The Red Dog starts to settle in, and becomes very attached to me very quickly: I cannot leave his sight, even for a moment. He follows me from room to room, watches me in the kitchen, whines when I go into the garage and leave him on the other side of the door. I go on a one-day business trip, and get a message from the dog walker, he would not leave the house, so I walked him in circles in the yard.
It’s all very endearing, until I discover the extent of the panic he experiences whenever I leave, on the leg of my grandmother’s antique dining table.
Separation anxiety, says the vet.
I order baby gates to contain him, and while I wait for them to be delivered, take him with me everywhere.
In the midst of this puppy love, I decide it’s time to lose some weight. My father bought me a juicer a year ago, and I stashed it on top of the refrigerator, where I could mostly ignore it, feeling guilty only when it happened to catch my eye, which happened only when the cat would climb up alongside it and knock some part down with a loud clatter. I find a juice diet online, and go to the store and load up on veggies and fruits and follow the plan exactly. I lose six pounds in five days and although some will hurry to point out that It’s Just Water Weight, I have to say, it’s very motivating water weight.
I’m eating my vegetables, just like grandma always told me to. Everyone’s happy.
So pleased am I by this turn of events that I decide to indulge myself in a gift: An ice-cream maker. I know an ice cream maker seems to have no place on a diet, but this is a juice diet, and of course you can make other things in an ice-cream maker. Sorbet, as luck would have it, turns out to be made entirely out of juice.
The ice cream maker arrives and I decide I want to make something with blood oranges, which were abundant in the fruit section less than a week before – but now, they’re gone, replaced by tangelos, something I was told I would like when I was six or seven and haven’t eaten since. I must not have liked them when I was six or seven, but that was a while ago, so it’s probably time for me to reconsider the tangelo. I have a recipe for tangerine sorbet from David Lebovitz’s newsletter, which seems like it should work for tangelos too, so I buy a dozen of them figuring that should yield the required three cups of juice, which it does, plus five leftover tangelos.
Which is not a problem, because I learned two important things: 1) Tangelos are delicious, and 2) tangelo sorbet is even more delicious.
The sorbet is also absurdly easy to make, and requires just two ingredients, or three if you’re feeling posh and want to add the optional cup of champagne. I loved the crisp citrus flavor, so light, and just lightly sweet. It would be the perfect finish to any meal, especially where you didn’t want something heavy. Just a little goes a long way, although The Child was so entranced with this that it didn’t last very long at all.
- 3 cups freshly squeezed tangelo juice
- ⅔ cup sugar
- Optional: 1 cup Champagne
- Warm 1 cup of the tangelo juice in a small saucepan with the sugar, stirring until the sugar is completely dissolved.
- Stir the mixture back into the tangelo juice and chill thoroughly.
- Freeze the mixture in your ice cream maker, according to the manufacturer's instructions. (If you want to add Champagne, mix it in right before churning.) Makes about a quart.
– because all the baking books are suddenly available now that I’m on a diet). Driving there, I saw a North Carolina license plate, and had nobody to pinch because I saw it first. Driving home, I was able to play my own music, which never happens two drives in a row and felt so strange that I finally just switched the radio to one of her stations and listened to some song I know the words to yet can’t stand.
– the same cookbook as the Apple Jellies recipe. The cookbook I have not opened since I bought it.
