Sunday, June 20, 2010

Carmela Soprano's Gelato Affogato (Ice Cream with Rum and Espresso) and Frank Sultana's Bungalow Bars


This has been one wet Spring.
I managed to finish planting our garden just before the rains hit - again - on Thursday.  

To celebrate having finished my planting I picked something nice and easy from Entertaining with The Sopranos.
Hey, I never said I was Superwoman.


Carmela sure knows how to pad a cookbook.
Gelato Affogato, "Drowned Ice Cream" is a mixture of
3 Tablespoons dark rum
1 Cup hot espresso
slowly poured over a scoop of ice cream and served immediately.
That's it.
Can you believe she had that recipe fill a page and a photo of this masterpiece plastered on the opposite page.
What chutzpa!!  

Take a wild guess how often little A. J. knocked back the topping without the ice cream.  And Carmela wondered why he had problems.  


Ma had 3 kids and we had lots of hot, muggy days during summers in New York.
Of course we had ice cream.  We loved ice cream.  Without the boozed up coffee.    

But... there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.
One summer day Pop came home quite pleased with himself.  His boss had bought out the stock of Bungalow Bar, a small local cheapy version of Good Humor ice cream.  Pop, without checking with Ma, had bought a dozen boxes of ice cream bars.

Okay... it was a good price.
Okay... we loved ice cream.  

Would it've killed Pop to get an assortment?
Pop just loaded up from the nearest stack.
Twelve boxes of strawberry shortcake ice cream bars.
Each box held 48 bars of strawberry shortcake.
That's 576 bars of strawberry shortcake.
Enough for 3 kids to have one each and every day for 192 days.
About 6 and a half months of strawberry shortcake ice cream bars.


The first few weeks we enjoyed them.
After a month, when Ma handed out the ice cream, we recited a little ditty I had composed:  

Bungalow bars taste like tar
The more you eat 'em, the sicker you are.

We resorted to gallows humor:
"If you're good, you'll get an ice cream.  If you're bad, you'll get 2."

Somehow we got through them.
We didn't buy strawberry ice cream for a long, long time.
But that was a while ago.
I'll eat ice cream, even strawberry, with or without the boozy coffee.


Another recipe down.  Fifty-seven more to go. 

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