by Kevin Burton
If I say “better late than never” do you say “amen”?
Well in this case, my wife does.
National Ice Cream month was last month, July, not August. That I didn’t squeeze out a participatory post in honor of the occasion is a black mark against my blogging record.
But for Jeannette, an eager consumer of ice cream who comes from a long line of enthusiastic connoisseurs, this perhaps borders on disgrace.
Except that happy as she is to embrace ice cream month she does not acknowledge the need for one. For every month is ice cream month, every week, every day, all day.
I wasn’t completely asleep at the bloggers’ wheel last month. We did start taking notes for an ice cream post, as I will detail later.
Here’s my excuse for the delayed post: It was the preparation for, participation in and recovery from the Beep Baseball World Series in late July, that diverted our attention from the task at hand.
Our Cleveland team pulled off a huge upset, the kind you don’t often see in beep baseball, by beating the Boston Renegades 10-9. They were rated 5th, we 13th.
That feat was worthy of a victorious ice cream-filled celebration. But that was the middle game of our day. We had to play (and we lost0 a third game. So we stopped thinking ice cream and started thinking showers.
Ice Cream Day, came and went on July 21. I gave myself liberty to do the post any time during the month, but alas, couldn’t even pull that off.
Jeannette says she likes all my blogs but that that the ice cream one was “a blog I can sink my teeth into.”
As for the former, it’s not possible that she likes all my blogs. I don’t even like all my blogs.
As for the latter, we shall sink our literal and literary teeth into said ice cream yet.
But first, a diversion into…Great Moments In Family Ice Cream History!
At a gathering in Colorado of my wife’s extended family, maybe 15-18 souls in total, we descended en masse upon an ice cream emporium attached to a local restaurant.
This store had approximately 25 tubs of ice cream. So much variety, those mostly pastel colors beckoning, your favorite, or two or three favorites, were bound to be there. Everyone in the travelling party selected a two-scoop cone.
Then our eyes went to granddaughter Willow. Could she hold up her end of the bargain? Though only about five at the time, she knocked her two scoops down just like the rest of us.
And these were generous scoops. Jeannette’s pride in Willow was exceeded only by her zeal to finish her own double cone.
Great Moments In Family Ice Cream History II!
I once took Jeannette to Columbus to attend my class reunion at the Ohio State School for the Blind. Our presence in Ohio’s capital city gave us access to Graeters, the best ice cream ever produced by human beings. (We have since found one in South Dakota that is almost as good.) Even though it isn’t spelled just right, Graeters is great.
I ordered a double scoop of mint chip in a bowl, then awaited my beautiful green treat. But the vendors proceeded to bring me an off-white, pale yellowish dessert.
Seems the green part of mint chip is only food coloring that drives up the price for both vendor and customers. The minty goodness comes from other sources.
But would my mind allow me to tase mint without seeing green? Absolutely!
We should have embarked on extensive testing of green mint chip vs. white mint chip that weekend to get to the bottom of things. Oversight.
As the days passed last month, my ice cream post intentions melted under the heat of competing obligations. I decided to drop the idea. Not every idea goes from concept to completion. There would be another ice cream month next year.
But in researching something else, I learned that the official state food for Missouri, the state where we attended the beepball world series, is the ice cream cone.
And I sighed.
So….here’s our ice cream research to date. Rating is on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being we wasted our money and calories, 5 being Graeters.
Our first foray into ice cream month was at Braum’s. Jeannette inexplicably chose birthday cake ice cream and rated it a 2. I wanted coffee but all they had was something called Capuchino Chunk, which sounds sort of similar but is not. I gave it 3.5 out of five because of the chunk part.
I will never order capuchino with breakfast when honest-to-God dark roast is available. I should have known capuchino ice cream wouldn’t measure up.
Our second ice cream stop was at a Stuckey’s in Missouri. We stopped there while we took the long way to the world series.
Our ratings were threes, me for my chocolate chip, Jeannette for her rocky road. The ice cream mirrored our overall Stuckey’s experience, which didn’t measure up to the wonders of childhood visits.
Didn’t stop us from buying matching Stuckey’s T-shirts though!
Finally, last Sunday we visited Lil’ Deuce Scoop, a small family-owned shop in our hometown. Jeannette rated her mint explosion a 4.75. I ordered vanilla and rated it 3.75. Vanilla should not be a synonym for bland, certainly not based on my dessert.
The mint chip option Jeannette liked so well is something I would normally get. But the names of the deserts were too cutesy and I thought vanilla would be safe.
Well that’s the scoop on ice cream month. It’s the end of the post but surely not the ice cream. I can see us getting ice cream for my birthday, which is coming up, but we won’t necessarily wait for a special occasion.
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