It is officially Spring

The guests have come and gone and my refrigerator, the silent witness to a ravenous pillage. What remains are a motley group, the hard core survivors: ½ a tub of Sabra hummus, some hardened jasmine rice, milk, grated carrots, raspberry sauce and scraping-the-bottom-of-the-carton vanilla ice cream. It pleases me to create, reuse and recycle when need be and food is no exception. On many occasions, the remnants make up a strange concoction which I loosely categorize as my layered meals that I dutifully eat. They can be pretty in that rough and tumble patchwork, take-me-as-I-am kind of way. There is no cool elegance in these meals. Today’s creation was different all together. I awoke this morning drifting upward towards consciousness after a fantastic night of movement and thrill. It was so involved that I dropped many details as I awoke. The sole memory of my nightly escapades was me scantily clad in an avocado green bikini flecked with gold. I sported a wicked tan complete with a very bodacious Brazilian bottom. Amused and inspired my thoughts turned to the raspberry sauce in the fridge. It was created for another time and place- Peach Melba the week earlier. The frozen raspberries were pureed with sugar, water and vanilla and then passed through a sieve to de-seed. The sauce was a potent floral elixir puddling sweetly over vanilla ice cream with mounds of syrupy peach halves. Peach Melba was indeed a happy convergence of ingredients, in particular the sauce and the cream a perfect marriage. In a move to simultaneously usher in warmer weather and thumb my nose at the cold I decided to create a beautiful blushing raspberry rose milkshake which would consist of the sauce, milk, vanilla ice cream and a healthy glug of rosewater. While I had visions of sweet 16 pink, I came up with girl gone bad fuchsia. A little too much sauce and not enough cream! I guess that is what happens when you throw in night time romp with spring time frolic. Nevertheless, the sauce was cleverly reinvented into a sophisticated drink snack that in a future iteration will partner perfectly with a crisp-chewy pignoli cookie. Now I’ll drink to that.