I finished reading The Two Hotel Francforts by David Leavitt over Thanksgiving weekend and was blown away by the quality of the writing. I want to highlight these two sentences that reference the sun and the moon, two much-written-about entities it's difficult to say anything fresh about:
All this came back to me as I sat outside the Suiça, and the sun resumed its posture of perennial bored sovereignty, like a lifeguard on his high chair, and the pigeons gathered, on the lookout for any new customers who, out of gratitude at finding themselves, after so many months, in a city with bread to spare, might give them some crumbs. (page 97)
The moonlight, though dull, held intimations of sharpness, as if shards of the noonday sun were embedded in it. (page 189)
The novel is set in the summer of 1940 in Lisbon and revolves around two married couples who are planning to escape to New York from Nazi-occupied Paris. The narrator of the story is Pete Winters, a car salesman whose wife, Julia, doesn't want to return to the U.S. because of her troubled relationship with her American family. Pete has an affair with Edward, a writer who has a complex, codependent partnership with his wife, Iris. The plot takes unpredictable but always true-to-life turns, and the dialogue sparkles. You should read it, even though the adjective half-shod appears on page 210. ;-)
Tony had been hinting he'd really like a batch of a frozen dessert I hadn't made for him in far too long: Blood Orange and Bittersweet Chocolate Sorbet. His friend Nancie, whom I referenced in my Comparing Billions to Billions post, sent him the recipe, from Sunset magazine, in February 2016 and said it was enough to inspire her to get an ice cream maker. As I wrote in this post1 on my long-running personal blog, Hawleyblog (log-in and password required; email me if you'd like them), "this sorbet was fantastic, thanks in no small part to the Campari, which gave it an extra air of sophistication." If I'd come up with this flavor, I would have called it Blood Orange–Campari Sorbet With Bittersweet Chocolate because the Campari was more essential to its enjoyment than the chocolate and Tony and I discussed at the time whether the chocolate was even necessary or wanted. "My final decision is that it's a fine addition but I'm sure it would also be scrumptious without it," I wrote in my Hawleyblog post.
I'd been finding (and purchasing) blood oranges at our local supermarkets for several weeks, but, of course, once I'd decided to make a batch of BOCSWBC, they disappeared everywhere. I had a bag of clementines in the fridge that I had planned to use for our Thanksgiving turkey breast, in this preparation from Food & Wine. I'm sure the clementine-and-garlic combo would have been magical—I trust F&W's recipes not to suck—but I started to have my doubts and decided I'd rather serve a more-traditional, herb-infused turkey. So the clementines were available to make Clementine-Campari Sorbet on Sunday.
I needed 3 pounds of clementines to produce the 3 cups of juice. As I often do, I substituted brown rice syrup for the corn syrup. And I left out the chocolate because clementine and chocolate seemed like a less-winning combo than blood orange and chocolate.
The processed sorbet base was a pretty, apricot-like color ...
... that grew paler after it finished solidifying in our freezer:
It tasted pretty good, but I'm not craving this sorbet anywhere near as much as I did the BOCSWBC.
Tony and I tried this sorbet with a sprinkling of bittersweet chocolate chips. We both agreed it's better without the chocolate element. And by the way, for the blood orange version, I throw chocolate chips into my ice cream maker toward the end of churning rather than go through the timely process of melting bittersweet chocolate, pouring it onto a sheet pan, freezing it, and breaking it into fragments.
1That post also included the announcement that Tony and I were getting married nine weeks later. The post about the wedding itself is here.