To say I enjoy ice cream is an understatement.
One of my first jobs as a teenager was in a small hand-made ice cream shop called The Creamery in the town where I went to high school, Goshen, NY. Besides having all their ice cream be hand-made, their other claim to fame was that their ice cream machine dated from the 1890s – with large gears, a giant ice and salt bin, and enough noise and commotion to always bring in a crowd whenever we were making a new batch.
I’ve never had the temperament for service industry jobs, but I was good at following recipes and eventually became the one in charge of making the new batches at night and coming up with new flavors. The place and the job didn’t last very long, but I took away from it a love of both making and eating ice cream.
Only a handful of our wedding presents have lasted this long but the Krupps ice cream maker I begged to put on the registry is still alive and kicking after almost fourteen years. A couple weekends back I started going through my recipe list and realized that for as much as I love ice cream I actually only tend to eat chocolate or vanilla if left to my own devices.
Strange, I thought, but true the more I thought about it.
To address this embarrassing lack of breadth of experience (and because setting arbitrary, often nonsensical goals helps my mind function properly), I’ve decided to purposely try as many strange and varied ice cream flavors as I can in 2010 without completely destroying my diet. Because Putnam County lacks in a great many areas, I realized that I’d have to settle on store-bought ice cream for my experiment so I’ll be going with Ben & Jerry’s since they make quality ice cream and their hippy outlook on things is pleasing to me.
For the purposes of the experiment I won’t be including their plain chocolate and vanilla flavors since I’ve already had both of them by the ton and count Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate as my current flavor of theirs.
Coming next week, the first flavor on deck: Cherry Garcia.
(As an aside, the title of this post is a quote from Voltaire – the crazy old coot.)
