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A few weeks ago, at a charity fund-raising sale put on by some local fraternal order (Eagles? Elks? Egrets?) I picked up a used ice cream maker. So, when Mom of Mother’s Kitchen announced that this month’s Spice Rack Challenge would be coriander, I wondered: are there any recipes out there for coriander ice cream? Turns out there are, and the one I picked to try was Coriander-Lime with Rhubarb Swirl (kudos due to the folks over at Burp!), just because it sounded like the most interesting of the bunch. Did you know coriander is said to have a slight lemon-y taste to it? I hadn’t really noted it before, but I can testify that however you care to describe it, it works fantastically well with both lime and rhubarb. (Both the ice cream itself and the rhubarb sauce include it, so the flavor of coriander doesn’t get buried by the other ingredients.) Unfortunately, given that this was my rookie attempt at making ice cream, I missed the window during which I was supposed to add the swirl to the ice cream, so my finished product wasn’t quite as pretty, but both David and I were still quite happy with the results. Funny thing is, I was kind of skeptical of how well the rhubarb sauce would go with the ice cream (maybe my sub-conscious sabotaged the swirl?), but after trying it I really don’t think the ice cream all by itself would have been nearly as good.

In the future, I think the only thing I might change is to steep the cream with whole coriander seeds, not ground coriander–the ice cream turned out ever so slightly grainy-textured, which might also have been due to the artificial sweetener I used, but I thought it was kind of strange for the recipe to call for steeping with a ground spice. Still, none of that ice cream is going to go to waste!