As Strong As Soup

If you’re anything like me, then whenever you buy a delicious, ripe melon, you have the problem of leftovers. I wrap the excess melon and stick it in the fridge for the next day.  I then usually forget that it's there and discover sad, dried up melon some days later. So that's why I came up with this solution to the problem of excess melon. Actually, it turns out that this sorbet is so refreshing and so ridiculously simple to put together that I'm quite happy to buy yet more melon just to make it. Unless my memory is playing tricks on me (yet again!), this sorbet is based on a recipe by the great Frédy Girardet . I'm sure that the original would have been more refined and would not have contained Malibu. But Frédy Girardet is a great chef and I'm most definitely not. The sorbet will certainly be smoother if made in an ice-cream machine, but it will still be very pleasing if you simply freeze it in a shallow container and rough it up a bit with a fork once it’s ...

Thyme sorbet has become a bit of a cheffy cliché in the recent past but I still wanted to see what it was like to make. Most recipes that I've seen follow a pretty straightforward sorbet formula, often with lemon, which is additionally infused with thyme. There's nothing at all wrong with that but I'd seen a sorbet with a milky quality in France and I thought I'd try adding milk to this sorbet before the thyme in the garden becomes too ravaged by the winter. This recipe only makes a small amount, but I think this works best in small amounts as an accent to other flavours – it worked well alongside a dessert made with blackberries, for instance. I used a mix of lemon and ordinary thyme in this recipe but I think it works with either 5 sprigs of thyme Zest of 1 lemon 300 ml full cream milk 300 ml water 200 g caster sugar Bring the milk, water and sugar to the boil, stirring now and then to make sure that the sugar has completely dissolved. As soon as it reaches b...