At the tail end of August, I hosted a dinner for La Peetch guests in my personal home. I do not do this often, but these were….
A) friends of my family who had booked one of our Catered Vacation rental weeks
B) family friends
So of course, there was this feeling of ‘much show them my house’, and because who doesn’t want to show off your in-progress farm, have new friends over for dinner, and bask in the provencal sunshine. But I can’t ever just have people over to my house without feeding them. Like…Ever. I just can’t do it.
So in true Makenna fashion, I invited them over for dinner. But of course, it was no ‘simple’ meal, rather it was a multi-course bonanza. There were a lot of dietary needs, a whole slew.
So I got to planning, and made a couple starters including three choices of gazpacho (beetroot spicy, classic, and yellow), a lemon verbena infused dairy-free cream and tomato salad, a summer take on a beef bourguignon (this was a request from one of the guests, not mine! I did a lot of things to make it summer friendly, including how it was plated), and I needed to come up with a dairy-free dessert option that could work.
I had a ton of cranberries in my freezer, so I got to work on a granita. But it felt flat, so while serving I topped it with a bit of cream (for the dairy lovers), and later while trying it and realising how good it was, I fell on the fact that it would make a GREAT cocktail too!
This is very much how I recipe develop. I think. OOOH! I have cranberries, that would make a refreshing dessert. And a granita? SURE! They are tart, they will need sugar. Then I go from there.
So while, this isn’t a complete recipe, it is an…approach to a delicious thing that makes…delicious things. I’ve included three ways I could see using this gleefully. And a rough cut video that shows me literally having the oooooh gin! epiphany.
Cranberry Granita
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