I felt like a bright, boozy gelato would be a perfect pairing for this bright, breezy romcom, so the latest Summer of Scoops installment is limoncello gelato paired with “Fire Island.”

This vegan, gluten-free recipe makes 2 pints or 4-6 “servings.”

Ingredients
1 cup vegan milk
1 11.2-ounce carton vegan creamer
2 shots limoncello
1 teaspoon lemon extract
1 teaspoon xanthan gum

Instructions
Pour the milk, creamer, limoncello, lemon extract and xanthan gum into a blender. (You can skip the limoncello or lemon extract but you need to have at least one to get that lemon flavor to stand out. If you skip the limoncello to avoid booze, I recommend replacing it with a combination of lemon juice and lemon extract.)

Pulse until all of the ingredients are evenly mixed.

What happens next depends on your ice cream maker. If you have a more standard one, you’ll pull your chilled (for 24 hours) bowl out and pour in the mixture to make the gelato.

If you have one like mine, you pour the mixture into two pints then freeze them for 24 hours.

After that time, you put the pint into your ice cream maker and let it do its magic on the gelato setting. Repeat for each pint, doing the respin cycle as needed to achieve the desired consistency. (Find my ice cream 101 tips here.)

Scoop and serve with “Fire Island!” This is also a good one to eat right out of the pint while you watch.

The Easy Route
Know of a brand, store or restaurant that makes vegan limoncello gelato? Please share those details in the comments.

The Pairing
A very loose adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice,” “Fire Island” follows a group of friends seeking love and sex on the titular island during a long summer weekend.

I watched this as soon as it came out on Hulu in 2022 because I was so excited about the possibilities behind a LGBTQ romcom. “Fire Island” wound up being one of my favorite films of the year and one of my favorite modern romcoms.

Plus, it really held up when I rewatched it last weekend! The whole cast is charming, making it an easy comfort watch that I anticipate being in my romcom rotation for years to come.

In addition to writing the script, Joel Kim Booster stars as Noah, a nurse who loves his friends, calling them his family, and isn’t looking for a serious relationship.

Bowen Yang is Howie, Noah’s best friend who is looking for a relationship, lamenting that he hasn’t had a boyfriend and he’s in his thirties.

The rest of their crew includes Luke (Matt Rogers), Keegan (Tomás Matos), Max (Torian Miller) and the one and only Margaret Cho as Erin, their lesbian mom-of-sorts who has a house on the island.

They quickly link up with a group of well-off friends due to Howie’s attraction to Charlie (James Scully), easily the most down-to-earth and adorable member of the well-off crew.

Noah and Will (Conrad Ricamora), one of the other members of the well-off crew, find themselves thrown together in situations beyond their control, finding each other quite infuriating at points. But the sparks between them also hint at sexual and romantic possibilities.

While this sounds like it my be full of trite tropes from the romcom genre, I can assure you it is much more than that and delivers the story with a lot of heart and humor.

This is evident from the very beginning, with the cast singing/humming along to the score for the Searchlight Pictures logo.

If you decide to make limoncello gelato and/or watch “Fire Island,” let us know! Tag us in your Instagram posts & stories, threads, tweets or TikTok videos: @veg_out_recipes