ice cream Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Sunday Stealing: ice cream

Who put the rum in the rum raisin?

Sunday Stealing celebrates ice cream.

1. What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?

Of the readily available flavors, I lean towards strawberry—strawberries and sometimes even strawberry syrup on top of strawberry ice cream. If it’s available, I like black raspberry or black sweet cherry. On the next tier are chocolate-infused items: mint chocolate chip and chocolate swirl. I did a quiz in 2010, and I named Orange Pineapple, which I hadn’t eaten in a long time. For soft ice cream, I usually pick a chocolate/vanilla twist.

2. If you could invent a new flavor of ice cream, what would it be?

I don’t think I need to invent a new flavor. Our local Stewarts stores create new short-term flavors, usually during the summer. I’ve tried a few.

3. Who do you like to eat ice cream with?

I like to eat it with children because kids seem to get great joy, which also gives me pleasure.

4. If you were a flavor of ice cream, what flavor would you be?

It has to have more than one word. It couldn’t be vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry; it could be something like Mint Chocolate Chip or Rum Raisin.

5. Does your family eat ice cream regularly, or just for a special treat?

Unfortunately, I can only eat it occasionally. If I ate it as often as I would like, it would be daily, and I’d weigh 500 lbs.

6. What is your favorite treat from the ice cream truck?

I associate ice cream sandwiches with ice cream trucks.

7. Does frozen yogurt taste different than ice cream?

Oh goodness, yes, they’re not the same at all. According to my taste buds, it’s inferior.

Nostalgia

8. If you could make a super sundae, what would it have?

In college, I used to go to the local shop and have a banana split. It had chocolate ice cream with chocolate sauce, strawberry ice cream with strawberry sauce, vanilla ice cream with pineapple sauce, and whipped cream. I feel like I didn’t need it very often, but the specificity of my recollection suggests that I did have it more frequently.

9. Can ice cream make a bad day better?

It can make a bad day better if it’s good ice cream. When I was growing up, there was this brand called Fro-Joy, which was marginally better than the store brands, which were meh.

10. Have you ever had homemade ice cream?

Yes, I have had it, but I don’t have any strong recollection of when or where. It seemed like it was A) pretty good and B) way more labor-intensive than I wanted to experience. It could have been at an Olin family reunion.

11. When is your favorite time to eat ice cream?

In the afternoon, between lunch and dinner. You don’t want to ruin your dinner, and you don’t want to have it after dinner and feel a little bit bloated.

12. What is the best kind of ice cream you ever had?

It was almost certainly Rum Raisin. I don’t remember the where or the when, but I do remember that it was so rummy that I thought I was going to become drunk. It was tasty but also quite potent.

Depends

13. Do you prefer your ice cream in a cone or in a bowl?

In general, I prefer it in a cone, but I’ve been in situations where it was so hot, and the person serving had many people to serve. I’d try to be polite and wait for them, but mine started melting on my hand, so I had to eat it faster than I wanted. On a scorching day, a bowl might be a better choice, but on a fall or spring day, the cone is probably a fine choice.

14. Is there such a thing as a bad flavor of ice cream?

I don’t think so. I don’t like peanut butter, so I dislike peanut butter ice cream, but it doesn’t make it bad. One flavor tasted like cotton candy, not my cuppa. I’ve had many exotic fruit things in ice cream that I did not enjoy.

15. They say an apple a day keeps the doctor away. What does an ice cream a day do?

Adds a pound this way.

16. Is ice cream better when it’s fresh or slightly melted?

A cone should be fresh; a bowl could be slightly melted.

17. What is the craziest flavor of ice cream you’ve ever seen?

I’ve seen plenty of odd flavors, but the names and descriptions don’t stick to my brain.

Hospital prices online, ice cream, 70

Generally speaking, I like the fruit flavors

change.puzzle In response to Ask Roger Anything, which you can still do, Alexis wrote:

Hospitals required to post all prices online beginning January 1 – Roger – blog post? This is incredible!

As a librarian, I almost always take the position that more information is usually better. I’m not at all sure how this change will work in the real world and private insurance.

I was surprised/disappointed that I managed to miss this news until the multiple stories that came out right after Christmas from the Associated Press. In fact, there was a story on the PBS Newshour on April 24, 2018, which details the policy.

“Hospitals are required to disclose prices publicly, but the latest change would put that information online in a machine-readable format that can be easily processed by computers. It may still prove to be confusing to consumers since standard rates are like list prices and don’t reflect what insurers and government programs pay.

“Patients concerned about their potential out-of-pocket costs from a hospitalization would still be advised to consult with their insurer. Most insurance plans nowadays have an annual limit on how much patients must pay in copays and deductibles — although traditional Medicare does not.”

Friend Anne wants to know:

What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?

That would be strawberry, which is NOT available in half gallons from Stewart’s, the local ice cream emporium with the most locations. You CAN get Neapolitan (vanilla/chocolate/strawberry) or vanilla and strawberry. So it’s my favorite flavor to get on a cone.

Generally speaking, I like the fruit-flavors: black raspberry, cherry vanilla, e.g.

Finally, Uthaclena asked quite a while ago:

What’s with 70? What’s wrong with 58?

This is in relation to the birthdays I note in this blog. Here’s the thing: people have only one 70th birthday. If I do someone’s 58th birthday, and another’s 63rd, I won’t necessarily remember if I wrote about them when I’m thinking of blog topics.

But the big 7-0 is easily retrievable because it’s consistent. I could have picked 80, but more of them would be dead. At 30, it’s way too soon; some folks aren’t noteworthy until later in life.

Mayonnaise and other important topics

I once had something called ice milk, which was disappointing, to say the least.

Dustbury hates mayonnaise, and managed to write a whole blog post about it. I’m not being critical. Rather, I’m impressed that he was able to engender a whole condiment conversation in the comments section. I like mayo well enough, in egg salad or on a BLT. It should be real mayonnaise or perhaps the light (usually written as “lite”) version, whatever that is. But I HATE the low-fat versions.

And worse is that stuff that looks like mayonnaise but is sold as Miracle Whip salad dressing; I can always tell when that’s been substituted. I’m actually not sure WHAT it is, but “Miracle Whip does not meet the minimum requirement of 65% vegetable oil to be labeled as mayonnaise as dictated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.” One of the worst things of my youth: bologna sandwiches on white bread with Miracle Whip.

This is similarly true of yogurt. Regular yogurt’s fine, and there are some decent lite ones, but the no-fat iterations I’ve tried are vile. The strange aftertaste, probably from some toxic chemical compound.

I used to drink 2% milk, then 1% for a long time, but now I have gotten used to skim. But the Daughter has not; she likes the 2%. Her mother once said it tasted like ice cream, and I scowled; surely it is fuller flavor, but it’s hardly ice cream because I know ice cream.

Ice cream is another product where the real thing is great, and the substitutes, not so much. I once had something called ice milk, which was disappointing, to say the least.

What food substitutes are acceptable to you, and which food items just can’t be replaced?

Vanilla ice cream

Was it a pacifier? Was it a message to us that, as long as we obeyed the rules, we could still be occasionally rewarded with just enough to keep us patriotic and loyal?

Things remind me of other things, all but forgotten.

One of the most peculiar items I came across recently was this: Black people were denied vanilla ice cream in the Jim Crow south – except on Independence Day.

The memory of that all-but-unspoken rule seems to be unique to the generation born between World War I and World War II.
But if Maya Angelou hadn’t said it in her classic autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, I doubt anybody would believe it today.
“People in Stamps used to say that the whites in our town were so prejudiced that a Negro couldn’t buy vanilla ice cream. Except on July Fourth. Other days he had to be satisfied with chocolate.”

I’m told that Thomas Jefferson, writer of the document associated with that day, was so addicted to vanilla ice cream that he arranged for vanilla beans to be transported in diplomatic pouches while he was serving in France and their revolution was going on.

Why then this ODD rule? The writer Michael W Twitty wonders:

Was it a pacifier? Was it a message to us that, as long as we obeyed the rules, we could still be occasionally rewarded with just enough to keep us patriotic and loyal?

But perhaps it is pointless to ask for more than context.

That article reminded me of a totally unrelated story, except that it did involve ice cream. Growing up in Binghamton in upstate New York, I was usually the only black kid in my class.

One day in fifth or sixth grade, we were going to get ice cream that came in these little paper cups. We used wooden spoons to eat it. I was out of the room when the voting on the decision on flavors – vanilla or chocolate, was being made.

When I came back to the classroom, I was asked what I wanted, and I said “Vanilla.” The whole class moaned; EVERYBODY else, probably 15 white kids, had picked chocolate. They were disappointed that it had not been a unanimous choice. But I didn’t particularly LIKE that brand of chocolate, as I thought it tasted chalky.

I wondered if chocolate had been a consensus choice, with the kids who thought “I don’t care” going along with the majority. In any case, this made me feel really uncomfortable because it made me feel different when, for the most part, I felt like one of the group. Don’t think it was specifically racial, probably not in their minds, though it may have rattled a bit in mine.

But the earlier story above made my choice of 50 years ago, somehow, a little more OK.

Stewarts has that full-value thing going

If one goes to the various Stewarts shops in the greater Albany area – there are approximately one billion of them – you cannot but notice that the price of their ice cream, which they make, has been creeping up. You don’t even need to actually BUY the ice cream there, the displays are so prominent. The sale price has crept up from $2.39 in the recent past, then rising, usually in 20-cent increments, until it’s now $3.19. I suspect, from personal experience, that Stewarts has experienced some price resistance as a result.

So Stewarts has gone on the offensive. Signs in the stores in recent weeks have noted that the ice cream might be $3.19, but it’s $3.19 for a FULL half gallon. Other ice cream producers may have held the line on their price, but they have instead shrunk the package size to a quart and a half. Thus, Stewart’s $3.19 is equivalent to their $2.39.

I think it’s an effective strategy because it’s honest. Whereas, the shrinkage of the packaging, not just in ice cream, but in tomato sauce, tuna fish, cereal, and loads of other products, smacks of deceit.

I was in a Stewarts in Canton, NY recently, and there were ongoing videos of Tom Mailey explaining the quality of Stewarts’ products – when did Tom Mailey grow a beard? Also, Flavor the cow was explaining how to play the various lottery games – the cow’s name is Flavor? And it left me satisfied that Stewarts is trying to play fair, while some of the other food makers are not.