Our new apartment in Philadelphia has a rooftop deck. I’m excited about starting a new herb garden (it’ll still be in pots, but I won’t be limited to the number I can reach on the windowsill). One of the first things I’ll plant is rosemary. I like pretty much everything I’ve ever used rosemary for (two favorite recipes starring this flavor are a tomato and pork ragu, and a lamb and lentil stew), and last year I visited the (highly recommended) Piedmont Restaurant in Durham, NC, where I tried a cocktail that combined rosemary with two of my other favorite flavors, grapefruit and gin. It was called a Rose Marie and it was awesome.
So last summer, I infused some gin with rosemary, and the one cocktail I made with that was very good. Then I dropped the container on the floor and it shattered (messy, but smelled good!) so to speed up the time it would take to get the rosemary flavor in, I had the idea of doing it as a granita instead. Here’s what I did:
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
2 sprigs rosemary
1/2 cup gin*
3 cups pink grapefruit juice
Simmer the water, sugar, and rosemary together until the syrup is slightly reduced and the rosemary is wilted. Remove the rosemary. Stir in the gin and grapefruit juice. Pour into an 8×8 baking dish and put in the freezer. Stir every 30 minutes for about 4 hours; you’ll end up with a granita that is on the soft side and can easily be scooped into wine glasses. It keeps forever in the freezer; just stir it up again before scooping.
*I think this would work fine without gin if you are a gin-hater or want to feed it to precociously-foodie children; adding additional sugar should keep it from freezing too firmly. By my calculation it has about 1/2 oz gin per half-cup serving.
I’m looking forward to making another batch once I have some rosemary! I have also recently been told that three more of my favorite tastes, lime, ginger, and maple syrup, taste great together. That was in the context of a main-dish recipe, but now I’m thinking granita…