Cold fusionberry

Move over, Dr. Emma Russell -- there's a new cold fusionist in town. Sure, my successful attempts at cold fusion have not yet averted a mass revolt in post-Communist Russia over soaring energy prices. But my cold fusion tastes better. Indeed, my cold fusion brings all the girls to the yard. My cold fusion is better than yours. My cold fusion is homemade ice cream.

For the holidays, my girlfriend gave me an ice cream maker. I didn't even know that I wanted an ice cream maker until I saw what one had wrought at a recent dinner party. The dinner party host and chef -- now a culinary student in New York -- had similarly received an ice cream maker as a birthday gift from her boyfriend. After the meal, she extracted a white plastic container from her freezer. Placing it on the kitchen island's countertop, she peeled off the lid to reveal the ice cream equivalent of "moonshine" -- a completely homemade, non-Ben & Jerry's honey lavender ice cream. She dropped a scoop into my bowl, and I immediately went to town. The texture was the perfect balance between rich and light. Unlike store-bought ice creams, this one wasn't cloyingly sweet; the natural flavors did all the work. I turned to my girlfriend and told her that I needed -- yes, needed -- an ice cream maker.

Dare to dream. My girlfriend e-mailed the host and asked her for the exact make and model of her ice cream maker and whether she liked it. The host replied that she loved the thing -- that it was simple to use and that it produced excellent results. My girlfriend was sold. She bought the Cuisinart CIM-20 Automatic Frozen Yogurt-Ice Cream & Sorbet Maker at the local Williams Sonoma.

When I opened it, I nearly did the Dance of Joy. Small kitchen appliances do for me what a new bandsaw did for Tim "The Toolman" Taylor. Two days later, after freezing the aptly named freezer bowls, I tried to make my first batch -- the raspberry sorbet from the recipe booklet that accompanied the machine. To avoid super-sweetness, I halved the two cups of sugar that the recipe called for and replaced the frozen raspberries with a slightly larger bag of frozen blackberries, blueberries, and raspberries. After suffering an early utensil casualty (I accidentally shredded my plastic icing smoother in the blender when I used it to push the frozen fruit into the blender's rotating blade.), I inserted the mixing arm in the now frozen freezer bowl and poured in the mixed elements. The freezer bowl went onto the ice cream maker's rotator.

I flipped the on-off switch and waited twenty minutes for the magic to happen. This must have been how Dr. Russell felt when she watched to see if her cold fusion machine would work under President Karpov's hand. (If you can't tell already, I admit that I enjoy watching The Saint. If that lurid detail precludes me from being chosen as President Bush's next Homeland Security secretary, so be it.) Twenty minutes later, Tretiak was finished and Simon Templar nearly free! Um, no. But the sorbet was done. The color was a ruby red, and its consistency was closer to that of ice cream than sorbet, notwithstanding the fact that no dairy products went into the mix. I put the bulk of it into a cleaned-out Chinese food takeout bowl for freezer storage and dropped two spoonfuls into a bowl for immediate consumption. It tasted much like a Jamba Juice smoothie, but with a deeper berry flavor. I had made cold fusionberry.

Although I hadn't mysteriously shaken off my rare heart condition or gotten Simon Templar out of trouble in the process, I'd made one of those elemental food items -- like bread, cake, or wine. I had harnessed the power of nature and given life to fruit and sugar! Okay, so I'm vastly overstating it. But I did make something delicious from scratch.

This afternoon, I used three of the clementines that my grandfather gave me yesterday to make a lovely clementine-honey frozen yogurt. It won't save the world. But unlike the crappy frame I made in my middle school shop class, the frozen yogurt was fun to make and went down easy. Form and function.