We had a small party last month…a small party. My husband was running to the store to pick up a few things, and I asked him to grab a half gallon of ice cream or two.
I should mention, at this point, that my husband is wonderful about grocery shopping. Though we both prefer to go together, if he ends up doing the shopping, he gets the best stuff! One of our favorite grocery stops is a nearby grocery outlet with the expected deals, on food that’s perfectly fine (we often wonder why it’s there!). This time ‘round, I was folding laundry when he got home from the store. He started unpacking and mentioned, off hand, that he couldn’t decide which ice cream to get, so he didn’t. While he was talking, he started pulling ice cream out of the bags—not one, not two, but six half gallons of ice cream!
As always, he had made excellent selections, and especially at the price he paid, I certainly wasn’t about to criticize! We had plenty of ice cream for the—did I mention?—small party, and we’re still enjoying the results of his shopping adventure. With all the ice cream in our chest freezer, my guess is that we’re going to be eating ice cream for a while, even when it does get cold outside. We’ve gotten a little bit adventurous in our ice cream experiments, but our favorite standby is baking individual brownies (love the fat free “No Pudge” brownie mixes!—make individual brownies with a couple tablespoons of mix and a tablespoon of yogurt…stir ‘til shiny and microwave for 1 minute—it just doesn’t get any easier than that!) in custard dishes or cappuccino cups, then topping the still-hot brownies with ice cream and chocolate syrup, sometimes with a whipped cream garnish.
Thankfully, although we have lots of ice cream, there’s lots of variety, with only one exception. Among his selections were two half gallons of the same flavor, one of the Edy’ Girl Scouts ice cream series—Thin Mint. It’s chocolate ice cream with a generous sprinkling of pieces of the Girl Scouts Thin Mint cookies. Although I generally don’t buy Girl Scouts cookies, this ice cream sure is good! We have agreed that we particularly like ice cream add-ins that are not quite so hard, more along the texture of the cookies in cookies ‘n cream ice cream than the hard chocolate chunks that show up in many ice creams. Since we’re in the middle of using a chocolate mint brownie mix, it works out very nicely, since we have extra Thin Mint ice cream to enjoy.
We’re definitely not ice cream addicts, but we just as definitely do enjoy a cup after dinner. Maybe (okay, no “maybe” about it!) it really was a good thing my husband couldn’t decide, and maybe it really was a good thing we were having a small party. We don’t often get in such a stash of ice cream, but we often crave just such a dessert after dinner. It’s nice to have the really good stuff, so we can satisfy those cravings with just a little bit. Add a brownie foundation, and life really is good!