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If you are anything like me, you might be wondering what to do with the basil in your garden that is getting scorched by this brutal Memphis summer. I’ve got a pretty solid idea, but first I’ll tell the story of how this tasty treat came to be.
Scrantonicity
I work at a cool place with great people. As a group, my coworkers make it easy to come to work, and it is a team built to succeed. Part of it is that everyone has a high skill level, but the other part is that we work well as a team. I feel like we get a lot of really good stuff done around the conference room table and the lunch table with our strong collaborative method. Part of this team dynamic comes from knowing how to have a good time. Remember, a team is only as good as its latest prank.
At some point last year, we had a pot luck meal at work using the herbs that are in our garden at the office. It was a way to show the great benefits of having your own herb garden as well as a way to get the employees together to have a good time. Sign-ups were done via email, and I didn’t think too much of the meal until I got the menu a few days before. While scanning the items, I noticed that I had signed up to make Basil Lime Sorbet, which I neither remembered signing up for or remembered ever making a sorbet.
“We Googled ‘Difficult Herb Recipes’ and Signed You Up”
When I asked my friends in the cube farm (we have cubicles that make a quadrant) how this happened, they gave me the thousand yard stare then shrugged their shoulders, before telling me to Google “difficult herb recipes.” When I did, I found the recipe that I was signed up for!
Fortunately, it wasn’t as difficult as it sounded. Well, until I found out that we had a juicer, which was after I had hand squeezed about 8 limes and turned my hands in to Wrinklestiltskin. The sorbet was such a big hit at the lunch that it became a part of my regular rotation, meaning that I made it again this weekend for the 2nd time ever.
The end result is both sweet and tart with a aromatic flavor of basil. It is a treat to be enjoyed in small, one scoop doses. It could serve as either a great palette cleanser or a dessert on its own. It is quick to make, but with the freezing involved, it is best done a day in advance!
Basil Lime Sorbet (basically the one from Allrecipes.com)
3/4 cup fresh lime juice (about 5 limes)
1 cup simple syrup (aka boil 1 cup of water with 1 cup of sugar for one minute then remove from heat)
20 basil leaves minced (or chopped very finely)
Mix the lime juice, basil, and simple syrup in a blender and puree. Pour the mixture into a container and freeze. This takes at minumum 2 hours, my freezer was closer to 4 hours for a double recipe. Take the frozen mixture out, put it back in the blender and puree again. Pour it back into the container and smooth it out and refreeze until time to serve. Eat.
Get in the kitchen and make something good!
-Thomas
PS. If you’ve got a few extra minutes. Here are some of the best of the prank clips from The Office.
I started making this at home in June & it was incredibly easy. I don’t use the simple syrup, however — try either blue agave syrup from Whole Foods or frozen white grape juice concentrate (Welch’s is fine). It’s sweeter than the sugar & has a lower glycemic index.
For a twist, add some of the lime zest into the sorbet. If you’re in a hurry, you can make this in a blender simply by adding ice cubes to the recipe and pulsing them until the consistency becomes sorbet-like.