Pudge and I outside Selborne Sweets

When I was 21, I went to Italy for the first time with my friend, Connie. At one point during the trip, we walked into a gelato shop near the Piazza Navona in Rome. The man behind the counter—seeing two young American tourists high on Italian charm and architecture—asked us if we wanted the Around The World. We said we did. And he commenced packing 21 gelato flavors on top of a single cone.

I was in love … with water, sugar and pure flavors.

A few years later, I fell in love again—with Steve … and the lemon sorbet I had on our first trip to Italy as a couple. I had daydreams about having a latte and lemon sorbet every day.

The latte daydream became a reality when the Blue Eyed Daisy opened across the street from our house a few years ago. I walk over every day and have one. Okay, actually two. I even take my own cup. And when Selborne Sweets opened just a few feet from my house recently, part two of the daydream became a reality.

In addition to homemade fudge, chocolate dipped strawberries and ridiculously addictive caramel corn, Selborne Sweets carries High Road craft ice creams and sorbets made locally. They have a limoncello flavor that takes me right back to Italy.

I may have to start showing up with my own cup.

Come have a cone or cup of the world’s most perfect summertime refreshment soon. And if you have daydreams like mine, here’s a recipe for lemon granita to fill in the gaps between trips to Selborne Sweets—it’s a quick, easy fix and doesn’t require a machine. I used a version of it years ago in my dinner series class at FSU and love the crystals in it. Serve it in frozen lemons for the intermezzo course.

Lemon Granita

Courtesy of Gourmet magazine

Makes about 2 ½ cups

2-3 large lemons

1 cup filtered or bottled still water (not distilled)

1/3 cup superfine granulated sugar

With a vegetable peeler, remove zest in long pieces from 2 lemons. Squeeze ½ cup juice from lemons.

In a small, heavy saucepan, heat water and sugar, stirring until sugar is dissolved. Stir in zest and transfer syrup to a bowl to cool. Chill syrup, covered, until cold. Discard zest and stir in lemon juice.

Freeze lemon mixture in a metal bowl, stirring every 30 minutes to remove ice crystals from side of bowl, until liquid has become granular but is still slightly slushy, about 3 to 4 hours. Serve immediately.

Image courtesy of the Atlanta Botanical Gardens

The good news: For the third year in a row, the Atlanta Botanical Garden asked me to participate in their Well-Seasoned Chef Series, a four-part cooking class in their edible garden outdoor kitchen.

The bad news: I tend to talk too much at these things and forget that people want to eat.

Still, the premise of the class was fantastic: how to make dinner for 30 people and have almost everything done ahead of time. I showed them skills and gave them recipes but I also peppered in some entertaining advice along the way:

Lesson #1 — Be willing to experiment on people

Sure, you can make the same thing you’ve always made the same way you’ve always made it, but where’s the fun in that? If you make something and it doesn’t work out, it’s not the end of the world. Your food does not have to be perfect. It’s your home, not a restaurant, so relax.

I started with pecan crackers topped with Many Fold Farms brebis cheese and Serenbe fig jam, which are so beautiful and simple. Then I did herb salad with orange balsamic vinaigrette, which brings me to my next two lessons:

Lesson #2 — Homemade vinaigrettes are easy

Oil, vinegar and some sort of sweet or savory element. Salt and pepper. You may never buy another $8 pre-made bottle again.

Lesson #3 — Never plate food at home

Restaurants serve individual plates of food, but at home I always serve buffet-style. The quickest way to bury yourself in the kitchen and make sure everyone eats lukewarm foods at different times is to plate it yourself.

After the salad, I made roasted wild salmon with caramelized Vidalia onions, sautéed collard greens with lemon-onion butter and a grits soufflé with arugula and goat cheese, instead of my usual recipe, which includes collards and cheddar (see Lesson #1).

Before the class, I emailed the person in charge and asked if I had any repeat attendees because I planned to make the same lemon curd parfait with fresh blueberries and gingersnap cookies that I did last year. Then I got to the farmer’s market, which leads me to the last lesson.

Lesson #4 — Plan your menu and be open to throwing it out the window

As soon as I saw that the first peaches were in, my parfait plan turned into sour cream pound cake with peaches, mint and ginger. Establish a menu, but let the farmers and their fresh produce be your guide. It’s like former president Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “In planning for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensible.”

Sour Cream Pound Cake with Peaches, Mint and Ginger

6-8 peaches

1/2 cup mint leaves, chopped

1/2 cup ginger liqueur

Natural sugar

2 cups heavy cream, whipped

Powdered sugar

1 recipe sour cream pound cake (recipe follows)

Peel and slice peaches. Place in bowl. If not sweet enough, add some natural sugar. Then add mint leaves and ginger liqueur. Let sit for 30 minutes to 1 hour to macerate.

Whip cream in a mixer. Sweeten with powdered sugar and some ginger liqueur. Set aside in refrigerator until ready for use.

Slice pound cake and arrange nicely on a platter. Take macerated peaches and spoon over the cake slices. Let sit for several minutes for the syrup to soak into the cake. May want to sprinkle more liqueur over the slices.

Top with whip cream. Garnish with some mint leaves.

Sour Cream Pound Cake

1 pound butter

2 teaspoons vanilla

¼ teaspoons baking soda

6 eggs

3 cups sugar

1 cup sour cream

3 cups flower

Cream butter and sugar together. Mix baking soda into the sour cream and add the vanilla. Add 1 cup flour and 2 eggs alternately until all is used.

Bake at 325 degrees for 1 hour 15 minutes in a 10-inch tube pan.

For about five years during my childhood, both of my grandmothers lived with my family at the same time. They were very different women who didn’t get along very well. My mother’s mother had a college education—which was unheard of for women in the early 1900s—and became the first female dietician for the Georgia school system. My father’s mother, Granny Lupo, was a very simple country woman who never had a job. They came from different worlds and had to share a bathroom, which made for some very interesting times.

Granny Lupo didn’t have a college education, but she knew her mint. She grew a patch of spearmint in our backyard and made sweet mint tea in the summer. When Steve and I bought the farm, I knew I wanted to have a mint patch for mint tea. I grow a lot of mint and sometimes it’s still not enough to make tea for all the people who ask if they can have some.

“Is it time, Marie?” the regulars at The Farmhouse ask me hopefully.“Is it mint tea season yet?” It’s that good. There aren’t a lot of things I say are perfect or “the best,” but my mint tea is perfect and it’s the best. And the key to making it perfect is forgetting everything you think you know about making iced tea.

Three things:

1. Get bed-raised mint. The stuff you buy in the store tastes dramatically different.
2. Get lots of it. More than you think you need.
3. Pour hot water over the sugar—a regular amount of sugar, people; we’re not making candy here—and the mint. The hot water literally cooks the mint. A lot of people think you can add mint at the end, but it doesn’t get the job done

I crave it. There’s a half-gallon in my fridge right now. My best friend craves it so much that, when she flies in from Maryland for meetings in Atlanta, she calls and says, “Where’s the tea?” And if she doesn’t have enough time to get to Serenbe, I’ll meet her at the airport with a big batch and we’ll just sit in my car and drink it until she has to get on the plane.

Mint Tea

2 quarts water

1/3 cup sugar

8 black tea bags (preferably Lipton)

4 cups fresh mint

Bring water to a boil. Stir in sugar until dissolved.

In a half gallon pitcher or container, place mint and tea bags and pour hot water over this.

Let cool to room temperature. Strain the liquid by squeezing the liquid from the tea bags to achieve maximum flavor.

Add more water, if needed, to make a full half gallon.

Leading up to Atlanta chef/restaurateur Ford Fry’s visit to the Southern Chefs Series earlier this month, I’d get these great texts from him:

I’m thinking of doing squid ink pasta with wood-roasted langoustine, breadcrumbs, chilies and mint. Does that sound good?

Planning to grill 40-ounce porterhouse steaks over a wood fire. Would that be okay?

And every time I’d get one, I’d think, really? Ford Fry is the man behind JCT. Kitchen, No. 246, St. Cecilia, King & Duke, and The Optimist, which was Esquire magazine’s Restaurant of the Year in 2012. Of course it sounds good.

Ford Fry is not hung up on being Ford Fry, despite countless awards and accolades. Every time he’s come to my kitchen, he’s so accessible, so good and just wants to make sure everyone understands what he’s doing, has fun and likes what they’re eating.

My favorite thing Ford made this time was pan con tomate, a traditional Spanish breakfast dish. He took really good bread (from Holeman & Finch), covered them with an entire $30 bottle of olive oil and baked them in the oven. Then he rubbed garlic and fresh tomato on top.

As we head into tomato season, this recipe should be front and center in your kitchen, covered with little splatters of olive oil and tomato seeds.

Pan Con Tomate

Serves 6

6 each 1-inch slices of crusty, rustic bread

1 each super ripe, local tomatoes, cut in half cross-wise

½ cup good extra virgin olive oil

1 clove fresh garlic

Maldon salt to taste

Either pre-heat oven to 450 degrees or heat a wood grill to medium high heat. Brush bread slices generously with olive oil. Season to taste with maldon salt. Grill or oven toast the bread until the edge are almost burned while the center is medium toasted and still chewy.

Rub a garlic clove across the toast softly then rub rip tomatoes over the toast, somewhat smashing the tomato. Serve warm.

Next up: Chef/restaurateur Kevin Gillespie, August 17-18. To register, call The Inn at Serenbe at 770.463.2610.

What are the ingredients in your perfect day? A long, hot bath? A walk in the woods? A   drive down country roads with the windows down and the music up?

I find that the things that make my heart sing haven’t changed much since I was a child. Like most adults, I get caught up in the doing-ness of life and make different choices with the way I spend my time now, but when I need a dose of pure, uncomplicated joy, I make myself a mud pie.

I recently shared my love of mud pies with my friend Miss Janice, whose husband’s family has lived in the Chattahoochee Hill Country for seven generations. She said, “You know, Marie, those mud pies are an early indication of your love of cooking.”

And that makes so much sense to me. At my childhood home, we had a huge, beautiful mimosa tree in our yard with pink flowers and I’d use its funky looking leaves as plates for my mud pies and serve them at pretend meals. Making mud pies gave me the freedom to create. If I put in too much liquid, I learned that my pie wouldn’t hold together well. I was adjusting my own recipes at three years old.

Not every mother lets her children play in the mud, but mine did—and it turned me into a mother who did the same. We put in three pools at different times and houses when my daughters were young and every time the girls wanted to roll around in the mud. I have great pictures of them literally covered in mud and smiling from ear to ear.

Mud is good for you in more ways than one. I recently found a book in my library called Earthing about the health benefits of dirt and the nutrients that come through the soil. Where do plants grow? Where do they get their nutrients? A little dirt in your system can be good for you and your immune system.

No matter what brings you back to that place of child-like joy, make time for it today. Maybe it’s riding your bike and letting go of the handlebars as you ride down a hill. Maybe it’s wading through a cold creek while the tadpoles dart around your toes. And if it’s making mud pies, try this recipe I perfected many backyard pretend picnics ago.

Mud Pies

1 bowl

1 big spoon or small shovel

2 hands

Water as needed

Use big spoon or small shovel to dig up dirt, mix it with water to the consistency you like and make mud pies with your hands.

1 bowl

1 big spoon or small shovel

2 hands

Water as needed

Use the big spoon or small shovel to dig up dirt, mix it with water to the consistency you like and make mud pies with your hands.