Tuesday, July 27, 2010

But it looked so good in the picture!

Published on foodlovers 26/7/19

I don’t often eat ice cream. Especially the fat laden sugary behemoth that is a Memphis Meltdown – I’m afraid I may be afraid of big nuts as the advertising suggested. There was however a moment of weakness on an unseasonably sunny day last weekend and I found myself leaning over the ice cream cabinet in the local gas station. I got suckered by a ‘new’ sticker.

There are two kinds of people on this earth – those who like their ice cream plain (vanilla, hokey pokey etc) and those who think the more bits and pieces you add the better. I’m firmly in the second camp. Or at least I was. Enter the Rocky Road Memphis Meltdown.

The description on the pack goes something like “A mountain of jelly rippled chocolate ice cream dunked in marshmallow and smothered in choc, nuts and coconut”. The mother in law, who also got suckered in, described it as being like eating a jandle.

It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with it as such. The individual components were fine (excluding the marshmallow which was like cloudy tough jelly) but the ultimate combination was wrong – too much other stuff, not enough ice cream, the whole thing was barely even cold.

I feel the need to add in a disclaimer at this point in the defence of Tip Top. Other people might love the product, it just didn’t do it for me.

Anyway, I was so disappointed that I got halfway through, gave up and put the thing bag in the bag, dropped it in the nearest bin and proceeded to sulk. For some reason food has an astounding ability to upset me; I feel cheated and let down in a way that is neither reasonable nor rational. It’s been happening a bit recently – Pak’ n Save steak that tasted not quite right and my first tasting of Collective Dairy yoghurt which just couldn’t match up to Piako.

Surely I am not alone in being lured in by the look of something to find that the reality is far less fulfilling. Anyone got any good examples
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About Me

I once made the mistake of cooking the entire 1966 Edmonds cookbook in a year. Now I blog from the safety of the couch. I live in New Zealand, a tiny (well relatively small compared to, say, Russia) cluster of Islands in the South Pacific. It's a verdant, smog free (except for Christchurch), sheepish, laidback kind of a place. I've lived at both ends of the country so I feel entitled to make jokes at the expense of both the Aucklanders (the "big city" where most of us Kiwi's live) and the Mainlanders (the folk who live in the south of the country which is rather more dramatic of aspect,devoid of population). A kumara, for those who aren't aware, is the Maori (the native peoples of NZ)word for sweet potato - generally refering to the purple/red skinned variety with yellow flesh. Kiwi's love kumara. If you dance with one you will probably need to lead. I am by training and past experiance a food scientist and by profession a food marketer, two professions blamed for messing with the nations food. I'd like to give a little something back to the food by letting it mess me up a bit. This is a collection of random musings about food and life in general.