March 25 - Ice Cream Dreams
It was during my senior year of high school and peak stoner years that Phish and Ben & Jerry’s launched Phish food.
Vanilla, chocolate or something else entirely?
Ice cream and I have had some phases over the years. In my childhood I was obsessed with cherry vanilla and went through hardcore maple walnut phase. My husband had never heard of maple walnut ice cream and he insists this is some east coast thing.
Then I went through a sherbert phase. That was brief. It was during a time when I loved creamsicles. As I became more mature, so did my ice cream tastes. Häagen-Dazs vanilla bean and their coffee ice cream we my go to for my middle school years.
It was during my senior year of high school and peak stoner years that Phish and Ben & Jerry’s launched Phish food. Maybe the most goddamn delicious combination of flavors I’d ever come across. Chocolate ice cream with caramel swirls, marshmallow swirls and fudge fish.
I ate it so much, I burned out on it—although it’s not my favorite Ben & Jerry’s flavor anymore. I love Cherry Garcia and also always had Half Baked on hand (Chocolate & Vanilla Ice Creams mixed with Gobs of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough & Fudge Brownies) during my senior year and early twenties.
One year when I was working on the farm, we always had ice cream on hand. Specifically Tillamook which is the fucking creamiest best. Their Chocolate Peanut butter is incredible.
Traveling around the world, particularly in Europe, I became a lemon sorbet connoisseur. I wanted it after every meal. Not sure what that was about, but it was so refreshing after a lot of the heavy food.
These days I don’t have ice cream that often, if ever. When I do it’s from a local place, Rori’s, and they have a lemon curd flavor I love. Also their malt ball flavor smacks.
Okay now I’m craving ice cream and I think I’m going to have to venture out to get some. I miss the good old days of being pregnant when my husband would go for me. Alas.
When I was a kid, my grandfather would take me on a walk to Carvel, where his friend Jasper worked. I was allowed to pick whatever I wanted (always a flying saucer with colorful sprinkles) and life was the kind of pure joy you never experience again.
I remember walking on a stone ledge that fenced in the neighborhood park, feeling like an acrobat scaling impossible heights, licking sprinkles, and enjoying time spent with the sweetest man I would ever, in my entire life, know.
I've also never known ice cream that sweet.
Time skip
Decades later, walking back to my car after an appointment near where my grandparents once lived, I saw the Carvel store. It was open, but I didn't go in. Instead, I walked the old route back to my grandparents' house. Passing the park, I was shocked to see that the ledge I had once scaled had shrunk! It rose barely a foot off the ground.
Of course, it was not the ledge that had shrunk; it was the world and I that had grown. Writing this is a wonderful act of shrinking it back, if only for a moment.
This may be one of the easiest prompts we’ve had yet. Chocolate. All day. Every day. No questions.
Chocolate ice cream has always been my treat of choice. I will take it over bars or cake. This sweet treat in an ice cream form just makes me happy. I prefer the chocolate milkshake and always get one after something happens at the dentist.
Chocolate ice cream is the treat that my mom and I will bond over. Everything just becomes brighter when I have it. Of course, you shouldn’t have this all the time, but every once in a while? I am so happy to indulge in a sweet treat.