WEEK 38: YOUR BEST DISH WITH BLOOD ORANGES, FETA, AND MINT

Feta Frozen Yogurt with Blood Orange
and Mint Granita

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Photography by Sarah Shatz

    BY HELENTHENANNY | SERVES 4

A&M: It’s rare to come across a recipe that’s both sophisticated and economical. Just four ingredients and three simple stages and you have a dessert that’s easy enough to whip up for your kids and impressive enough for a dinner party. The granita offers a balanced sprinkling of bitterness and sweetness. And the frozen yogurt (which, by the way, gets very hard in the freezer; leave it out for a bit before scooping) is tangy with lashings of salt and honey. Make sure you use full-fat yogurt, and if you can’t find honey-flavored, just buy plain and sweeten it with honey (we did it both ways and each worked out fine). And get ready for a grown-up, faintly subversive dessert. As Helenthenanny wrote, “Greek yogurt and Greek feta were meant to be friends, and served along with the blood orange and mint granita, it’s an orgy of ingredient love.” We agree wholeheartedly!

    FETA FROZEN YOGURT

    ½ cup soft feta, preferably fresh and packed in water

    9 ounces honey-flavored Greek yogurt

    BLOOD ORANGE AND MINT GRANITA

    2 big, fat, juicy blood oranges

    1 handful mint leaves

  1. Tune your iPod or Pandora Radio to Sarah Vaughan. Or Dinah Washington. Or just play Nancy Wilson’s “Peel Me a Grape” on a loop.
  2. For the feta frozen yogurt: Get out your immersion blender, or beaters, or your whisk and gumption, and put the feta and 6 ounces of the yogurt into a freezer-safe bowl. Now beat or blend those fellas till they are smooth. Don’t worry if there are some tiny chunks of feta; they are going to be little salty bursts of flavor in this sweet dessert.
  3. Stir in the remaining 3 ounces yogurt, cover with plastic wrap, and put in the freezer for a few hours or until frozen.
  4. For the blood orange and mint granita: Cut the blood oranges in half, run a knife around the inside rim, and gut them with a spoon. Put the guts into a bowl. Don’t worry if a bit of rind goes in, we just want as much pulp and juice as possible.
  5. Squeeze any leftover juice from the orange peels. Zest the orange peels into the bowl. Throw in the mint leaves and immersion-blend or food-process the mixture till it is quite pulpy. Strain through a fine-mesh sieve. Compost the pulpy remains, or something—we’re only using the beautiful blood orange juice infused with mint.
  6. Pour the liquid into a freezer-safe baking dish (I used a round cake pan, and it was gangbusters). Freeze for 2 to 3 hours, but do check on it frequently and rake through it with a fork every time it looks like the liquid is freezing, maybe every 30 minutes? Keep an eye out and a fork handy, as it depends how cold your freezer is and which pan you used. My granita looked like glittery flakes of blood orange ice after only 1½ hours or so.
  7. Scoop the feta fro-yo into a pretty dish, top with the granita, and turn your music machine to Ella Fitzgerald’s version of “Goody Goody,” then eat your little treat standing up in the kitchen. And I hope you’re satisfied, you rascal you!

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Photography by Sarah Shatz

    TIPS AND TECHNIQUES

    Helenthenanny suggests having “a small lemon on hand in case your blood oranges are crazy sweet and you’d prefer a bit more acidity.”

        If you like a sweeter dessert, add a drizzle of honey on top when serving.