today it’s a festival of delicious food! we have two delicious recipes to share today, starting with kristin silverman of the kitchen sink’s recipe for a delicious plum marsala sorbet. i tried this during the week and it is painfully good. perfect on its own or as an accompaniment to a light, flaky pie. personally i could eat a bucket of this with a nice glass of wine, but you might want to enjoy your plum marsala sorbet more responsibly.

about the kitchen sink: the kitchen sink is a site that kristin silverman created in law school as a place to spin stories about the food she cooked and to collect the recipes she adored. the kitchen sink has followed kristin and her husband kevin, a producer, at their table and in their travels for nearly two years. along the way, kristin became a lawyer, but she continues to moonlight as a home cook in her chicago kitchen.

Plum-Marsala Sorbet

4 cups pitted and chopped plums
2 to 3 tablespoons brown sugar, depending on the sweetness of your plums
1/8 teaspoon sea or kosher salt
1 teaspoon sweet marsala

Stir all ingredients together in a bowl. Transfer the mixture to a food processor and process until smooth. If you’d like a smoother sorbet, pass the processed mixture through a fine-mesh strainer, which will remove the skins. For a more rustic sorbet, you can skip the straining step.

Churn the mixture in an ice cream maker, according to the manufacturer’s instructions. If you don’t have an ice cream maker, you can make a granita. To do so, pour the mixture into a baking dish with sides at least an inch or so high; cover with plastic wrap and freeze. When the mixture is frozen, scrape with a fork until fluffy.

Why I Chose This Recipe

During a recent week in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys, plums seemed to pop up on menus (not to mention road-side farm stands) everywhere we turned. Returning to Chicago, I was thrilled to see that while I was away on vacation, plums had come into season here in the midwest. I gathered up a good bunch from the Seedling Farm stall at the Wicker Park Farmers’ Market and day dreamed about potential recipes as I walked home, the plastic bag full of plums dangling heavily from my wrist. A sorbet seemed the best use for the plums on that hot Sunday afternoon: cool, tart, simple and pretty. Using brown sugar and sweet marsala to sweeten up the puckery plums gave the sorbet a bit of an edge. Don’t fret if you don’t have an ice cream maker. This recipe, like most sorbet recipes, will work just fine as a granita.