Peach Basil Sorbet inspired by a lost manuscript…

My mom recently emailed me the contents of an old thumb drive. She told me, “I found this thumb drive cleaning out a drawer. It has the cookbooks you wrote in when you were 10 and 11, do you remember those? And do you remember the way you would act out your own cooking videos in the kitchen?”

I plugged in the thumb drive and began scrolling through the two 60-page Word documents. I created them originally to resemble, as closely as possible,  what I imagined a real cookbook manuscript looked like.

I scrolled through the documents, reading recipes that I had daydreamed with exotic ingredients I had discovered on The Food Network (Harissa Glazed Halibut) , and recipes I had made up myself with full creative license (like a Peanut Butter and Apple Juice Smoothie…).

I’ve had the realization before that my work is what I dreamed about when I was younger. But that moment staring at those manuscripts, I felt my passion for food come full-circle. I believe that the endless hours I spent daydreaming about sharing my recipes with others was not just daydreaming…. it was somehow shaping my future by creatively visualizing what I wanted to do.

This recipe is inspired by my 11-year-old cookbook daydreams. In one old manuscript, I found a recipe for a Basil Sorbet. It was definitely one of those exotic recipes that I had not actually made, but which sounded magically sophisticated and unusual. And this final recipe is magically sophisticated and unusual. It tastes like springtime.