Workin’ on My Night Cheese
I know it was my intention to share cool animation related posts on this blog, but I also hoped to share some of my antics and my love for and obsession with all things pop culture including, one of the coolest and funniest women in entertainment, Tina Fey.
A few weeks ago, one of my favorite shows, Tina Fey’s 30 Rock, finished its seventh and final season. As I mourned, I was happy to discover that Tina Fey had made sure fans like me would have something to drown their sorrows in! A 30 Rock themed Ben and Jerry’s ice cream to sooth my aching heart and ease my still funny, but slightly empty NBC Comedy Thursdays.
I was certain that nothing could be better. But I was mistaken. This flavor proved to be a disappointment! Ben and Jerry’s had created a Liz Lemon Greek Frozen Yogurt to celebrate the occasion. Lemon flavored, obviously. With a blueberry lavender swirl. To some people that might sound delicious, perhaps even edible! It certainly supports a good cause, Jumpstart, an organization close to the hearts of many of my Tufts classmates.
Why do I have a problem with an ice cream flavor?
Because I know, as a fan of 30 Rock, that Liz Lemon would never eat this flavor. Liz Lemon and I have similar standards of nutrition.
Here are a few of my favorite Liz Lemon related food gifs. There are more out there!
Below, you can find a food pyramid describing my terrifyingly bad eating habits last year!
Liz Lemon gets it. I know that when seeking comfort food, I wouldn’t turn to a fruit flavored debatably healthy ice cream substitute. And I trust that Liz Lemon wouldn’t either. (This sort of shenanigan has led my friends to believe that I never eat vegetables and hate the idea of a balanced meal. This is false and vegetables are great, but there is less room for comedy in a balanced diet. (Admittedly, I am eating some Easy Mac as I work on this.)
The Saturday night after 30 Rock came to an end, I had a wrong to right. I had to deliver justice to the world of sitcom based ice cream flavors. If there is one food Liz Lemon loves, it’s her night cheese.
So I set out, with a couple of my friends, to make an ice cream worthy of Liz Lemon! Night Cheese Ice Cream. You read that correctly. I made cheddar cheese flavored ice cream in my dorm kitchen.
I never cook, and I’ve never made ice cream, but this was surprisingly easy, and perhaps even more surprisingly, delicious! I looked up some cheddar cheese ice cream recipes, how to make ice cream without an ice cream maker, and picked up the ingredients at the Shaw’s at Porter Square.
It looks a little bizarre. Our best guess was that the cheese we used was too processed to melt. It made for a weird texture, but I’ll call that a moderate success! B+ to A- worthy ice cream making! Check out these pictures of parts of the process! The process was as simple as making a custard sort of thing, melting in the cheese, and freezing that over the course of a few hours. (Once we realized that we had to separate the yolks for the custard, we had to try the bottle trick that was all over YouTube last year! My friends were successful. I was not!)
It took a few hours and we had to refreeze it repeatedly, so we had the opportunity to watch Midnight in Paris! All in all a successful night!
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever cooked? Better yet, what’s the weirdest reason you’ve ever had for cooking something? Let me know in the comments!
p.s. If you’re in Boston or Cambridge and love animation, I haven’t forgotten to include a little something for you in this post! Harvard Square’s Brattle Theater is having their annual Bugs Bunny Revue and showing the best of the Looney Tunes this weekend going into the first half of the week! And over at the ICA they are showing all of this year’s Oscar Nominated Shorts! I’m majorly psyched and hope to attend one if not all of these events!
p.p.s. And check out the latest trailer for Monsters University! I’ve been waiting for this for years!