A-Z Munchin' Monday - X, the Challenging Letter

Well, this is a stretch, but anything is when you have to come up with something that begins with the letter X. I looked on some wiki answer site for "foods beginning with X" and came up with the word, xiangcaojing, which is Chinese for VANILLA. Like I said, it's a stretch.

But, hey, now we're talking food that matters! For most of my childhood, I was perfectly happy to get a bowl of VANILLA ice cream! Perhaps this was before the era of Moose Tracks and Ben and Jerry's crazy menu (Cherry Garcia, anyone?).

Vanilla was my fave, probably because you could dump practically anything on it, topping-wise, and it would complement it nicely. I still fancy a cone or bowl of vanilla ice cream, be it hard-as-rocks outta the freezer, or that "soft-serv" stuff you can extract from the machine at the finer all-you-cab-eat steak houses and Chinese buffets (look for the sign that says "xiangcaojing"). I really like that chocolate "shell" stuff you can pour on some vanilla ice cream, and it hardens around the scoops. Excellent! (Or, this week, x-cellent).

And since we already took care of watermelons last week, it seems to me that a bowl of vanilla ice cream (not French vanilla, mind you) is perhaps one of the next-best patriotic, American things to ingest over this weekend, up there near hot dogs (of which I had one today, nitrate-free - is that still American enough?) particularly if topped with red, white and blue sprinkles.

So I hope you all have a great Fourth of July weekend, what's left of it, and that we can all escape the acrimony and the bad news of the day and remember that, even if we Americans don't appear to have a very good handle on the affairs of state all the time, the founders seemed to have some great ideas regarding how to kick this country off, keep it going, and for the most part, that recipe has served us pretty well for centuries, and I daresay it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.