We’re getting a little ridiculous with the ice cream flavors. There used to be three basic flavors: vanilla, chocolate, and for the far left, strawberry. Then they decided to put the three flavors together and call it something absurd with an air of Napoleon Dynamite in a snowglobe. We looked in the box and thought, “Oh cool, it’s striped, like the flag of Neopolita.” Within 25 minutes, the box looked like someone had drilled down the center of it and sucked out everything brown until you were left with a white stripe and a pink stripe which sat in the freezer collecting ice crystals until the next Beatles reunion.
There was also something that appeared on the freezer aisle called fudge ripple, a synonym for someone glopped a little chocolate syrup in the ice cream and then decided not to eat it and put the bowl in the freezer until it got hard that way. Not the tastiest treat in my disregarded opinion. Oh, and there was always lime and orange sherbet. None of the other fruits ever got a shot at this. Nope, only orange and green were marketed. Green reeeeally caught on because someone’s aunt mixed it with ginger ale at a baby shower, and it took over the seventies like acoustic guitars and vans with curtains.
Now we’ve done everything. We’ve tried it all. We made up unorthodox flavors, starting with lemon and ending with grilled cheese bacon sandwiches. Like Solomon of old, whatever our eyes desired, we did not keep from them. Some things are good in and of themselves, but they don’t go with ice cream. Vanity of vanities.
Then we had the blast, blizzard, flurry, completely depraved avalanche era. If it could happen in a cold storm, we ate it. It’s actually transliterated in most ice cream chronicles as mixing candy into ice cream. It’s not complicated. Or at least, it wasn’t.
For years, Mickey D has had two flavors of their snowstorm: M&M and Oreo. It’s failproof. Show me a red-blooded American who doesn’t like M&Ms and Oreos, and I’ll show you a seventh grader who’s not going to argue about what he’s wearing on picture day. Neither are happening.
So mark it down in history that this month McDonald’s put a third flavor out there. I don’t know if they’re trying to confuse the drive-through more than it already is, if that’s even possible, but so help me, they’ve done it. And here’s the title: Grandma McFlurry. Did that trouble anybody else, or just me?
I mean, the names are self-explanatory. What’s in the Oreo McFlurry? That would be Oreos. What’s in the M&M McFlurry? I’d say M&Ms. So … what’s in the Grandma McFlurry?
Yeah, it stumped me, too.
I Googled it and found out it’s candy pieces. It was unclear as to what kind of candy pieces it is, but it just said it’s the kind Grandma would give you from her purse. Wait, not that! The paper-stuck-to-the-candy kind? My digestive track is fifteen percent paper because of my childhood. The wrapper-smells-like-lotion-and-is-the-color-of-blush variety? The here-let-me-wipe-that-off-with-a-Kleenex flavor? Or is it just filled with half-pieces of gum? Because we all know in the Handbook for All Grandmothers, page 41, it says “Divide all gum sticks in half before distributing to grandchildren. They will have something to talk about at your funeral.”
I kind of shuddered at the thought of an ice cream treat filled with any of this. Plus, I decided if I was going to be any kind of credible author of this column, I would need to do the proper research and actually purchase the thing. Sometimes you’ve gotta do life’s hard stuff. I crossed my fingers the whole way there, “Don’t let it be a broken machine day.” If you know, you know the odds were not in my favor.
So now that it’s said and done and digested … I still don’t know. It was alright. It was good really. It didn’t exactly awake my tastebuds to a stroll down a sentimental lane with the most beloved creature God ever made -- my grandmother, Dunca -- but it was a dessert. And there wasn’t anything wrong with it, although I still didn’t decipher what’s in it.
I tried it, Solomon. “As it happens to the fool, so it also happens to me.”
But when they come out with Uncle J.P. flavor, just for the record, I will not be doing that.
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