I Scream Loud

Hi. Have we met? Well then I am sure you know that my favorite food is iced cream. So many people that I have told this to have retorted, "Ice cream is not a food." They expect that my favorite food will be something savory, like pizza or sushi. They want me to name a specific dish like spaghetti alla carbonara. But it doesn't work like that. Food is food and iced cream is iced cream. I don't know whether it's a comfort thing, or a girly thing (not so, because Neil loves iced cream almost as much as I do). I always stem it from the night before I was born. It was a hot summer night (she says it was around midnight on a Thursday) when she just had to have some iced cream. My parents walked around the West Village and she got a cone (because let's be honest, unless there is a valid reason as to why you really cannot handle the logistic of a cone, you really should be eating iced cream (no, those are not typos) off a cone. The next day, yessir, the very next day, I arrived, indignant for more iced cream.

Tasti D-lite is like a cult following here in New York City. Well, rather, you either love it- and when you love it, you really truly love it- or you hate it. Rarely do people simply tolerate it. I love it. When you eat as much as iced cream as me, you have to have some kind of a low fat option, or I would as large as a house. Tasti D-lite is certainly up there. I love homemade ice cream stores; places that make their own ice cream. One of my favorite- if not the best one in the entire world- is Browns, an ice cream mecca in York, Maine. This is a small shack on top of a hill, on a small peninsula that juts out into the ocean. This is where people come far and wide (at least, in the area) to partake in the freshest, creamiest, fruitiest, chocolatiest, more flavorful, bursting with goodness ice cream I've ever had. Unfortunately it's not the easiest thing in the world to go on these Browns pilgrimages, so I have to turn to other devices.

For my housewarming party, I was gifted two iced cream makers. Either this is how well my friends know me, or I just blatantly requested these as gifts. I gave one to my mom (after she blatantly asked me for the spare one and the other, I set to making iced cream as soon as I had time to. My first stop, on Neil's request, was to make Nutella iced cream. I found a recipe on foodnetwork.com (Giada DeLaurentis' recipe) and went at it. Neil came over and announced that mine was more hazlenutty than the one Mom had made at home. I also made a pistachio ice cream, which turned out to be so nutty that it is truly more pistachios than iced cream (which, in this case, is actually okay in my book). From Not Eating Out in New York's blog, I found a great recipe for carrot cake ice cream, which I think I will attempt in the days before we leave for Peru.

The great thing about making iced cream at home is that it does have that great homemade touch that I love about iced cream. The downside is that I have to work for it.