Ice Cream

It was a Pavlovian response.  Not just the salivating and the excitement, but the begging my mother for coins, the heart- pounding fear I’d miss it, then the shrieking, running out to the street to see the white truck with the painting of the ice cream bar on the side cruising slowly down the hill.

Fat chance I’d miss the Good Humor man—he had a vested interest in not being missed.  He thoroughly enjoyed selling his wares and making kids happy in our stultifyingly hot, humid summer suburbs.  But the happy memory of that children’s song’s tinkle can still make me drool, (much like a fountain’s trickle can still make me tinkle).

Each week, Levi gravitates to the fresh raspberries at our local farmers market.  He insists on buying them claiming to “love them”.  He eats 2 or 3 and then he is done.  I pack them in his lunch box and a few stragglers end up coming home with him.  I can’t toss them.  So, I either eat them or throw them in a baggie and put them in the freezer.

I had just enough fresh and frozen raspberries to make David Lebovitz’s Raspberry Swirl Ice Cream.  Doesn’t that sound good?  I haven’t made any ice cream this summer and it has been on my mind.  Today, the kids are going to arrive home from camp to a very, very, sweet treat.

This recipe calls for vanilla extract.  Instead, I steeped the cream with a fresh vanilla bean.  I cut the pod in half, scraped out the seeds and threw them in the bowl of cream along with the pod.  When it came time to add the custard to the cream, I removed the pod and saved it to make some vanilla sugar.

This ice cream is a small reminder that summer is here and it is here to stay for just a little while longer.

Start with oatmeal cookies (the homemade variety, of course), add ice cream, make sandwiches, then sit back and watch the enjoyment as happy people eat them.

Kids love ice cream sandwiches, and adults feel like kids as they eat them.

Raisins are always a great addition to oatmeal cookies, but when they are frozen, they can get hard and difficult to chew. It seems the perfect way to get their sweet flavor in an ice cream sandwich is to puree them before incorporating them into the dough.

I discovered, too, that giving raisins the puree treatment fools those who dont' care for those little dried grapes. My husband is a good example. He won't eat anything that involves raisins. I offered him one of these cookies, still warm from the oven. After he ate about three of them, he asked, "What is that flavor that I can't quite pinpoint? Dates?" (He likes dates – hates raisins). I thought it safe to share the secret with him. How could he say he didn't like them after already wolfing down three with great gusto? He gave me a sheepish little grin and grabbed another cookie.

In Margate, New Jersey, there is an ice cream shop that time forgot. It is called Two Cents Plain and it has little white wire chairs with red and white striped seats, red and white wallpaper festooned with whimsical line drawings of flappers in long necklaces and gents in boaters, and a jar on the counter where customers can deposit tip money for the scoopers’ college funds. It looks just the same today as it did in 1979, when I had my fifth birthday party there.

We had the whole place to ourselves that day! What a thrill for a five-year-old. More thrilling still were the ice cream “clowns” (still on the menu) which were presented thusly: a scoop of ice cream on a plate, and a sugar cone inverted on top as a hat, point side up, and a face drawn on the scoop of ice cream with Red Hots. I had asked for a baby sister for my birthday that year and instead was presented with a baby brother, and the ice cream clowns went a long way towards placating me.