My Inheritance

After my grandmother passed away earlier this year, my mother came upon this box. She handed it to me and said "Joanna, this is your inheritance, use it wisely."

Oh what could this simple box contain, well just as it says on the front recipes. They were all the recipes that my grandmother made on a regular basis, those from her family, as well as those she tore out from the newspaper or magazines and those that she traded with neighbors and friends.

The contents were written on random bit of paper, index card, tear outs from the paper. It drove me nuts to look through these bits of paper. So I decided to organize them and eventually create a family cookbook. As I was looking through, I realized that there were 5 versions of some recipes and that means recipe testing. Trying to figure out what are the correct portions to create the best version of the dish.

So I plan to write about each of the recipes here as I test them.

My first trial is lemon sorbet. I thought I would start with something easy and I wanted to test out the new ice cream maker my mother in law gave us.

So here is the result of the lemon sorbet. I picked about 5 lemons from our tree, yes it is finally producing lemons. I zested and juiced them. I mixed that with a little simple syrup. And threw it in the ice cream maker. After 40 minutes this is what I came up with:


My first impression of it was that it tasted like the frozen lemonade you get at the ball park. It is fluffy and light. I simply loved the lemon tartness. I think I need to adjust the recipe to either reduce or eliminate the lemon zest. I think it detracted from the texture. But recipe is a keeper.