Bad news for my mom and my waistline

I love ice cream.  Every summer when I return to the States, I make sure to get my fill of ice cream because I know I’ll go the next four or five months without it.  While describing ice cream as a motivation to return to America may be a bit extreme, it is a definite perk.  For the past four years in our small town in China, we have not had a single container of decent ice cream.  Green pea and corn flavored popsicles?  Red bean filled ice cream bars?  We have plenty of those.  In the winter, they sell them out of cardboard boxes on the street.  Creamy, rich, smooth, flavorful American-style ice cream?  Nowhere to be found.

That is, nowhere to be found until about a week ago when Rachel discovered a new brand of ice cream in the freezer at the tiny neighborhood store we refer to as the blue store.

It’s a box with three small containers of ice cream.  The flavors look surpisingly normal–with not a single vegetable to be found near them.  The pictures indicate one container is cookies ‘n cream, one is traditional rocky road, and one is rocky road with vanilla ice cream.  Rachel bought a box, gave it a try and reluctantly reported to the rest of us that good ice cream had finally made its appearance in our city.  I say reluctantly because she knew spreading the news would mean a quick disappearance of all packages of said ice cream.  Sure enough, in a day all the boxes were gone.  We held our breath.  More often than not, we find a food we love, we buy it all, and it never comes back again.  But a day later the freezer was re-stocked.  It could still disappear within a week or month, but for now we seem to have a steady supply.

There is now one less reason to ever leave this city (bad news for my mom).  Ice cream has reentered my diet (bad news for my waistline).  I also now have a reason to whip up batches of my dad’s hot fudge sauce, which I’ve been making with dark chocolate cocoa.  Oh my goodness, I’m in trouble.

My judgment of the quality of this ice cream, though, may be a bit skewed.  Below is my favorite snack to take to Chinese class.

You may say, “What’s odd about that?  It just looks like pretzel sticks.”  But take a closer look at the flavor.

Yep, green bean flavored cracker sticks.  Five years in China and I think that is a perfectly normal, acceptable, and tasty flavor combination.  I just haven’t come around to green bean popsicles yet.  That’s going to take at least another five years.