Food Friday : Pre-Amtrak Snack

I am off to New York City for a workshop called ‘Design Your Life’. Sounds pretty self-helpy, right?  Well, yeah, that’s the kind if mental space I am in these days. Anyway, the workshop will be a topic for a later date – depending on the outcome.  If you hear nothing more of it, assume it is a safe bet not to ask anymore.

In trying to get in a regular habit of writing, I thought some themes might help with discipline. I find it hard to fabricate a random topic every few days. Makes my head hurt to try to nail down a fleeting thought and elaborate on it with a level of detail.  For you bloggers that do this daily, please, let me in your secrets.

So, right, back on topic.  Focus and discipline brought me to this idea of themes. On that, welcome to the first installment of Food Fridays.

As I said, I am off to NYC and one of the best things about being at South Station midday during the week are the South Station Food Trucks.

Despite just eating lunch, I, naturally, found room for a ‘small’ food truck snack. Unfortunately, Clover, my favorite go-to truck for some salty rosemary fries is suffering from a minor bacteria problem this week (and I will return despite this). Instead, I ‘settled’ for something sweet. . .

Namely, I opted for a a peanut[2] (read Peanut Squared) ice cream cookie sandwich from the Cookie Monstah Food Truck.  This is two peanut butter cookies surrounding a scoop of peanut buttercup ice cream. Sure, I could have just had a cookie to satisfy a sweet tooth and called it a sufficient indulgence, but this is the first time I’ve visited the Cookie Monstah.  So, I wanted the whole experience. That mentality is exactly why I accept I will not be svelte – yeah, I do think some things taste better than skinny feels, but since I’ve never actually visited ‘skinny’, I will admit my opinion is bias.

Okay, focus and discipline, back to the ice cream sandwich. Its hard to call this beast a sandwich since it was 5-inches tall and 5-inches around with meant it required a spoon to eat it.  I have a similar gripe with ‘open-faced’ sandwiches.  This sort of thing kind of blows the idea of a ‘sandwich’ experience for me.  To eat this monstrosity, I was either spooning ice cream or munching cookie, but it took some effort to do both in one bite. The beauty of an ice cream sandwich is the two-for-one bite. It’s BOTH innards  (ice cream) and carrier (cookie) in one bite. The result was it also meant I had to sit down to eat it. Sure, I had 45 minutes before my train, so sitting in Dewey Square to enjoy the post rain sunshine and sit under my favorite Os Gemeos graffiti wall was the agenda anyway. But, isn’t making ice cream compact and mobile the other beauty of an ice cream sandwich?  That and those little chocolate bits that stick to your fingers (mmm. . . chocolate bits).

Decidedly, the best part of the peanut[2] was the peanut butter cup ice cream. This is Ironic, right?  It is a cookie truck after all.  Well, the ice cream won out for a couple of reasons.  First, I am not as much of a cookie connoisseur as I am an ice cream connoisseur. Second, I am not much of a connoisseur of giant, overly-rich and super-sweet treats.  It is really a rare craving for me to reach for a bag of cookies over a bag of potato chips.  I prefer my sweets subtly sweet to allow complex flavor profiles such as spices, herbs and cooking techniques shine through over the the smack-you-in-the face sugar, sugar and more sugar sweets out there. These cookies fell squarely in the latter category. They were big and strangely fluffy – huge actually.  They were super-rich – tongue-coating-rich actually. They were super sweet – achingly-sweet actually. Actually, I don’t recall them saying ‘peanut butter’ to me at all.  So, rather than try to make a sandwich-on-a-spoon experience out of it, I mostly spooned into the ice cream and lightly nibbled on the cookies. The left over cookies made for a nice train ride  companion, but I don’t know they’ll get much more nibbling over the weekend, I think I’ve had my fill.

Will I visit the Cookie Monstah truck again? I doubt it. Even my curiosity of whether the signature chocolate chip cookies surrounding vanilla would be subtler isn’t sufficient compulsion right now.  It was a rare sweet craving that brought me there.  In the future, I will likely stick with salty go-tos and leave my sweet indulgences to a well-crafted dessert or a simple scoop of ice cream instead.  Now, as Connecticut wizzes by the train window, my stomach is agreeing with that sentiment.