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…