ice cream Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

It’s A Wonderful Life Museum

Spotted Duck ice cream

I didn’t know there was an It’s a Wonderful Life Museum in Seneca Falls, NY. But, of course, there had to be.

On September 5, after breakfast at the hotel, my wife and daughter went for a walk while I desperately tried to whittle down my email. Then we drove down to the waterfront, walked through the Seneca Falls Museum and Tourism Center, and looked for a place to have lunch.

After the meal – good food, slow service – I went to the IAWL Museum, eventually joined by the rest of the family. As I have noted multiple times in this blog, I dismissed the film for years until my wife insisted I see it. It’s surprisingly good. My family has even seen a Radio Theater retelling.

My good friend Steve Bissette wrote a great review back in 2008. It ends:

“We may love A Christmas Carol, but we know the Scrooges, the Potters and the Geckos of the world would laugh at the ghosts of Christmas past, present and yet to come. They laugh at them and spit on us every chance they get.

“That, I’m sorry to say, is part of why It’s a Wonderful Life continues to bring tears to our eyes today.”

Cole Haddon noted, and I quoted, regarding a pivotal scene: “George wasn’t supposed to cry, but Stewart couldn’t help himself. That’s because the actor was a broken man himself, not unlike the character he was playing…”

History

As for the museum itself, it had a lot of memorabilia, some of it signed by Karolyn Grimes, who played little Zuzu Bailey. Seneca Falls ISN’T Bedford Falls, but there IS a connection that is more than coincidence, which is why Grimes comes to town regularly.

Among the interesting pieces are a couple of photos of Donna Reed with actor Dick Van Dyke advocating in 1968 that the US should have a Secretary of Peace. The description of Lillian Randolph indicated that she took some grief for playing the maid Annie, though it had not bothered me.

Some time after Todd Karns played Harry Bailey, he became a noteworthy painter. A fan letter to Jimmy Stewart from Don Collins, one of the twin boys who played baby Pete, is displayed.

The crew had a picnic after wrapping the film in August 1948, with all the actors and production folks. It’s hard to see, but Jimmy Stewart appears wearing a hat in both the back row left and back row right.

Just a few doors away is a shop where I bought a replica of the Globe Theatre Program for the movie premiere. The shop owner was a really interesting dude who had lived in several states, but moved from NYC to Seneca Falls shortly after 9/11.

Ice cream

Before we headed back to Albany, our daughter wanted us to stop at an ice cream shop. As it turns out, it was about 40 minutes away in Penn Yan. We went through Geneva, which we recognized because our daughter had visited Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

The line at the Spotted Duck was a bit long, but the service was rather robust. The three of us shared an eight-flavor flight, then we looked at the ducks, some of whom were spotted.

On the ride home, the youngest of us saw 28 deer; I think I saw 8. The bad weather seemed to miss us; we drove through a section of the highway where it HAD rained, but not when we were there.

What a full couple of days.

Sunday Stealing Makes You Choose

tea and geography

Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!

This week, our inspiration is Life of a Fool. This blogger maintains that this meme has “been seen everywhere.” The questions only require a simple, definitive answer, but if you’d like to elaborate, we’d like to hear what you have to say.

Which one? Sunday Stealing Makes You Choose

1. Pepsi or Coke?

Diet Cherry Pepsi. That full-sugar glass bottle of Coke that one used to only get near Mexico

2. Cappuccino or coffee?

I don’t drink coffee, and never did. There is something vaguely uncivilized about not drinking it; some people have tried to make me feel that. Someone makes a pot of coffee, and you don’t share. I probably mentioned my absolute refusal to make it. It was an office task; I made it once, it sucked, and I was off the hook.

Here’s a useless piece of information about cappuccino: “The name comes from the Capuchin friars, referring to the color of their habits, and in this context, referring to the color of the beverage when milk is added in a small portion to dark, brewed coffee (today mostly espresso).

Ice cream?

3. Chocolate or vanilla?

I’m assuming the question refers to ice cream, though it isn’t explicitly stated. I find that vanilla ice cream, as an accompaniment, is about perfect. It goes with chocolate cake, fruit pies, hot chocolate, and much more. A good chocolate ice cream needs to stand on its own, and some do.

I shared this before – it’s about racism and vanilla ice cream.

4. Hot tea or iced tea?

One of the first things I learned when I visited my parents and baby sister after they moved to the Southeast US was that there is tea and hot tea. Whereas, in the North, there’s iced tea and tea. What was the question again? Either one; it’s weather-dependent.

5. Dinner for two or a party?

It must be dinner for two, because I do it far more often. I like other people’s parties, though; I only throw one per year because it’s work.

Sunday Stealing: ice cream

Who put the rum in the rum raisin?

Sunday Stealing celebrates ice cream.

1. What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?

Of the readily available flavors, I lean towards strawberry—strawberries and sometimes even strawberry syrup on top of strawberry ice cream. If it’s available, I like black raspberry or black sweet cherry. On the next tier are chocolate-infused items: mint chocolate chip and chocolate swirl. I did a quiz in 2010, and I named Orange Pineapple, which I hadn’t eaten in a long time. For soft ice cream, I usually pick a chocolate/vanilla twist.

2. If you could invent a new flavor of ice cream, what would it be?

I don’t think I need to invent a new flavor. Our local Stewarts stores create new short-term flavors, usually during the summer. I’ve tried a few.

3. Who do you like to eat ice cream with?

I like to eat it with children because kids seem to get great joy, which also gives me pleasure.

4. If you were a flavor of ice cream, what flavor would you be?

It has to have more than one word. It couldn’t be vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry; it could be something like Mint Chocolate Chip or Rum Raisin.

5. Does your family eat ice cream regularly, or just for a special treat?

Unfortunately, I can only eat it occasionally. If I ate it as often as I would like, it would be daily, and I’d weigh 500 lbs.

6. What is your favorite treat from the ice cream truck?

I associate ice cream sandwiches with ice cream trucks.

7. Does frozen yogurt taste different than ice cream?

Oh goodness, yes, they’re not the same at all. According to my taste buds, it’s inferior.

Nostalgia

8. If you could make a super sundae, what would it have?

In college, I used to go to the local shop and have a banana split. It had chocolate ice cream with chocolate sauce, strawberry ice cream with strawberry sauce, vanilla ice cream with pineapple sauce, and whipped cream. I feel like I didn’t need it very often, but the specificity of my recollection suggests that I did have it more frequently.

9. Can ice cream make a bad day better?

It can make a bad day better if it’s good ice cream. When I was growing up, there was this brand called Fro-Joy, which was marginally better than the store brands, which were meh.

10. Have you ever had homemade ice cream?

Yes, I have had it, but I don’t have any strong recollection of when or where. It seemed like it was A) pretty good and B) way more labor-intensive than I wanted to experience. It could have been at an Olin family reunion.

11. When is your favorite time to eat ice cream?

In the afternoon, between lunch and dinner. You don’t want to ruin your dinner, and you don’t want to have it after dinner and feel a little bit bloated.

12. What is the best kind of ice cream you ever had?

It was almost certainly Rum Raisin. I don’t remember the where or the when, but I do remember that it was so rummy that I thought I was going to become drunk. It was tasty but also quite potent.

Depends

13. Do you prefer your ice cream in a cone or in a bowl?

In general, I prefer it in a cone, but I’ve been in situations where it was so hot, and the person serving had many people to serve. I’d try to be polite and wait for them, but mine started melting on my hand, so I had to eat it faster than I wanted. On a scorching day, a bowl might be a better choice, but on a fall or spring day, the cone is probably a fine choice.

14. Is there such a thing as a bad flavor of ice cream?

I don’t think so. I don’t like peanut butter, so I dislike peanut butter ice cream, but it doesn’t make it bad. One flavor tasted like cotton candy, not my cuppa. I’ve had many exotic fruit things in ice cream that I did not enjoy.

15. They say an apple a day keeps the doctor away. What does an ice cream a day do?

Adds a pound this way.

16. Is ice cream better when it’s fresh or slightly melted?

A cone should be fresh; a bowl could be slightly melted.

17. What is the craziest flavor of ice cream you’ve ever seen?

I’ve seen plenty of odd flavors, but the names and descriptions don’t stick to my brain.

Hospital prices online, ice cream, 70

Generally speaking, I like the fruit flavors

change.puzzle In response to Ask Roger Anything, which you can still do, Alexis wrote:

Hospitals required to post all prices online beginning January 1 – Roger – blog post? This is incredible!

As a librarian, I almost always take the position that more information is usually better. I’m not at all sure how this change will work in the real world and private insurance.

I was surprised/disappointed that I managed to miss this news until the multiple stories that came out right after Christmas from the Associated Press. In fact, there was a story on the PBS Newshour on April 24, 2018, which details the policy.

“Hospitals are required to disclose prices publicly, but the latest change would put that information online in a machine-readable format that can be easily processed by computers. It may still prove to be confusing to consumers since standard rates are like list prices and don’t reflect what insurers and government programs pay.

“Patients concerned about their potential out-of-pocket costs from a hospitalization would still be advised to consult with their insurer. Most insurance plans nowadays have an annual limit on how much patients must pay in copays and deductibles — although traditional Medicare does not.”

Friend Anne wants to know:

What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?

That would be strawberry, which is NOT available in half gallons from Stewart’s, the local ice cream emporium with the most locations. You CAN get Neapolitan (vanilla/chocolate/strawberry) or vanilla and strawberry. So it’s my favorite flavor to get on a cone.

Generally speaking, I like the fruit-flavors: black raspberry, cherry vanilla, e.g.

Finally, Uthaclena asked quite a while ago:

What’s with 70? What’s wrong with 58?

This is in relation to the birthdays I note in this blog. Here’s the thing: people have only one 70th birthday. If I do someone’s 58th birthday, and another’s 63rd, I won’t necessarily remember if I wrote about them when I’m thinking of blog topics.

But the big 7-0 is easily retrievable because it’s consistent. I could have picked 80, but more of them would be dead. At 30, it’s way too soon; some folks aren’t noteworthy until later in life.

Mayonnaise and other important topics

I once had something called ice milk, which was disappointing, to say the least.

Dustbury hates mayonnaise, and managed to write a whole blog post about it. I’m not being critical. Rather, I’m impressed that he was able to engender a whole condiment conversation in the comments section. I like mayo well enough, in egg salad or on a BLT. It should be real mayonnaise or perhaps the light (usually written as “lite”) version, whatever that is. But I HATE the low-fat versions.

And worse is that stuff that looks like mayonnaise but is sold as Miracle Whip salad dressing; I can always tell when that’s been substituted. I’m actually not sure WHAT it is, but “Miracle Whip does not meet the minimum requirement of 65% vegetable oil to be labeled as mayonnaise as dictated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.” One of the worst things of my youth: bologna sandwiches on white bread with Miracle Whip.

This is similarly true of yogurt. Regular yogurt’s fine, and there are some decent lite ones, but the no-fat iterations I’ve tried are vile. The strange aftertaste, probably from some toxic chemical compound.

I used to drink 2% milk, then 1% for a long time, but now I have gotten used to skim. But the Daughter has not; she likes the 2%. Her mother once said it tasted like ice cream, and I scowled; surely it is fuller flavor, but it’s hardly ice cream because I know ice cream.

Ice cream is another product where the real thing is great, and the substitutes, not so much. I once had something called ice milk, which was disappointing, to say the least.

What food substitutes are acceptable to you, and which food items just can’t be replaced?