Lemon Bars With Dill

School has started and I'm back from a bunch of travel . This means that weekly lunch with my junior faculty colleagues has resumed in full force. I'm telling you this because it also means I now have a weekly audience of guinea pigs for food experiments and cause to be in one place long enough to actually spend time making stuff for them. Pearwise entries should appear regularly again over the next few months.

This week I tried a couple things I've been meaning to do for a while. The first, and perhaps more interesting, was to combine lemon and dill in a dessert. They're a classic pairing, of course, but mostly served with things like salmon or crab cakes (try googling 'lemon dill' -- you'll get about 50 salmon recipes). A lemon dill sorbet could arguably make a nice palate cleanser, so why not try the same combination in a lemon bar?  Could be tasty.

The second was to try David Lebovitz's recipe for whole lemon bars. These are exactly what they sound like; you actually chop up a whole lemon -- peel, pith and all (minus the seeds) -- and spin it in the food processor with the other filling ingredients. I might have tried these without dill, but that would be dangerously close to a  repeat dessert, something that hasn't happened yet in the 2.5 or so years I've been baking for our lunches. Dill adds sufficient diversity.

To add the dill flavor, I made a dill sugar and used it in both the crust and the custard. This just involved chopping up some dill (maybe 1/8 cup?), and putting it in the food processor with about 1 cup of sugar. This turned it a delightful shade of green and it had a clear dill scent.

Then I just used that sugar in place of regular sugar in the recipe. As you can see, the result has a neat looking green color. The taste is very lemon-y, a bit bitter from including the pith, and there's a clear taste of dill on the finish. It's possibly too strong, but i'm not sure. We'll see what the others say…

Tomato Basil Frozen Yogurt

A couple weeks ago, I was preparing to leave for a 10-day trip, and realized that I had a couple extra tomatoes and yogurt in the fridge. I also had one of those supermarket basil plants growing in the window and I was pretty sure it would die while I was gone. What to do… why not frozen yogurt?

Well, one can actually think of a lot of reasons. "You could have made tomato sauce," said a colleague. True, but I just had two tomatoes. Not really enough for much sauce. There were other reasons not to do it too. Tomatoes aren't usually dessert. The idea sounds sort of odd. And it could all just wind up being a waste.

And yet it seemed like it might work. Basil ice cream is delicious. Pizza sauce is often sweetened with sugar. And tomatoes could easily play nicely with the tangy-ness of yogurt. So I tried it, and the results were surprisingly good. Rich with tomato, a hint of basil, and the tang of yogurt. Most of my colleagues (who are patient guinea pigs, but also not afraid to say what they don't like) liked it. One person didn't.

To make it, I started with a strawberry frozen yogurt recipe. I coarsely chopped two tomatoes and 8-10 basil leaves, and let those macerate with 1 cup of sugar for about 3 hours. The tomatoes released a lot of juice, so I cooked this down a bit until the juice thickened to the consistency of a light syrup (maybe 15-20 minutes?).

I then put the tomato mix into the blender with 1.5 cups plain full-fat yogurt, a little (1/4 tsp or so) salt, a few grinds of black pepper, and some lemon juice. After pureeing, the flavor was good but not very rich. I added a little bit of vanilla extract for richness and a couple pinches of citric acid powder to boost the lemon juice.

The result was rich (though I might cut the vanilla a bit next time) and tart at the same time, with the background of the basil. It was pretty interesting; kind of like a frozen and sweet gazpacho.

Ingredients:

2 big tomatoes

1 cup sugar

8-10 chopped basil leaves

1.5 cups plain yogurt

1/4 tsp salt

1/8 tsp citric acid

1 tsp or so lemon juice

1/8 tsp black pepper

1/2 tsp vanilla extract