So it looks like if you want ice cream while you're at my house, you'll either have to warn me ahead of time or bring your own. D. can't eat much dairy these days, and my main use for it is the scoop of vanilla that I put into my cocoa-fied coffee each morning. When Breyers was sticking to their promise of cream, vanilla and sugar as their sole ingredients, I always had a carton in the freezer. Once they started to slip tara gum into the mix, I started looking for an alternative (much to the kids' dismay). With said kids now out of the house at least until next summer, I switched to whipping cream. A tablespoon puts back the fat that my non-fat cocoa mix is missing with fewer calories than the aforementioned ice cream. But earlier this week, I discovered that my newest carton was one day past its buy date. What to do? I didn't want to pitch it, it wasn't going to last more than another day longer, and I really didn't have the time or interest or ice & rock salt required to pull out the ice cream maker.

Ah ha! I have a solution. A year or so ago, I bought a gazogene* to make whipped cream. I 'whipped' up my whipping cream and squirted it into two quart boxes, and popped them into the freezer. It's definitely not 'ice cream' by any means, but it serves my purpose. One box, I swirled with chocolate syrup to make a sort of fudge ripple, but the other I left plain.

What, no sugar, you're asking? Absolutely. We found years ago with salt that we tend to use less if we sprinkle it *on* the food instead of mixing it in. Less is needed because the salt that is there hits the taste buds, rather than being 'hidden' inside the other foods. Turns out that sugar works in a very similar way. There is enough 'sweet' taste in the cinnamon sugar that I sprinkle on the ice cream floating on the cocoa/coffee that I'm good.

Why use the ice cream or the whipping cream at all? Originally when I skipped my daily latte, I found that my feet would start cramping. I assumed it was the calcium, so when I started making my coffees at home, I made up a dried milk/cocoa/cinnamon/vanilla mix to add to it to make kind of a non-sugary mocha. Unfortunately my feet cramps started reoccurring, and adding more mix (i.e., more calcium) didn't fix the problem. It appears to be a low-fat issue. I don't eat a lot of fats normally during the course of the day, so I've resorted to the ice cream (now whipped cream) as a means of putting the milk fat *back* into my non-fat cocoa. So far, this seems to have solved the problem.

* a devise using compressed CO2 to aerate fluids, similar to a seltzer bottle.