Yes, I’m still sick. Let’s see, this started in France on the 19th of December but that would have been the 20th over here, so I would have been sick a total of… (checking calendar) … 17 days. That’s a long time. Well, my cold is almost gone. I mean, I can breathe again at the very least. I’m not sure if I have any fever. I don’t think so. I think I just feel like shit because (1) I’ve been eating too much ice cream, and (2) I haven’t been sleeping because of all the coughing. I don’t cough as much during the day, it’s when I’m lying down and trying to sleep that my throat gets all constricted and tries to jump out of, er, my throat.

No, I’m not at all alarmed by any of this and won’t see a doctor as my parents, my friends, my friends’ parents and my boyfriend have been insisting. Well, because, all it is now is a cough really, and that’s a fairly recent development. That turned up on the 31st, if I’m not mistaken. Anyway, I’ve stopped smoking. Again. (Yeah, right.) And I’ll see how I fare after I’ve stopped poisoning myself with food.

Which, by the way, has been moved to the 7th. Screw the Feast of The Three Kings. I’m a pagan, as my mother likes to call me (after reading the op-ed piece I wrote many moons ago on contraception and the Catholic Church). I used to think of myself as an agnostic but I’m more of an atheist now, I believe. Anyhow, nobody starts anything on a Saturday and I might as well take a whole week off of January.

It really is just too hard to stop. My two new finds this January are:

1. The lava cake from S&R that my friend, Marmie, brought to dinner this week. Stick it in the microwave for 30 seconds and try not to burn your tongue afterwards. This is soooooo sinful.

Carmen’s Best’s malted milk ice cream. Ohmygod. I didn’t realize how much I missed Horlicks or how fantastic it would be in ice cream.

I was actually doing a Carmen’s Best ice cream taste test on my own. (Until my parents joined me.) I bought five tubs of ice cream, gave one of the cookie doughs to Joel and kept one for myself, but I also wanted to try out three other flavors: malted milk, malted chocolate and cheese.

I went for the cookie dough first because I had been fantasizing about it since I first tried it and I had been wanting to eat a whole tub by myself before going back on the Paleo diet. I took a big scoop. Hmm… There were some nuts (- nuts?), some chocolate morsels – but where was the cookie dough? I dug around, found some bits that looked like cookie dough but they had no taste. I put it down to my deader-than-dead taste buds. Maybe I should wait for my sister-in-law and her kids to try it before I pass judgement…

Then again, taste buds or no taste buds, I’m pretty sure that this isn’t anywhere close to the one that I tried before. I have to say that I am more than a little bit disappointed because it was on the basis of Carmen’s Best cookie dough that I had been telling everyone that it’s the best ice cream in the Philippines. I even gave a tub to Joel for Christmas! Oh dear. I hope his tub is better than mine…

Being the best is not only about using the best ingredients, it’s also about being consistent. I can’t tell you how bummed I am about not getting the cookie dough ice cream that I wanted. I might have to stop over at Cold Rock Ice Creamery tomorrow to get my fix.

I also got in touch with Fog City Creamery and they’re experimenting with cookie dough now and will let me know when they’re ready for orders.

By the way, I brought some of Fog City Creamery’s ice cream to a dinner party late last year (because, according to writer and fellow foodie, Teddy Montelibano, they have the best ice cream in the Philippines) and the salted caramel was described by one of my friends as “orgasmic”. It got such rave reviews that Adam Lieberman launched his own version at his restaurant, Rose. (FYI, his Ambassador’s Butter Cream ice cream rocks.) Everything we tried from Fog City Creamery was good although, at that time, I still maintained that Carmen’s Best was better. For the lactose intolerant and those doing Paleo, Fog City Creamery created a special ice cream made out of coconut milk, 70% cocoa chocolate bits and honey. I’m ordering a few tubs next week. Contact Edylyn Gamboa at +63-917-883-3344 for orders. Pick-up is at her house in Valle Verde.

Back to my little Carmen’s Best taste test.

This is how I know their cookie dough wasn’t up to par – because their malted milk was the bomb! Holy cow’s milk, Batman, that was udderly good! Okay, I’ll stop being corny now. But, as I write this, even if I’m still ill from all that ice cream I just had, I am tempted to go back downstairs to the freezer and eat the rest of it. It’s that good.

The cheese ice cream is a bit odd. For the non-Pinoys out there, cheese is a common ice cream flavor in the Philippines, which I absolutely love. Normally, the ice cream itself is yellow and tastes like cheese. Carmen’s Best cheese ice cream is white, with lots of cheese chunks. My mom thought it tasted like powder milk. (Ouch.) I just think it’s odd – a bit pastillas-y, but I like it.

The chocolate version of the malted milk is a very light milk chocolate, which I am not a fan of, especially since it had less chips in it than the malted milk. My parents liked it though. My mom thought it was the best out of the lot. It was good but I actually prefer the cheese to it.

I think I’ll watch one more episode of “Boardwalk Empire” (okay, two!) before going back for more of that malted milk. Yummmmmmm…

Update: 6 January 2012, 8:13 PM

Okay, I actually really, really like that cheese ice cream. You know what it reminds me of? Dial K for Kitchen’s polvoron, which I mentioned in this blog before. If that were to become an ice cream, it would taste like Carmen’s Best cheese ice cream. They both taste like pastillas. 🙂