As you might have heard, it’s somewhat hot here in Austin. Today the temperature has dipped somewhat, it was only 101F, but basically there has been a daily broiling that is progressively leaching my body of its precious minerals. You know why Texans have skin that looks like leather? It’s because their bodies are constantly cured in a bath of self-produced saltwater.
So here are some of the things that I’ve been putting in my mouth for no other reason than they happen to be cold.
We’ll start with the Rich’s brand icecream treats. This lemon/lime swirl bar is everything that Sprite wishes it could be, but never will.
Rich’s ScrewBall is a cone of popsicle slush that I assume you eat by squeezing into your gaping maw like a toothpaste tube. And what makes it screwball? There’s a gumball on the very bottom! A soggy, partially dissolved gumball! Pretty screwy, huh?
Then there’s the patriot bar!
Sam Adams ate a frozen popsicle just like this during the Constitutional Convention.
The second closest grocery store to where I live is a Mexican market. In a freezer tucked behind the güero treats, with a hand-labeled "Mexican Paletas" sign I found these frozen tasties:
The coconut bag of slush tasted exactly the way you would expect. The rompope bolis tasted less like eggnog and more like a butterscotch shake.
The closest grocery store to my home is a Korean market. And their freezer section is a veritable goldmine of icecream.
This one didn’t have any anglo lettering on it, but you could sort of describe it as a wafer-cone pocket filled with icecream, caramel, and nuts. I presume the characters on top are the Korean words for "brain freeze."
The other one was in the school of suckable icecream sack, complete with cryptic opening instructions.
I just used my teeth.
On a separate occasion I continued my Korean iced treat exploration, getting another of the polymer suck-sacks or "Squeez"(vanilla this time).
The coffee bar on the right cracks open in the middle. Which is fine unless the icecream inside is partially melted. The resulting spillage is unavoidable and upsetting. The bar on the left had all the tasty refinement of any premium icecream bar you might buy at a duller market.
And of course we can’t talk about cold things without talking about beer. Longtime followers of this blog might remember my Quixotic quest to achieve truly cold beer with the Cryobev3000 (I’m thinking of re-branding it the Beer Squid, but that’s a topic for another entry). Here are some ethnic alternatives to regular old beer.
Popular in Northern Germany is the alster, named after a lake in Hamburg.
It’s beer mixed half and half with lemonade. Think of it as a compromise between refreshing and intoxicating.
Another alternative is michelada.
This is a Mexican flavoring syrup that let’s you water down your beer with ice without looking weird. It’s for people who think that their beer lacks that zesty south-of-the-border taste.
Considering that there’s three months more of this heat, you can expect more Food Frakking on this topic.
