The holy grail of ice cream
And the cost of eating out versus cooking at home, some numbers
My favourite flavour for desserts is malt. When I was a kid, I loved Horlicks and Vitasoy (specifically the soy malt drink that came in the brown popper). I also loved Milo*, which was actually not quite malty enough for my liking but if I thought of it as a chocolate drink then it was fine. If I wanted true malt, I’d just go for Horlicks. I also love Maltesers, the greatest of all mass produced chocolates (in America they have something vaguely similar called Whoppers but those are a poor imitation).
It surely follows that my favourite ice cream flavour is malt, which makes my ice cream/dessert life difficult because this is a rare flavour to find. Or at least to find one malty enough. In supermarkets, the flavour I’d been buying was Tillamook’s Malted Moo Shake, which is my favourite of the supermarket ice creams. Whenever we go to ice cream shops, I scan menus to see if there’s a malt flavour — and there usually isn’t.
So typically when eating ice cream, I settle for the not-malty enough flavour of whatever malt I can find, or I just get another flavour. It’s not an actual problem, but it is a constant and long-running dessert disappointment.
Until.
Until until until.
A few weeks ago, we were given an ice cream maker. And oh how my life has changed. I have finally tasted an ice cream that is sufficiently, gloriously, deliciously malty. It is the ice cream that I have been searching for my entire life and the only ice cream I will need for the rest of my days. It is my holy grail, my true love, The One. If I were a poet, I’d write poetry about this ice cream. If I were a musician, I’d compose songs about this ice cream. If I were an artist, I would paint this ice cream. Alas, I’m none of those things, so I will just eat this ice cream.
We’ve been using this custard ice cream base recipe, and we’ve now made four different batches and four different flavours: vanilla, chocolate, malt with chocolate chunks, and dark chocolate with chocolate chunks. All of them have been delicious.
I am very slightly tempted to experiment with other flavours, but I’ve only got the freezer capacity for one flavour at a time, and any other flavour we make would be at the expense of malt. And now that I know what is possible, and that it is possible to have a malt ice cream that is malty enough, that is the only flavour I want. Pity about the rest of my family who want other flavours.
Eating out versus meals at home, some numbers
I roasted a chicken for dinner last week, and as I was serving it, I was mentally calculating how much the meal cost. The chicken was $22.50, and after adding in the veg, spices, and butter, I figured that meal cost about $25 in ingredients. We got about six serves out of it, so that cost a hair over $4 a serve.
That train of thought led me to wondering how much our meals at home cost on average, and how much eating out costs as a comparison. So I went to the trusty spreadsheet where I am still tracking every cent we spend on food, had a look at August, and did some maths.
We spent a total of $1,256.29 on food groceries in August 2024. We ate a total of 344 meals at home, for an average of $3.65 per meal, per person. Each meal at home for the four of us costs $14.60.
In contrast, we spent $1,000.27 on meals eaten out (this doesn’t include just buying drinks or dessert; the total amount spent on food away from home was $1,040.26), for an average meal cost of $55.57.
So about $14 at home to feed the four of us, or $55 eating out to feed the four of us.
We typically buy pretty high quality ingredients: our fruit and veg comes from our CSA box from Yasukochi Family Farms and our local farmers’ market, our chicken comes from Pasturebird, and our beef and other meat comes from Perennial Pastures or Farm Foods. We’ve been drinking Maple Hill or Alexandre Family Farm milk. Eating Vital Farms eggs. Baking with King Arthur flour. Cooking Rancho Gordo beans. As much as we can, we have been trying to vote with our forks, but this isn’t the cheapest way to buy food groceries.
Since we started this whole voting with our forks thing and our food spend went up to about $1k a month for groceries, I kept thinking we spent a lot on food. Especially when I read reddit threads about how much families across the country/world spend on groceries. I have had a constant slight and vague unease about food spending, wondering if we’re spending too much and being too extravagant. So it came as a nice surprise to find out that even with buying more expensive ingredients, it still only costs about $3.65 per person, per meal. A thousand dollars a month sounds like a lot, but $3.65 a meal sounds significantly better.
A book or two
It’s been awhile since I’ve mentioned books here, but I read two recently that I thoroughly enjoyed and are worth mentioning here. The first is Magic Pill by Johann Hari which is about the wave of new weight loss drugs like Ozempic and their effects. It was a great read, well-paced and informative, and Hari covered the many different aspects of weight loss with insight, sensitivity, and wit.
The second book is Swallow This by Joanna Blythman, which I found out about because Hari referenced it multiple times in Magic Pill. So I tracked it down, read it, and loved it. It’s about how processed foods are made, with a British focus (Blythman is British). It reminded me of a lot of the other books I’ve read about ultra-processed foods and despite all those other books I’ve read on the topic, I still learnt new things from this one. Highly recommend it.
*As I searched for Milo so I could add the link to this post, my search engine showed me that other people also asked ‘Is Milo a health drink?’ which amused me. As delicious as it is, I didn’t think it was ever meant to be a health drink.