Recipe of the Month: Melon-Basil Smoothie

August's Recipe of the Month is a first for me. I've had recipes featuring veggies and recipes featuring fruit, savory recipes and sweet ones, salads and soups and main dishes and desserts—but this is the first time I've done a beverage.

First, a little background. This spring, one of Brian's coworkers, who's a much larger-scale gardener than we are, gave him a surplus cinnamon basil plant out of his garden. I'd never heard of cinnamon basil before, but as its name suggests, it's a variety of basil that has a vaguely cinnamon-like flavor and aroma. (According to Mother Earth Living, it's also good for repelling pests such as mosquitoes, but it can't be all that potent, since this is the first year we've grown it and the mosquitoes in our garden are thicker on the ground than ever.) Anyway, we had plenty of space to spare in our garden after finally giving up our attempts to grow Brussels sprouts, and cinnamon basil was reputed to be a beneficial companion for tomatoes, so we willingly set aside a square for it. The plant grew and thrived, and eventually we had to face the question: what do we do with this stuff?

First, we tried some of it in our favorite basil-based recipe, Pasta à la Caprese, but it didn't really work. The cinnamon-like flavor of the basil struck a vaguely discordant note with the tomatoes and garlic, resulting in a dish that was edible, but not fantastic like the original. And based on this experiment, we suspected that simply substituting cinnamon basil for regular basil in other recipes would probably have the same result. The problem, we figured, was that with few exceptions, we use basil in savory dishes and cinnamon in sweet ones, so we didn't have any recipes in our repertoire where the combined flavor of the two would be appropriate.

However, Brian recalled that at the time his coworker gave him the plant, he mentioned that it could be used in an ice cream recipe that was quite unusual and refreshing. So Brian went back to him and got this recipe (which was basically a more detailed version of this one from Food.com) and prepared a half batch of it. He modified it just slightly, substituting a cup of skim milk (which is what we usually have at home) for a cup and a quarter of whole or 2 percent, and upping the heavy cream from 3/4 cup to a full cup to compensate.

The ice cream itself was, as promised, definitely different from anything we'd ever had before; we just weren't really sure whether it was different in a good way. We kept tasting a little spoonful at a time, pensively, trying to decide whether we liked it or not, and we never came to a firm conclusion. We definitely didn't hate it, but we never really fell in love with it either, and the two pint containers we'd filled just sat in the freezer, as we were never quite inspired to dig into them. Eventually, Brian brought one of them in to work and gave it to his coworker who'd given him the plant, by way of a thank-you, but the other nearly-full container just continued to sit.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, one of the booths at our local farmers' market ran a sale on melons: just a dollar each, which is a great deal around here. I picked up a variety I'd never tried before called golden melon, which looks and tastes rather like a honeydew, but with a bright yellow rind. And after trying a piece, it occurred to me that here was a flavor that might actually go rather well with the cinnamon basil ice cream.

It took me a little while to get around to trying the combination, but last weekend, as the last of the melon was at risk of going bad, I mentioned it to Brian, and he whipped out our little Magic Bullet blender (a Freecycle find from seven years back) and mixed some up on the spot. He initially tried it with half a cup of melon chunks to two tablespoons of the ice cream, but after I tasted it, I thought it could use just a touch more ice cream, so he added one more tablespoon and decanted it.

The resulting mixture was, like the ice cream itself, different—but I found myself a little more prepared to come down on the side of calling it different in a good way. The light, sweet honeydew flavor softened the sort of oddly pungent taste of the cinnamon basil, and the combination was curiously refreshing. It isn't something I'd want to make all the time, but it seems like a pleasant chiller for a hot summer day—and, if nothing else, a reasonable way to use up the rest of the ice cream.

It occurred to me that maybe you could even make this into a cocktail if you happened to have a compatible sort of liquor to throw in. Nothing in our liquor cabinet—cheap gin, golden rum, amaretto, creme de menthe—seemed quite appropriate, but I thought if you had something like Midori or other melon liqueur, you could throw a bit of that in, garnish it with a sprig of mint, and call it something like a "Melon-choly Baby." (I actually considered buying a bottle of melon liqueur for this purpose to experiment, but by that time I'd used up all the golden melon, and the farmers' market this weekend didn't have any more. The only melon on offer was cantaloupe, and when I tried a bit of that with the cinnamon basil ice cream, they didn't complement each other well at all.)

At this point, I'm not sure whether I'll be making this again; I guess it depends on whether any more golden melons or honeydews show up at the farmers' market, or at the supermarket for a reasonable price. But my success with it has encouraged me to continue seeking out new uses for the cinnamon basil. For instance, since it went so nicely with fruit in this drink, it occurred to me that perhaps it would work well in the basil vinaigrette for this cucumber-nectarine salad we tried last year—so if we can find a good deal on any nectarines or peaches in the near future, we'll give that a try. And if anyone else happens to know of any other good uses for this unusual herb, please shout them out in the comments below.