I usually don't deliver verdicts on products I haven't tried. My comments here are on not on the products themselves but only on their "curb appeal". If they sound good to you, you try them, and they're exceptional, please let me know. Otherwise, I don't intend to even try them.

I Like Coconut Cream Pie

In general, I like coconut cream pie. Remember that cheap-o lemon cream pie that 60 Minutes (IIRC) made fun of ten or twenty years ago, because it contained neither lemon, nor cream? They have a companion product, a coconut cream pie, and it's fairly good, even though I suspect it reduces your life a week by eating it. When it comes to real coconut cream pie, I like it even better. It's light, fluffy, delicate - adjectives I don't associate with better ice cream.

And I like Turkey Hill ice cream, in general. I'm not impressed by their "Philadelphia Style" Chocolate ice cream, because it tastes like cocoa, rather than chocolate, as if it were ice milk instead of ice cream. I wondered what they mean by "Philadelphia Style" so I called 1-800-MYDAIRY and asked. The nice lady on the phone said that it meant that they use natural ingredients. I'm still trying to figure out that one, since a Philly cheese steak has Velveeta instead of cheese, and little shavings of beef instead of a steak. But I generally enjoy TH ice cream, even in flavors that shouldn't be my favorites.

Rethinking The Flavor Of The Month

February's flavor of the month, though is "Coconut Cream Pie." They have chunks of coconut cream pie chopped up into coconut ice cream. To my way of thinking, coconut doesn't have a very strong flavor unless it's toasted, and that's not common in ice cream or in pie. What's more, when I have had other "pie" type ice creams in the past, I've been disappointed by the crust.

Crust is the best part of a pie. Delicate and flaky, a pie crust tends to enhance almost anything that it contains. When you put it in ice cream, though, the lard solidifies, and the flour picks up moisture. The crust tastes terrible in ice cream.

Bandito's Mexican Restaurants, a chain in Ohio and Indiana, offers a fried ice cream dessert, which consists of a ball of ice cream rolled in coconut and frozen extremely hard, which is plopped into the french fry vat. The coconut is toasted in the oil, and the ball deposited in the same shell you'd expect to be served a taco salad in, then drenched with chocolate syrup, topped with whipped cream, and topped with a maraschino cherry, before it's rushed to your table. It's not quite worth the ten-hour road trip to Fort Wayne, but if you find yourself within 40 miles of Indianapolis or Lima, I recommend a detour. (The rest of their offerings are delightful as well.) I don't know how you'd put that dessert in a Turkey Hill half-gallon tub, though - and rather than disappoint customers, I'd suggest that the folks in Conestoga not try.

Fighting The Groggies

I'll bet you can't name the best-selling laxative on the market. That's because you don't think of it as a laxative. It's coffee. A lot of people depend on coffee to get themselves going in the morning - and they're not talking only about mental alertness.

In fact, much of the traditional salty/greasy/sweet breakfast foods are good for that. They don't make the Sal Hepatica laxative any more, but you can buy bottles of Magnesium Citrate, another salt-based laxative. "Sliders" get their name because their high fat content lubricates your colon. Raising your blood sugar rapidly with juice, sweet rolls, or pancake syrup causes what is called "dumping syndrome" - and both milk and cola behave like juice in this respect.

That being said, you don't want those foods to do a number on you too quickly. They advertise that "the best part of waking up is Folger's In Your Cup" but it's no coincidence that so many coffee advertisements depict that joyful moment when you open the can and the fragrance first attacks you, tying your hands behind your back, and throwing you to the floor so it can make mad frantic love to you. One of the longest-lived ads had a jingle based on the sounds made by the blurping of a percolator, featuring the coffee splooging up into the glass dome.

The Church Of Juan Valdez

There are many who buy their coffee at Starbucks, and maybe those are the people that Five Hour targets. At about $5 a shot for their "energy drink", they're in the same price category, although McDonald's and Dunkin Doughnuts are both considerably cheaper - and with drive-through windows, as convenient.

For many of us, though, it's not a hassle to make coffee, it's a religious experience - and if you don't otherwise need to leave the house, there's little appeal to a drive-through window. Even the increasingly popular "bikini baristas", looking norhing like Mrs. Olsen, aren't enough to get us to cross that threshold to brave traffic.

If I were after convenience, I'd be buying coffee grounds instead of grinding my own beans, or better yet, I'd be buying k-cups. There must be many of us who grind out own beans, for there are an awful lot of choices in bean coffee. The morning ritual - three Ss in the bathroom, and making the first coffee of the day - assures me that God's in his heavens, all's right with the world.

At least, until I turn on the news. Everything goes to hell then. But that'a all the more reason to perform my morning ritual. In these days, every little bit of normalcy is a rare gem.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Bandito's - barista - cheese steak - Coconut Cream Pie - coffee - energy drinks - fried ice cream - ice cream - laxatives - Magnesium Citrate - morning rituals - Philadelphia - pie crust - Sal Hepatica - Starbucks - Turkey Hill - velveeta