I’ve always loved ice cream. I remember making sundaes with my Grandpa with chocolate sauce and spanish peanuts....I think that’s where my love of salt and sweet began. I remember spending the night with my other Grandparents and having ice cream floats while my Grandpa always had his 3 ice cream scoops in a bowl. The essence of summer was neopolitan ice cream, a cone from Dairy Queen, a Drumstick, Breyers Vanilla, or sometimes even a scoop from Baskin Robbins when my best friend was working. Nowadays BR is not quite my thing, I lean more towards small batch locally made ice cream and gelato (except for Haagen Daas Special Reserve Fleur de Sel Caramel!). I had to laugh at myself as I walked up to the ice cream shop counter here in "B." tonight. The sign outside said “42 glaces”, that’s right 42 ice cream flavors! (Yes, made onsite) Bring on the Speculoos and cream! Bring on whatever that flavor is because I’ve never seen that word before! But really, if it’s fruity and/or something sweet mixed with cream can you go wrong?! I may have ended up eating the flavors I wouldn’t be caught dead devouring at home, à la cookies and cream and snickers, but when he flavors are instead Speculoos and Rocher it’s infinitely more acceptable, non?
Then I sat down on a bench to enjoy the view and my dinner. Yep, there’s that sense of victory when you decide to have ice cream for dinner, or cereal, or anything you were raised to believe was not actually a proper dinner. And the 2nd scoop is what makes it a meal, not a snack. Inevitably I’ll be back tomorrow to have 2 more scoops because I just can’t leave that many flavors behind, and because it’s my French lesson in action. I’ve started discreetly writing words and phrases down that I don’t know, and I look them up at the end of the day. I did brave dinner on my own last night, not willing to give up the chance to experience the cuisine here, and had a lovely roasted vegetable tart with pesto, tapenade crusted cod with basmati rice and roasted tomatoes, baba au rhum with rhum raisin ice cream, and some lovely white bordeaux wine. This morning at the market I picked up some fantastic fruits and cheeses, a petit basque cake, and some absolutely magical roasted potatoes that were cooking at the bottom of the duck rotisserie. So I was only hungry enough for 2 scoops of ice cream for dinner tonight, hope you can understand why...
