If I haven't been writing about ice cream as much here, it's because I've reached a point where there doesn't seem like so much new stuff out there to discover. When I was a single girl, it always seemed like there were way more new flavors being produced than I ever had time to try. But now that there are three of us here, it seems like we go through the flavors three times as fast and now we can say that we've tried just about everything that interests us. It doesn't help that there are many brands and subbrands that I've sworn off because they contain propylene glycol: Edy's Fun Flavors, Turkey Hill Light, and Breyer's Blasts, for instance.
But in recent weeks, Breyer's ice cream has been on sale at our local Kroger. As I mentioned above, I'm avoiding all the Blasts flavors because of the propylene glycol, which leaves us with the all-natural flavors. I can tell from their website that there are a ton of these still being produced, but our local store only stocks a few of them, and what we find ourselves buying most often are plain old chocolate and vanilla. We've found the chocolate to be wonderful, and the vanilla...
Well, the vanilla is more complicated than it would seem at first glance, since Breyer's has not one, not two, but four different kinds of vanilla. We've tried two of these so far. Natural vanilla seems to be the baseline flavor, and it is a very strong, light-bodied vanilla with visible flecks of vanilla bean. I love this ice cream but can only eat it by itself, as it seems a waste to put chocolate sauce or other toppings on it. Not to fear, though. The other variety we've tried, homemade vanilla, is a much more traditional, denser type of vanilla with a less prominent vanilla taste. This kind is fine by itself but even better with chocolate sauce or served with a la mode desserts.
We are so taken with these two varieties that it's hard to find an excuse to even try the other two, French vanilla and extra-creamy vanilla. However, in the interest of journalistic integrity I may eventually be induced to do so!
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Reader, I married him
Apologies for the late notice in posting the news here, but on April 7th my barely-remembered dreams came true and I finally married my sweetheart. I feel like an honest woman!
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
The return of ice cream posts
I'm going to talk about ice cream some more just because I can. It's been about six months since I did so last, and we go through the flavors way faster now that there are three of us, so this may be a very long post.
Deluxe: We've continued to make some good finds in this range, which we buy a lot now that the prices of most name brands have gone up a lot. A flavor that my stepson loves is Triple Brownie. I find it a little bit artificial tasting for my liking, but it does have a lot of chocolate in it, and who can argue with that? Better, in my opinion, is Death by Chocolate. It has small brownie pieces and also a few nuts, but not too many. One flavor we got and all hated was Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. It tasted extremely of chemicals and was just horrible.
I also tried Deluxe's holiday line of flavors this year. I didn't like Pumpkin Pie, as the spice balance was all off. Peppermint tasted wonderful, but had one problem: the peppermint pieces were huge and impossible to bite through while frozen. I ended up spitting them out as I came across them until the bottom of my bowl was filled with what looked like aquarium gravel. The one flavor I found to be perfect was Eggnog, which was much better somehow than the actual Kroger eggnog I bought.
Turkey Hill: We've also been buying this brand a lot when it's on sale. Their Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough is really good, and you can actually taste the brown sugar in it. Another big favorite of ours is Lady Liberty Mint, which started out as a limited edition flavor but now looks like it might be here to stay. It's a very strong mint ice cream with the same chocolate cookie stripe that you find in Double Dunker. It's to die for!
A limited edition flavor that I'd always avoided and now wish I hadn't is Box of Chocolates. I'd thought that it would be filled with huge hard pieces of candy, but the pieces are actually tiny and blend in very well with the ice cream. I remember seeing this in stores around Valentine's Day before, so let's hope it makes an appearance again this year. Another limited edition flavor that the men here liked more than I did was Whoopie Pie.
We also just tried Cookies 'n Cream and it was exactly what you'd expect. Nothing stood out about it, but it was perfectly fine.
A disappointment we had recently was to buy a box of Coconut Almond Fudge, one of the flavors available only as light ice cream. It tasted of chemicals, and I was quite surprised to see that it contained my archenemy propylene glycol. Looking at the ingredient lists on their website, it seems that all their light flavors now contain this additive. Let's hope it doesn't migrate over to the full-fat versions any time soon.
Deluxe: We've continued to make some good finds in this range, which we buy a lot now that the prices of most name brands have gone up a lot. A flavor that my stepson loves is Triple Brownie. I find it a little bit artificial tasting for my liking, but it does have a lot of chocolate in it, and who can argue with that? Better, in my opinion, is Death by Chocolate. It has small brownie pieces and also a few nuts, but not too many. One flavor we got and all hated was Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. It tasted extremely of chemicals and was just horrible.
I also tried Deluxe's holiday line of flavors this year. I didn't like Pumpkin Pie, as the spice balance was all off. Peppermint tasted wonderful, but had one problem: the peppermint pieces were huge and impossible to bite through while frozen. I ended up spitting them out as I came across them until the bottom of my bowl was filled with what looked like aquarium gravel. The one flavor I found to be perfect was Eggnog, which was much better somehow than the actual Kroger eggnog I bought.
Turkey Hill: We've also been buying this brand a lot when it's on sale. Their Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough is really good, and you can actually taste the brown sugar in it. Another big favorite of ours is Lady Liberty Mint, which started out as a limited edition flavor but now looks like it might be here to stay. It's a very strong mint ice cream with the same chocolate cookie stripe that you find in Double Dunker. It's to die for!
A limited edition flavor that I'd always avoided and now wish I hadn't is Box of Chocolates. I'd thought that it would be filled with huge hard pieces of candy, but the pieces are actually tiny and blend in very well with the ice cream. I remember seeing this in stores around Valentine's Day before, so let's hope it makes an appearance again this year. Another limited edition flavor that the men here liked more than I did was Whoopie Pie.
We also just tried Cookies 'n Cream and it was exactly what you'd expect. Nothing stood out about it, but it was perfectly fine.
A disappointment we had recently was to buy a box of Coconut Almond Fudge, one of the flavors available only as light ice cream. It tasted of chemicals, and I was quite surprised to see that it contained my archenemy propylene glycol. Looking at the ingredient lists on their website, it seems that all their light flavors now contain this additive. Let's hope it doesn't migrate over to the full-fat versions any time soon.
Friday, February 3, 2012
I'm coming out
It's come to my attention that, improbably, there are still a few people out there visiting this neglected corner of the blogosphere. Once I figured that out, I thought that I should probably put some kind of an update here to tell you what's been going on with me since I've been AWOL.
So here goes: I fell in love and moved to West Virginia, leaving the library world behind me in the process. I also acquired a couple of step-children in the deal, one who lives with us full time and one who just visits occasionally. I've had some poems published, most recently in a journal that some people have actually heard of (but probably not you). I should be pretty happy and crowing about all this to the world, and there's only one reason why I've crawled into my shell and hidden instead: I'm not actually married. Hopefully one day my beloved's long, torturous divorce, worthy of a Hollywood celebrity in the 1950's, will wend its way through the court system, but until it does, I am not only living with someone I'm not married to, but living with someone who is, in fact, legally married to someone else. I guess if I was a different kind of person I would shrug it off or take pleasure in the fact that I am a scarlet woman, but instead I have just been hiding, waiting for the situation to improve. I guess I finally got tired of waiting, so here I am, telling the truth at last.
So here goes: I fell in love and moved to West Virginia, leaving the library world behind me in the process. I also acquired a couple of step-children in the deal, one who lives with us full time and one who just visits occasionally. I've had some poems published, most recently in a journal that some people have actually heard of (but probably not you). I should be pretty happy and crowing about all this to the world, and there's only one reason why I've crawled into my shell and hidden instead: I'm not actually married. Hopefully one day my beloved's long, torturous divorce, worthy of a Hollywood celebrity in the 1950's, will wend its way through the court system, but until it does, I am not only living with someone I'm not married to, but living with someone who is, in fact, legally married to someone else. I guess if I was a different kind of person I would shrug it off or take pleasure in the fact that I am a scarlet woman, but instead I have just been hiding, waiting for the situation to improve. I guess I finally got tired of waiting, so here I am, telling the truth at last.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Monday, July 11, 2011
Ice cream catch up (not ice cream and ketchup!)
It's been a long time since I talked about ice cream here, but I wanted to record some of my thoughts, if only for my own record keeping purposes. Just as I did in the beginning, this is going to be a catch-up post that gives my strong impressions on various flavors as they come into my head. I think I'll go brand-by-brand to make things easy on myself.
Turkey Hill: I have an all-time new favorite ice cream flavor-- Turkey Hill's Double Dunker. It's coffee ice cream with crumbled-up bits of chocolate chip and Oreo cookies, along with a chocolate cookie stripe. I'm usually only so-so about coffee ice cream flavors, but this is divine, and stripe is especially addictive.
Deluxe: I told you I'd never had a good batch of Deluxe ice cream, but we finally found a flavor we love: chocolate cookie crumble. It consists of chocolate ice cream with a chocolate cookie stripe much like the one that Turkey Hill uses in Double Dunker. It's definitely the best thing I've ever had from Deluxe.
Edy's : I broke my rule of never buying Edy's ice cream because I found a flavor actually available in the old Grand line instead of the new Fun Flavors one: rocky road. I found out after I got it home and did some research that Edy's is the originator of this flavor, and then my expectations were even higher. Unfortunately, I didn't like it at all. There were too many nuts for me, and the texture of the marshmallows was very strange. The others who live in my household felt the same way, and we actually argued over who had to eat it whenever we had ice cream!
I also tried a couple more flavors of Edy's frozen yogurt. Strawberry was so-so, and I wouldn't buy it again. I see now that it has been discontinued, and it doesn't really surprise me. Chocolate fudge brownie was actually pretty good, and cookies and cream was also something I could live with.
Breyer's: Recently I was hankering for neopolitan, and since Breyer's was on sale I got their vanilla, chocolate, strawberry. (Why not just call it neopolitan? It would be much easier to type!) I know I've said in the past that Breyer's is good no matter what the flavor, but sadly, this was a miss for me. All the flavors seemed extremely weak, especially the strawberry. I think I won't buy this in the future.
A flavor we had more luck with was waffle cone. It has vanilla ice cream with pieces of chocolate-covered waffle cone, a caramel ribbon, and mini chocolate chips. I thought it was merely acceptable, finding the caramel to taste a little bit burnt and the whole product too sweet, but my fiance really liked it. (I notice now when looking at the ingredients that it also contains the dreaded propylene glycol. Breyer's, I'm surprised at you. Grrr!)
Blue Bunny: Since I hardly ever go to Wal-mart, it had been a long time since I'd had any Blue Bunny ice cream, but I got a great flavor recently: double strawberry. It has huge chunks of great-tasting strawberries and a nice flavor overall. We'll definitely be getting this one again.
Turkey Hill: I have an all-time new favorite ice cream flavor-- Turkey Hill's Double Dunker. It's coffee ice cream with crumbled-up bits of chocolate chip and Oreo cookies, along with a chocolate cookie stripe. I'm usually only so-so about coffee ice cream flavors, but this is divine, and stripe is especially addictive.
Deluxe: I told you I'd never had a good batch of Deluxe ice cream, but we finally found a flavor we love: chocolate cookie crumble. It consists of chocolate ice cream with a chocolate cookie stripe much like the one that Turkey Hill uses in Double Dunker. It's definitely the best thing I've ever had from Deluxe.
Edy's : I broke my rule of never buying Edy's ice cream because I found a flavor actually available in the old Grand line instead of the new Fun Flavors one: rocky road. I found out after I got it home and did some research that Edy's is the originator of this flavor, and then my expectations were even higher. Unfortunately, I didn't like it at all. There were too many nuts for me, and the texture of the marshmallows was very strange. The others who live in my household felt the same way, and we actually argued over who had to eat it whenever we had ice cream!
I also tried a couple more flavors of Edy's frozen yogurt. Strawberry was so-so, and I wouldn't buy it again. I see now that it has been discontinued, and it doesn't really surprise me. Chocolate fudge brownie was actually pretty good, and cookies and cream was also something I could live with.
Breyer's: Recently I was hankering for neopolitan, and since Breyer's was on sale I got their vanilla, chocolate, strawberry. (Why not just call it neopolitan? It would be much easier to type!) I know I've said in the past that Breyer's is good no matter what the flavor, but sadly, this was a miss for me. All the flavors seemed extremely weak, especially the strawberry. I think I won't buy this in the future.
A flavor we had more luck with was waffle cone. It has vanilla ice cream with pieces of chocolate-covered waffle cone, a caramel ribbon, and mini chocolate chips. I thought it was merely acceptable, finding the caramel to taste a little bit burnt and the whole product too sweet, but my fiance really liked it. (I notice now when looking at the ingredients that it also contains the dreaded propylene glycol. Breyer's, I'm surprised at you. Grrr!)
Blue Bunny: Since I hardly ever go to Wal-mart, it had been a long time since I'd had any Blue Bunny ice cream, but I got a great flavor recently: double strawberry. It has huge chunks of great-tasting strawberries and a nice flavor overall. We'll definitely be getting this one again.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Fall 2011 preview
Last week was the 2011 Upfronts, and the excitement of hearing about all the new TV shows for next season was enough to bring me out of my long silence! As usual, I'll tell you my picks for each time period of the week.
Monday
8:00-- We've been waiting a whole year for Fox's sci-fi show Terra Nova, and here's hoping it'll be worth the wait. In case you've been living under a rock and haven't read any of the numerous articles about it, it's about people from the near future who travel back in time to colonize the past-- Earth at the time of the dinosaurs. It'll either be fabulous or horrible; we'll have to wait and see to find out which one.
9:00-- A new show in this time period is Hart of Dixie, in which a doctor from New York sets up practice in a small town in Alabama. Of course this premise has been done a million times before, but it's exactly the kind of thing I've liked, so I'm willing to go along for the ride again.
10:00-- Castle returns in this time slot. Also, a new show I'm dying to see is The Playboy Club, which takes us back to the swinging '60's. I'm not totally convinced I'll love it from the previews, but I'm tantalized enough to know I have to give it a try.
Tuesday
8:00-- Glee, of course!
9:00-- The New Girl stars Zooey Deschanel and looks cute and quirky. After that at 9:30 I'll be watching Raising Hope, which turned out to be a much better show than I gave it credit for last year. There's also a possibility that I'll tune in to Ringer, starring Sarah Michelle Geller as twins who are both on the run from the bad guys. I'm not entirely sure it's my cup of tea, but since I like the actress I may feel compelled to give it a try.
10:00-- Body of Proof turned out to be much better than I expected, given that ABC held it until the very end of the season. I'm glad to see it'll be returning for another year. There's also a somewhat generic-looking new procedural on CBS called Unforgettable. The hook here is a detective who has perfect recall. I'm not convinced, but it's been getting a lot of buzz.
Wednesday
8:00-- I'll be watching The Middle. I'm also somewhat curious about Up All Night, starring Christina Applegate and Will Arnett as the parents of a newborn.
8:30-- Two new shows in this slot, and I can't decide which one to be more excited about. Suburgatory is about a father and daughter who move from the big city to the suburbs, while Free Agents is an office romance about people who work in a talent agency.
9:00-- Modern Family.
Thursday
8:00-- Vampire Diaries.
9:00-- Secret Circle is sort of a companion show to the above about teen witches.
Friday
8:00-- Chuck. Also getting a lot of buzz in this hour is A Gifted Man, about a man who can communicate with the ghost of his dead wife. I didn't expect to like it, but the preview drew me in.
9:00-- Fringe.
Sunday
8:00-- Once Upon a Time is the story of a woman who moves to a town where all the locals have alternate identities as fairy tale characters. It sounds intriguing.
9:00-- The Good Wife has been moved to this slot, somewhat of a problem because CBS always has long football overruns on Sunday nights. I guess I'll be watching this one live at a different time every week. Oh well, at least I won't have to get up for work on Monday morning!
10:00-- Pan Am is another show that takes us back to the swinging sixties, but this time with stewardesses. I preferred this one in the previews.
Monday
8:00-- We've been waiting a whole year for Fox's sci-fi show Terra Nova, and here's hoping it'll be worth the wait. In case you've been living under a rock and haven't read any of the numerous articles about it, it's about people from the near future who travel back in time to colonize the past-- Earth at the time of the dinosaurs. It'll either be fabulous or horrible; we'll have to wait and see to find out which one.
9:00-- A new show in this time period is Hart of Dixie, in which a doctor from New York sets up practice in a small town in Alabama. Of course this premise has been done a million times before, but it's exactly the kind of thing I've liked, so I'm willing to go along for the ride again.
10:00-- Castle returns in this time slot. Also, a new show I'm dying to see is The Playboy Club, which takes us back to the swinging '60's. I'm not totally convinced I'll love it from the previews, but I'm tantalized enough to know I have to give it a try.
Tuesday
8:00-- Glee, of course!
9:00-- The New Girl stars Zooey Deschanel and looks cute and quirky. After that at 9:30 I'll be watching Raising Hope, which turned out to be a much better show than I gave it credit for last year. There's also a possibility that I'll tune in to Ringer, starring Sarah Michelle Geller as twins who are both on the run from the bad guys. I'm not entirely sure it's my cup of tea, but since I like the actress I may feel compelled to give it a try.
10:00-- Body of Proof turned out to be much better than I expected, given that ABC held it until the very end of the season. I'm glad to see it'll be returning for another year. There's also a somewhat generic-looking new procedural on CBS called Unforgettable. The hook here is a detective who has perfect recall. I'm not convinced, but it's been getting a lot of buzz.
Wednesday
8:00-- I'll be watching The Middle. I'm also somewhat curious about Up All Night, starring Christina Applegate and Will Arnett as the parents of a newborn.
8:30-- Two new shows in this slot, and I can't decide which one to be more excited about. Suburgatory is about a father and daughter who move from the big city to the suburbs, while Free Agents is an office romance about people who work in a talent agency.
9:00-- Modern Family.
9:30-- A new show in this slot is I Hate My Teenage Daughter. I didn't think much of it from the previews, but may give it a try the first week or two.
10:00-- Revenge is a show about a girl who returns to her wealthy hometown to get vengeance on the people who ruined her family in the past. It looks fairly turgid; I'll be watching solely because of my love for Emily van Camp.
Thursday
8:00-- Vampire Diaries.
9:00-- Secret Circle is sort of a companion show to the above about teen witches.
Friday
8:00-- Chuck. Also getting a lot of buzz in this hour is A Gifted Man, about a man who can communicate with the ghost of his dead wife. I didn't expect to like it, but the preview drew me in.
9:00-- Fringe.
Sunday
8:00-- Once Upon a Time is the story of a woman who moves to a town where all the locals have alternate identities as fairy tale characters. It sounds intriguing.
9:00-- The Good Wife has been moved to this slot, somewhat of a problem because CBS always has long football overruns on Sunday nights. I guess I'll be watching this one live at a different time every week. Oh well, at least I won't have to get up for work on Monday morning!
10:00-- Pan Am is another show that takes us back to the swinging sixties, but this time with stewardesses. I preferred this one in the previews.
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