As much as I love ice cream, I’ve always been something of a purist when it comes to what I like in it.
If we’re talking soft-serve ice cream, the only allowable additional topping/mix-in is (in my mind) rainbow sprinkles. If we’re talking hard ice cream, we’re talking almonds in chocolate ice cream and chocolate chips in vanilla or vanilla mint. Pretty hard and fast rules that lead to tasty ice cream if you’re okay with very limited choices, which I am.
That said, the idea of putting fruit in ice cream is practically the work of the Devil to me. It’s in this context that I purchased a pint of Cherry Garcia at Hannaford.
Later that night, I took the pint out of the freezer, opened it, and was surprised to see what I thought were brownish swirls of something that looked like butterscotch. I re-read the carton to see if I misread the ingredients and there wasn’t a trace of butterscotch to be found on the outside.
Tentatively, I teaspooned out one of the swirls and was taken back by a tart-ish taste when I was expecting sweet. It dawned on me that the brownish thing was actually one of the cherries; I was expecting them to be red, for some reason.
Initially, I couldn’t decide if I liked the taste but was immediately put off by the somewhat chewy, sort-of slimy consistency of the piece of cherry. I like my toppings/mix-ins to add a crunchy texture to ice cream and not to make it chewy.
I’ve come to believe that one of my issues is that I have difficulty judging foods purely on their own terms and I believe this to be a result of my overall lack of good food exposure. When it comes to ice cream, for instance, my pre-conceived notions of what to expect are framed by my experiences with chocolate, vanilla, and mixtures of the two, so when I try something new if it doesn’t immediately conform to those narrow expectations my kneejerk reaction is to be disappointed and to not like what I’m tasting.
Under my old method of doing things I would have concluded my Cherry Garcia experience after the first teaspoon-ful and written off the flavor as a failure. However, in the interests of trying to expand my food comfort zone as well as for this ongoing project I decided to forge ahead with another taste.
Once I had overcome my preconceived notions of what the ice cream would be like a strange thing happened: I realized that it was actually very tasty. That might not sound like a very big deal to most folks, but when you’re practically food phobic it’s a much bigger leap than might be imagined.
In the subsequent spoonfuls, I was surprised to find that there were also chocolate chunks in the mix, which I kind-of recalled reading on the outside of the container but had completely forgotten about.
Just as I was becoming thrilled at the idea of not only having tried something new but also having really liked it as well, my wife walked into the kitchen to see what I was doing.
“Whatcha eating?” she asked.
“Cherry Garcia,” I said triumphantly.
She borrowed my spoon, took a taste, and that was the last I saw of that particular pint.
Cherry Garcia: I tasted, I liked, and I’m going to buy a lot more in the future.
