Ice Cream

Ice cream is long-standing and honored tradition in the Grant family. My grandpa, Albert, used to eat vanilla ice cream with real maple syrup poured over the top. So you can see that I have no choice but to carry on this tradition.

When it comes to ice cream, I am a firm believer that you cannot have too much chocolate. My husband looks at me askance, but I ignore him, and put Hershey’s syrup on my chocolate ice cream anyway. Although sometimes I mix it up and use Bailey’s Irish Cream instead.

When I was in high school, my family often went for Sunday afternoon drives (after a big lunch and a nap of course.) More often than not we would end up at the Sobrana ice cream parlor where I more often than not devoured a “teremoto” (earthquake) that involved 6 scoops of ice cream and all other kind of nonsense. I only weighed 85 pounds at the time, but I could eat my weight in ice cream. My brother tried to eat one, but only once, and he promptly deposited it all over the front lawn as soon as we got home. Lightweight.

The worst thing is that our kids are now old enough to know the good stuff. If we have Ben & Jerry’s or Haagen Daaz in the house, Meg will do periodic inventory. If she finds out we ate it all, she gives us a good telling off.

Thankfully she’s still too short to reach the chocolate cabinet.

My son’s three favorite flavors of ice cream are vanilla, New York vanilla, and French vanilla.

At Ben & Jerry’s annual Free Ice Cream Day, he will actually cue up to order—you guessed it—vanilla.

He gets this from me. Although I am not as hard core about pure vanilla, I do prefer vanilla based ice creams such as chocolate chip, cookie dough, and cookies and cream.

My wife, on the other hand, prefers (in ascending order) chocolate, chocolate fudge, chocolate fudge brownie, double chocolate fudge brownie, double chocolate fudge brownie chocolate chip, double chocolate fudge brownie chocolate chip covered with (i.e., gasping for air under a reservoir of) chocolate syrup.

For her, ice cream is simply the vehicle to get chocolate into her system. Combine this with coffee flavoring and you’ve got Heather’s preferences pegged. (If there were such a flavor as Choc O’ Latte, she’d have it.)

Did I mention I also like fruit flavors? Lemon Sorbet, Orange Sorbet, Raspberry Sorbet, Fresh Strawberry.

I also enjoy mint chocolate chip. This is the sole deviation Heather will make from her chocolate, um, mud bath.