No. It’s worse. Those specks are vanilla seeds. It is easy to imagine that vanilla ice cream with black specks in it has more flavor or that the seeds make the vanilla more ‘real’ or ‘natural’, but vanilla seeds contribute no flavor at all to vanilla ice cream. Putting vanilla seeds in ice cream is just a marketing gimmick. Vanilla is the world’s second most expensive spice. Saffron is the most expensive. Even the cheapest, lowest quality vanilla bean pods sell for over $100 a pound. In making vanilla extract, all of the flavor is extracted from the pods, including the seeds. Exhausted vanilla seeds have no flavor in them and are just kitchen trash. Top quality vanilla ice cream does not have black specks in it. It is only the lower quality brands of vanilla ice cream that resort to this marketing trick. So, who makes the best vanilla ice cream? In my opinion, among nationally sold brands, it’s Ben & Jerry’s.
1. Anything that you plug into an electrical outlet. Why risk burning down your house or electrocuting yourself to save $1 or $2? The only way you can sell a power strip, extension cord, or night light for $1 is by making it on the cheap.
2 Electronics. Cell phone charger cords are cheap, but good ones cost more than $1. Why risk frying your cell phone to save 2 bucks on a charger cord?
3. Batteries. Cheap batteries leak and can damage your gadgets. Brand-name batteries at dollar stores are often old and near the end of their shelf life, which is why they are cheap.
4. Vitamins. Most vitamins sold at dollar stores are brands you never heard of. You have no way of knowing if anyone tested them for potency or safety. Like batteries, brand-name vitamins sold at dollar stores are often old and near the end of their shelf life.
5. Makeup. Who knows what cheap makeup is made out of? They don’t list the ingredients, and anything you put you put on your face will be absorbed into your skin.
6. Anything that makes fire. This includes matches, butane lighters, candles, flares, fire starters, lighter fluid, etc. It’s just too dangerous.
MY FAVORITE THING TO BUY AT DOLLAR TREE is Häagen-Dazs ice cream cups. They usually have them in a freezer next to the cash registers. These cups are small, but I like this size. There’s a little spoon under the lid.
Does Häagen-Dazs come from Denmark? No, but they have tried to give people that impression. Häagen-Dazs even used to have a map of Denmark on the lid with an arrow pointing to Copenhagen. (See photo below.) Häagen-Dazs was started by a non-Danish couple in New York. They wanted a name that sounded Danish because Denmark is noted for its high quality dairy products, and Americans have a positive image of Denmark, but Häagen-Dazs means nothing in Danish. Besides, there is no umlaut (the 2 little dots over the ‘a’) in Danish. There are some characters in the Danish alphabet that we don’t have in the American alphabet, like the letter that looks like an ‘a’ and an ‘e’ squashed together, like in ‘Julius Cæsar,’ but there’s no umlaut. In 1980, Häagen-Dazs sued Frusen Glädjé, a competing ice cream brand with a fake Swedish name. Frusen Glädjé means nothing in Swedish and was never made in Sweden. Häagen-Dazs argued that selling ice cream with a fake Scandinavian name was their idea and that no one else had a right do it. They lost the lawsuit. Kraft sold Frusen Glädjé to Unilever, which discontinued the product. Häagen-Dazs is now made in countries all over the world – but not in Denmark.
This recipe only contains 2 ingredients and takes 5 minutes to make. If you want an excellent chocolate sauce that instantly hardens into a shell when poured over ice cream, here’s the secret: coconut oil. At room temperature, coconut oil is solid but spoonable; however, it becomes hard and brittle at colder temperatures, like the temperature of ice cream. You can buy coconut oil at many supermarkets and Trader Joe’s. To make a really good hard chocolate ice cream topping, place in a microwaveable bowl 1/3 cup (2.5 ounces) of coconut oil and 1 cup (6 ounces) of semisweet chocolate. Microwave at 50 percent power in 30 second intervals, stirring the mixture between the intervals until the mixture is thoroughly combined. That’s all there is to it! You can store your chocolate topping at room temperature and spoon or pour it over ice cream. If the mixture is too thick, add a little more coconut oil or microwave it slightly to warn it up. You can also use this mixture to make chocolate covered frozen bananas on a stick and other frozen desserts. (A jar of this stuff also makes a very nice Christmas gift from your kitchen!)
This chocolate topping tastes much better than the bottled chocolate ‘magic shell’ toppings sold in supermarkets. This recipe is made with real chocolate. Nearly all of the commercially made products you find in supermarkets are made with inferior ingredients like palm oil. It’s cheaper to make this stuff that way, but predictably, it doesn’t taste as good. At the bottom of the pile, there are chocolate shell products sold at dollar stores that are made out of something called ‘natural chocolate flavor.’ I don’t know what it is, but isn’t made from cocoa beans.
Ice Cream! I have $25 gift cards from Cream, the popular ice cream sandwich store on Telegraph Avenue. Its one gift card per unit, not per tenant; however, since they only charge $2 for an ice cream sandwich at Cream, a $25 gift card goes along way! At only 2 bucks a sandwich, I fail to see how this place makes money, but fortunately, that’s not my problem.
I have never understood the appeal of Neapolitan ice cream. I never liked it. Neapolitan ice cream is that 3 color ice cream that you frequently see at children’s birthday parties. It’s 1/3 chocolate, 1/3 vanilla, and 1/3 strawberry. It usually comes in a square or rectangular brick and is sold in nearly every supermarket in the United States. Neapolitan ice cream is one of America’s top selling ice cream products, and it has been that way all my life. But – why do people buy it? It always tastes lousy. The chocolate is usually OK, the vanilla is bland, and nobody likes the strawberry. The strawberry ice cream in Neapolitan usually gets eaten last or not at all. It seems that every time someone opens up a container of Neapolitan ice cream in their freezer, the chocolate and vanilla are gone, but the strawberry is all still there and covered with frost because it’s been in the freezer so long. I think the only reason that people buy Neapolitan ice cream is because it is colorful.
BEAVER URINE. Why don’t people eat the strawberry section of Neapolitan ice cream? Maybe it’s the beaver urine. None of the mass market brands of Neapolitan ice cream are made with real strawberries. The strawberry section of Neapolitan ice cream is usually flavored with beaver urine. Yes – you read that right – beaver urine. To be technical, imitation strawberry ice cream is flavored with castoreum, a chemical produced by beavers to scent mark their territory. It is extracted from beaver urine. Castoreum is used to create a number of different artificial flavors besides strawberry. A lot of raspberry ice cream and sorbet are also made from beaver urine. I wonder how much Neapolitan ice cream they would sell if they had to put on the label ‘flavored with beaver urine.’ I suppose that for most people it wouldn’t make any difference. After all, most people never read ingredients labels.
NATURAL STRAWBERRY FLAVOR. Don’t be fooled by the words ‘natural flavor’ or ‘natural strawberry flavor’ on the ingredients label on Neapolitan ice cream. ‘Natural strawberry flavor’ does not mean the flavor came from strawberries. It means that the flavor came from a natural or organic source, and beaver urine is natural and organic.
