My vacation officially began Tuesday evening in an unfortunate fashion: stuck on the tarmac at LaGuardia for around three hours on my way back from a meeting. While it wasn’t my first choice for how to kick things off, the in-flight entertainment system had an episode of Treme and one of Newhart, so it wasn’t much different from how I usually spend my vacations anyway. Except that the flight attendants, who had been back and forth up the aisle countless times to fill water glasses, then declared that no one was allowed to use the bathroom. Which is kind of the urinary equivalent of giving a 6-year-old his Christmas presents early but telling him he can’t open them until the 25th.
Fortunately for me, I had opted for dehydration over potential pants-peeing, and once my TV-watching was finished, I was able to concentrate and finally crack a problem that had been haunting me for months.
On an earlier trip I’d spent a couple of days at Unilever’s test kitchen in New Jersey. Test kitchens, in my experience, are great places to be – I have friends who work in them who might disagree – because every now and then someone will whip something out and conspiratorially tell you, “This won’t be on the market for another 16 months, but here… give it a try.” Or, in this case, a kind chef will decide to ply you with a steady stream of as-yet unmarketed Choco Tacos.
(The Choco Taco, if you don’t know, is a taco-shaped ice cream treat, the shell made of waffle cone and the innards made of ice cream dipped in chocolate and nuts.)
The Choco Taco is awesome. (Even if it weren’t made by a client, I would believe that.)It’s also unavailable in Canada. So several months ago I decided I would try to figure out something that could take its place. And finally, on the tarmac in Queens, surrounded by disgruntled, full-to-bursting travellers, and just in time for Taste of the Danforth, I think I finally figured it out: ice cream souvlaki.
Just from the name, which is, I’ll admit, nowhere near as catchy as Choco Taco, you can probably figure out it out: a souvlaki stick skewering chunks of ice cream instead of chunks of meat. They’d probably have to be frozen pretty solid to stay on. And they’d definitely have to be rolled in nuts and chocolate. You could mix up flavours, creating an improvised Neapolitan kind of thing, or veer into kebab territory by skewering bits of fruit as well. All rolled in nuts and chocolate, of course. Or, if you wanted to extend the metaphor, a waffle cone stands in for a pita and whipped cream acts as tzatziki. If someone with a concession stand next weekend is reading this, you would sell out of these things in no time. Or rather, we would sell out of these things in no time, since I imagine I’d be getting a small cut of the sales?
And if anyone with a concession at Cariba-, uh, the Scotiabank Caribbean Festival is reading, get in touch. Let’s talk about this idea I have for ice cream patties.
Ideas Free to a Good Home is a clearinghouse of ideas we’re too lazy to develop ourselves.
