Freeze-dried chili mac ice cream

did you know you can make ice cream in a vitamix?

To mine own dearest clowns,

How art thee? this week, the weath'r appears to beest getting quaint hot. While i wanteth summ'r to cometh, i am not eft f'r all the heateth 'twill bringeth.

Okay, enough of that. I found a Shakespeare translator on the internet and thought it’d be funny if I trolled you guys by writing this whole edition in Shakespeare-ese, but I can’t handle more than a few sentences. My eyes started bleeding after I tried doing another. I took a few Shakespeare classes in college, and I don’t think any of that information really came in handy more than once or twice at bar trivia, meaning, maybe I got a drink or two out of all that college tuition. Sorry, mom and dad.

Anyway, yeah, summer’s on its way in, and frankly, I’m not really ready to feel so sticky all the time yet. I am pretty sure the older I get, the stickier I feel as a human being overall. Mine own yarbles shall beest sticking to the inside of mine own forks and i am not h're f'r yond.

I’ll leave that last one for you to figure out on your own.

Now, during summer, people often like to go camping and eat ice cream. One activity involves getting bitten on the balls and ass by mosquitoes, and the other involves enjoying a frozen treat, two activities I respect very much. As a city boy, it has been probably like a decade since I’ve gone camping, but I like to pretend I can hoof it in the wilderness.

And so today, I, Dannis Ree, the greatest food writer in all of history, decided to combine ice cream with freeze-dried camping food, because when I thought of it at the time, I thought it was the funniest idea ever.

I am honestly not sure what I was thinking, but who am I to question my own genius?

I’d read somewhere that it was possible to make ice cream in my Vitamix blender, but I did not give it much thought until recently.

For some reason I imagined it would be an enormous pain in the ass, but it turns out that at least according to this YouTube video that looks like it was shot through a pair of broken glasses, it only takes five ingredients and no special equipment other than this monster of a blender. I swear to God, you could turn rocks into a purée in this thing. Remind me to try that sometime.

If you watched that weird home video, you’d see that the ingredients are half-and-half, milk powder, sugar, vanilla, and ice.

Now, my issue with a lot of mix-ins to ice cream is the texture. I think chocolate chips in ice cream are too waxy, and fruit chunks just turn into plant-based ice balls. Taking this into consideration, I decided to forgo things like hot dogs and whatever else you cook on a campfire, and instead, I turned to modern technology: I decided to buy freeze-dried camping food from an outdoor sporting goods store.

I hadn’t been to a store like that in ages. Half the people there were dressed like they were about to go rock climbing, lots of them were wearing bandanas on their heads, and there was a healthy mix of extremely tight biking shorts thrown in for good measure. Based off how the place smelled, I think most of those customers spend a lot of time at Whole Foods.

When I finally got to the register, the nice lady glanced at the food and asked, “Where are you going?”

I mumbled, “Uh, I’m a food writer. I’m going to…write about this stuff.”

Then there was a pause before she asked me if I wanted to sign up for a membership.

Harvey was clowning around pretty hard, so I threatened to blend him.

But look at that face. Besides, today is about freeze-dried camping food ice cream, not Harvey ice cream.

I really like the idea of fortifying milk with dry milk.

That is an intense amount of milk. It reminds me of this tweet.

Avery Edison @aedison

every time i drink milk i remember my roommate who used to put powdered milk in his milk so he could drink "more milk per milk"

“More milk per milk.”

This kind of thinking is truly next level. I can only dream about soaring to such great heights.

Now if I was going to be making a chili mac ice cream, I figured plain vanilla wouldn’t necessarily cut it for a base flavoring.

This is why I decided a little bit of beef broth concentrate would be a good idea. See, it’s my whimsical version of a twist on an old classic. Meat-based ice cream!!!

I have to say, that little plop of beef stock concentrate looks like an unburied cat turd resting on top of litter.

And that little hole the vanilla left in the granulated sugar looks like what happens when you pee in snow and you’re alarmingly dehydrated. Also if that’s what your pee looks like, please go to the hospital immediately. In fact, call an ambulance.

Running the Vitamix with ice makes a pretty loud racket.

I highly advise you run away from the blender, screaming your ass off, while it’s going. Hearing what sounds like a power tool followed by shrieking can only be a real treat for your neighbors. After it was done, I tried some of the blender ice cream, and the flavor was pretty good considering I essentially put concentrated cow in it. It was sweet and creamy with just a touch of savoriness at the end. Honestly, if I hadn’t put the meat paste in there myself, I wouldn’t have thought twice about the flavor, but now I think there’s a market for this. This is a free idea, Ben or Jerry.

I was so distracted by its magnificence that I forgot to take a picture of the plain ice cream once it was done. I am not entirely sure I would even describe it as ice cream, even. It’s more just sweet milk with ice particles suspended in it.

Time to mix in the star, the freeze-dried chili mac!

I fuckin’ love freeze-dried food. I love the texture, more than anything, since it shatters and dissolves. So I ate some right out of the bag, and I am happy to say it was pretty good that way. Davida looked at me like I had a fourth leg growing out of my ass.

I mixed the chili mac in with the blender ice cream, and it was time to let the whole thing sit in the freezer.

In the meantime, I let out a 45-minute-long fart while dancing in the kitchen to Hoobastank. Then I played Nintendo, because I’m an adult, and I get to do whatever the hell I want, all the time, like make chili-based ice cream.

The ice cream did not set up very well, especially with all the shit I mixed into it.

There’s a lot of salt in freeze-dried chili mac, so I’m assuming that didn’t help much. Then I helped myself to a big healthy spoonful and decided that I really liked it. The freeze-dried camping food stayed as crunchy as before, weird dehydrated beef bits, beans, noodles, and all, and the sweet cream clinging to it made for an entertainingly dissonant bite. All that dried seasoning whacks you in the balls with flavor, too. And who doesn’t love getting whacked in the balls?!

Davida crunched on a little spoonful and made a face. “I don’t like it. It’s like cereal.” I think this is the best most accurate description anyone could have given it, honestly. And now I’m stuck with a whole quart of this shit in the freezer. Do any of you want to come over, hang out in the backyard, pretend we’re camping, and get whacked in the nuts?

With flavor, that is. Bug bites are optional.

---

Hey! If you like getting whacked in the sack with this newsletter, please don’t forget to share it on social media. You’re slacking, everyone, I see you. You would not believe how much work I put into this thing, it’s the least you can do.

Also, I crunched some mental numbers. I’m at the point where if every single one of you were paid subscribers, I could actually write this newsletter for…a very bizarre living. Then I wouldn’t have to show my bhole to people on the street for a penny. Sign up for a paid subscription, and you’ll get exclusive content, plus gain access to the paid archives as well, via foodisstupid.substack.com.

The idea of me doing this full-time is cracking me up right now.

I’m still brainstorming what I’ll be writing about later this week, but I will tell you, I got some pretty strange other things at the outdoor sporting goods store. Like something called Egg Crystals. Whatever I make, I’m sure it’s going to be terrible. I can’t believe I used to feed people for a living.

And of course, as always, hope you’re staying safe, enjoying some sun, love you all, and see some of you in your inboxes later this week. Ciao, clowns!