Granita

I mentioned in the previous post that I had made a dessert to go with my simple, but tasty, special crab legs dinner.  I wanted to make a dessert that was equally as simple.  On a hot summer day, that equals granita.

Granita is a simple sorbet-like dessert that takes just water, sugar, flavor, and a freezer.  Unlike sorbet, it is scraped with a fork intermittently as it freezes to maintain a granular texture, and is not run through an ice cream machine.  Whenever I have made granita, it has been with fruit as the flavor, but I understand it can be made in nut flavors, or even chocolate. 

After our crab legs, I served strawberry-yogurt granita with fresh peaches.  I made the strawberry granita with frozen strawberries which made it super simple.  The only difficult part, if you can even call it that, was to make sure to scrape the granita about every 20 minutes or so as it froze. 

Tonite, we had spicy spring rolls (later post), and I again wanted something simple, and also cooling to chill us down after the spice from dinner.  I made a watermelon-ginger granita out of fresh watermelon, and served it with vanilla cream and toasted almonds.  I made the vanilla cream with fresh vanilla beans and vanilla sugar.  (It is super easy to make vanilla sugar, by the way: After scraping the insides of vanilla beans for your recipes, put the pods in a container with sugar; replace the sugar as you use it up.)  You might not think watermelon and ginger would make a good pair, but trust me, they are tasty together.  The watermelon-ginger granita was perfect for this hot summer night after our spicy southwestern meal.  Dan raved about it on and on.  It is so easy to make granita; I highly recommeng giving it a try on one of the few hot days we have left this year.

Happy eating!