Lemon Granita
I miss the simpler days. I miss high school and college. Five years into real life, I suddenly have this craving to go back to college, I suddenly crave. Live a disciplined life made of a timetable and classes where there is always a right and wrong. There is rarely a subject (other than philosophy) where there isn’t a right or wrong answer. Sure there can be a spectrum from good to bad, but there was a neutral answer. Decisions weren’t multilayered and emotional, and most importantly — you saw the results very quickly.
On the other hand, life seems to have many decisions that don’t have a definitive answer. And honestly, no answer looks terrible either. It’s just a sea of grey. My family is going through one such set of decisions. Recently my grandmother has diagnosed with stage four cancer. It’s at a location where there isn’t much prognosis of remission, but there are options for improving life. What started last year as toothache became cancer. We were proactive with the care she needed right from the toothache. The dentist saw it and took out four teeth, the oncologist did a test which came clean, the gastroenterologist checked for GI problems and recommended medication, another oncologist cleared her of cancer symptoms from the neck down (yet no one noticed cancer), and there was even a round of treatment with a homoeopath. Finally, a doctor looking for cancer above the head last month caught the tumour.
I don’t want to talk too much about the medical procedure, but the way life works are in so many shades of grey. We are consistently taught that the decisions we make will affect the result. Yet, in life, results may not go your way, even if all you did was try and find a solution. There is no right or wrong. Sometimes the decisions you make may never bear fruit. And sometimes, you will do something that just happens to work out. Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken seems to have a whole new meaning for me now. Everyone travels the road less travelled at some point. A road with no answers, no result, no idea of what is there on the other side. Just hope and determination to keep walking along. And hopefully, see it through to the horizon.
Life decisions are complex and somehow they seem to get trickier as we grow up. I have been going through some of those questions in the last few weeks but what really helped through that process was to not hesitate in making this lemon granita. Simple syrup infused with pink peppercorn and then blanching some lemon zest and juice in that sugar mix. The prep is 10 minutes, the cook is another 15, and then it’s a matter of freezing and scraping along the way. The result is a tart, sweet, and faintly spicy icicle that melts in your mouth and helps you keep the focus on life’s many complex questions. I hope you like this recipe and always, happy cooking!
Recipe
Ingredients
60-90 ml of lemon juice
1/2 cup of simple syrup (heat down equal parts sugar and water until the sugar is all dissolved)
1 tablespoon of pink peppercorns (optional)
1 teaspoon salt
Method
Start by making a simple syrup. Equal parts of sugar and water mixed well. Add de-shelled pink peppercorns. Remove the heat and add the lemon juice
Add to a flat baking sheet with walls. The juice should only cover an inch of the pan. Add the shells for added colour.
Place in a freezer. Scrape the ice every hour for 4 hours until frozen perfectly.
