Here, in honor of ice cream season, are two pieces of ice cream trivia for you:
- The first ice cream parlor opened in 1776 in NYC.
- 98% of all US household’s buy ice cream each year.
98! isn’t that amazing? My mom was a serious ice cream nut. A day was not complete without a bowl of ice cream. She liked those boozy Baskin Robbins’ flavors like, Apricot Brandy, Daiquiri Ice, and Rum Raisin. Grandma always had simpler stuff, one of those rectangular boxes of Neapolitan in the freezer. Remember that? One stripe each of chocolate, vanilla and strawberry, like ice cream for those who can’t commit to a whole carton of a single flavor. I remember carefully scooping out all the chocolate one time, to her dismay.
I admit I am a chocolate fan rather than an ice cream fan, so even in ice cream I tend toward flavors like mud slide and triple chocolate brownie. I tend to skip the dairy altogether and go straight to the Trader Joe’s Bittersweet with Almonds. Unless we are camping in Tillamook, where the high point of every day is going to the dairy for ice cream.
For non-dairy folk, check out the Yonanas machine. I have one and it is really a fun thing. It takes frozen bananas and makes soft serve out of them. I know you are going to tell me your Vitamix does that but no, the Vitamix doesn’t do that, it makes smoothies. The texture is totally different. Come on over, try them both and see! Anyway, I had a bowl of yonanas with chocolate chips for dinner all last Summer and it was wonderful. Regardless of whatever hype you may hear on the review sites, if you don’t like bananas, you won’t like it – because it tastes like… big surprise here, BANANAS, not ice cream. There are some hysterical reviews on Amazon where people bought the thing thinking it would make frozen bananas taste like vanilla ice cream, but the texture is right so it is a good substitute as long as you aren’t a banana-phobe or something like that.
Inga Duncan Thornell 