuff he did, while not particularly funny at the time, is pretty funny in retrospect.) . Fortunately, though, I have lots of fond memories of us hanging out since then!

Happy Birthday Spencer!