One night last week at about 11pm, I was in the midst of one of my longest writing rallies yet. Stress had shaken me awake before the sun, panic had driven me to eat every meal with one hand while still averaging 30 words per minute, and now, hopped up on some kind of delusional deadline-smashing drug, I was poised to take this stint of endurance typing into the a.m. hours. After being contorted around a desk for over 18 hours, though, I was feeling the teensiest urge to stretch, maybe to take a break. But this was no time for breaks! I was on fire! So I did a little maneuver I like to call The Horizontal Office. I dragged the computer downstairs to the couch, mashed some pillows under my chest, reread the last sentence I had written, and promptly fell asleep on my keyboard.
Somehow my brain made it to Saturday night intact, when, at around 5pm, I stood in a clean kitchen, computer stashed somewhere awaiting my next nap, a week’s worth of commitments miraculously fulfilled, and finally realized I had nothing to do.
So, naturally, I made ice cream. (Well, actually sherbet.)
Which is something I used to do a lot, but lately…well, lately I’m not only busy, but I’m busy worrying about not being busy. I don’t even have time for my usual salted caramel saunter to Scoops. And that is a serious, serious problem.
On Saturday, I finally got my priorities straight. I walked outside my house and picked a dozen mandarins (if you squint you can see them growing on the tree outside the window). Zested them, sliced them, juiced them. By way of improvisation, I supplemented with a pomelo from the farmers’ market (and if you don’t know pomelos, ohhhh…you’ll never go back to the grapefruit). I began making mandarin pomelo sherbet, loosely adapted from this fantastic recipe by Pete Wells in the New York Times. (Be sure to read the story about making it with his four-year-old son and watch this video of Jill Santopietro that has one of the best tips for making ice cream I’ve ever heard—spoiler alert: Put the ice cream maker in the fridge while it’s freezing!)
The thing about making ice cream is that, like writing an article, it really is quite a production. There are no short cuts and it’s knuckle-busting work (more so if you use a hand-crank freezer, and may god have mercy on your soul). I have to remember to put the freezer bowl into the freezer 15 hours ahead of time. After the prep work of zesting and juicing and stirring and chilling, it takes a good 30 minutes for the cream to freeze in the machine, and another hour or so for the ice cream to ripen in the freezer. But there’s a serious satistfaction in creating something that results in such delicate perfection. It employs the strictest changes in states—heating but not boiling, aerating but not whipping, cooling but not freezing solid—to create something that’s so fragile, so fleeting, it could literally melt away.
As the ice cream maker started its predictable gyrations, it purred its rhythmic intonations like a mantra. What am I doing to myself? I wondered, letting the muscles slowly start to become unclenched in my shoulders. The metaphor of spinning my wheels came to mind, as did the crunch of “the grind.” I leaned forward, putting both elbows on the counter, my chin in my hands, craning my face as close to the bowl as possible. My eyes glazed over, completely mesmerized by the swish of the paddle sloshing through the creamy juice, watching until the ice crystals formed, puffing the liquid up into soft pale orange folds. It was, by far, my best work of the week.
