This Week's New Flavors: Lemon Verbena (Dairy) and Chocolate-Mint (Vegan)

I made Lemon Verbena Ice Cream and Chocolate-Mint Vegan Frozen Dessert today. The herbs, pictured at left in the trunk of my car just before I left for the CR&GC this morning, came from both Sandbrook Meadow Farm and my deck garden.

Lemon verbena is probably my favorite scent. It's no wonder it's long been used in perfumes, because aside from its strong lemon aroma, it's got a floral air about it.

Kurt was at the club with me today. (Because I'm not a member, I need a chaperone whenever I work in the kitchen.) He and his 9-year-old grandson, Tristan, both raved about this ice cream. Tristan said it was better than you get at an ice cream parlor. Woot!

The last time Kurt joined me at the club—on a day when I made Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream—we talked a lot about herbs. Today, he brought me a clump of pineapple mint that I'm going to plant outside as soon as I'm done writing.

The Chocolate-Mint was made in the same way as my Chocolate-Ginger VFD: I steeped my flavoring ingredients (many sprigs of spearmint and peppermint) in a mixture of hemp milk, flax milk, and refined coconut oil. At the end of the process, I added Enjoy Life–brand dark-chocolate and semisweet-chocolate chips to my warm VFD base and stirred until the mixture was smooth. Enjoy Life chocolate chips are free of pretty much everything you could think of that might cause an allergic or autoimmune reaction, including potato and sesame.

Neither of my new frozen desserts is terribly photogenic; one is solid white, and the other is solid brown. But I'm confident you'll find them to be enticing if you give them a taste at the Hunterdon Land Trust Farmers' Market on Sunday.