Day 102 / Day 10 - What I Did With the Lime and Milk

Okay, so for all of you on the edge of your seats (you know who you are), here's what I did with the lime and milk.

After my experiment with lime-basil sorbet, I started to crave real good old-fashioned lime sherbet. So instead of going to the supermarket and buying a half gallon like most normal people, I brought out the ol' KitchenAid again.

I found this recipe:

http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=1057277

Notice how the recipe calls for three cups of half-and-half. Well, remember that I bought a big ol' container of heavy cream for my very healthy tomato soup. So, being the enterprising chef, I combined 1 1/2 cups of heavy cream and 1 1/2 cups of milk, and made 3 cups of half-and-half. The only other challenging part of the recipe was trying to get the lime zest with a cheese grater. I put all the other ingredients in my blender.

Now, I have a confession to make. I did this all yesterday, but made the foolish decision once again to start my ice cream freezing without first chilling the mixture, a no-no with the KitchenAid, especially on a 90 degree night. I ended up with lime sludge.

So, 24 hours later, with the mixture well chilled and the ice cream freezer attachment once again frozen solid, I started the mixing.

whirr...whirr...whirr...whirr...

Well, happily, I saw the liquid start to clump together, and before long, I had some amazingly refreshing lime sherbet.

I scooped it into mugs, covered them, and put them in the freezer.

Now, you might be wondering, why am I writing about this on my Indoor Gardening blog? Well, if you take a good look at that picture, you might notice a mint sprig I used as garnish. Yes, that is freshly snipped mint from my potted mint plant, which happens to have been transplanted from my old Aerogarden (the one that's now housing the cherry tomatoes)!

Speaking of the Aerogardens, the lights went off on my basil Aerogarden, so I used two more nutrient tablets and filled up the reservoir. That left me with only two precious nutrient tablets. So in two weeks, I'll have to decide whether to retire the basil to start a new crop, to try to transplant the remaining basil plants into soil, or to order more nutrient tablet and keep 'em going. Decisions, decisions...