On Father’s Day, I picked a fight with my dad.
The argument was about homemade ice cream, and the fact that for all the rosy memories of us gathered around my father’s grinding monstrosity of an ice cream machine, waiting for that first taste, the ice cream was lousy.
“I think my ice cream tasted pretty good,” my dad said, fondly nostalgic.
“Ummmm,” I answered.
Then I told him: The homemade ice cream I’d had (made by him or me) just wasn’t worth it.
Soupy, overly sweet, icy, bland and dependent on a space-hogging appliance.
My thinking goes, if homemade ice cream can’t top the creamy texture and rich flavors found in any decent supermarket, why bother? Let’s face it, even Haagen-Dazs vanilla bean is still unimpeachable.
“When I was a kid growing up,” says Jeni Britton Bauer, creator of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, “we’d make ice cream, and I was always the kid who just wanted to go down to Haagen-Dazs.”