Ice Cream Sandwich Stakeout

It was less than a mile away. I had been waiting for this for days. By now the word had gotten out that the Cool Haus truck, known through all the land as a distributer of gourmet ice cream sandwiches, was going the way of credit reports and ringtones for the week. You heard right. Due to a sponsorship by USA, in a very “cool” move (hold for laughs, or giggles, or awkward silence in the absence of both), all week this mobile dessertery was giving it up for free.
Which is good, because I pretty much never have cash. Now that you can buy a 5 cent tile of Bazooka Joe gum on a debit card, cash has become sort of extinct in my life. Believe me, that fact really comes home to roost when I am faced with a parking meter. Desperate scrounging occurs, much huffing and puffing, and I usually wind up peeling a nickel from the perpetually sticky bottom of the irresponsibly sized cup holder below the dash. Gross for me, and I’m sure, gross for the meter maids.

Back to ice cream sandwiches. Less than a mile away. I knew it was over at 6pm, but this is LA, and time doesn’t seem to apply here. As soon as my class ended I raced to my car across 4 lanes of traffic. (It doesn’t sound like a lot now that I write it, but it certainly felt death-defying at the time.) It was exactly like the scene in Atlantic City when Susan Sarandon runs down the boardwalk with the radio blasting opera in her purse-sans boardwalk, sans radio, sans opera. Boils down to running, actually.

The traffic at this hour was pretty horrible, as you might imagine, but in a moment of bizarrely convenient soundtrackery, Tom Petty fueled me onward with “I Won’t Back Down.” Nor will I, Tom. Nor. Will. I. As I squealed around the corner, through what I will always remember as a yellow light, no matter what the cameras reveal, I spotted my prey. Parked innocently on a quiet street. No line. YES. No Line! Wait, no line. No line? This can’t be good. This is bad. Free ice cream sandwiches, and no line. What can this mean?!!

I pulled into an oversize parking spot on an unnecessary diagonal, bypassed the sticky nickel, and raced to the shutting window just in time for: “Sorry guys, that’s it for today.”

Now for a little trip down ice cream sandwich memory lane. When I was a kid, ice cream sandwiches were sold in the school cafeteria for 50 cents. Having no debit card yet, I made the cash purchase on a regular basis. Two chocolate cookie planks that were miraculously never soggy, holding captive a brick of basic, unbeatably vanilla ice cream. I’m really not a picky eater at all, but there are some things that I like to eat with a certain ritual. For example I like the Newton, but not the Fig. So I eat the Newton, and leave the Fig. It’s about as athletic as I get. And I like to eat the ice cream in an ice cream sandwich first, and then eat the remaining cookies, now just a double-decker cookie.

Visions of a younger me with my 50 cent delicacy swam in my thought bubble until I shouted, “Where are you going next?!” Which is how I found myself sitting in a shopping center parking lot, staking out the truck’s next location. I beat it there by 10 minutes. I’m not proud.

In my case, the perp was a scoop of balsamic fig and mascarpone ice cream between two snickerdoodle cookies. The ice cream was like the coldest, creamiest cannoli filling, with the chewy bonus of balsamic softened figs. But the cookies, always my favorite part anyway, were so cinnamon dusted, so crispy on the outside but soft in the middle, that for the first time in my life I found myself having eaten both cookies first, with the ice cream for dessert dessert. So much for tradition. And the whole experience, the sentimental flashbacks, my first time eating the cookies first, all the scurrying across Los Angeles intersections, was absolutely free. Thank God, because I never have cash. Except for you, sticky nickel. Except for you.

Tooth or Pancakes...

I am not a morning person. Runs in the family. My sister and I were the only kids I have literally EVER heard of who had to be pulled out of bed on Christmas morning, once we knew the joy of sleeping in. Or at least the joy of not-getting-up-just-because-you-are-told-to-and-the-whole-house-is-up-you’re-going-to-miss-it-fine-nevermind-we’ll-just-leave-you-alone. However, there is one thing which remains absolutely WORTH getting up early for, almost exclusively on Saturdays. The Pancake Breakfast. I really don’t care who’s throwing it, or why. I mean, of course I care-it’s just that whether it is a small town fire department, or an airplane hanger bursting with members of the Tampa Bay Goth Senior Citizens Unite members-pancake breakfasts are consistently awesome.

Lately, a cosmic conspiracy has kept me from the pancake breakfasts I love so much. The Toluca Lake Fireman’s pancake breakfast was conveniently railroaded by an emergency dentist appointment. It had been on my calendar for months. It DID NOT go down without a fight. Tooth? Or Pancakes…Tooth? Or Pancakes… In the end, the tooth won due to my realizing that if I ended up without any teeth, I would also never be able to enjoy pancakes again. Very Gift of the Magi.

The Beaumont Cherry Festival Pancake Breakfast was wiped out by a very late night at work the night before. It all started to seem just a little too perfect. Somebody didn’t want me to have pancakes. And I was getting grouchy about it to be sure. Look, I hate to mess with the space-time-continuum as much as the next girl, but I finally got my pancakes.

And a hush fell over the land.

I got a hot tip on a food truck sighting in Los Feliz, and hot-footed it over there pronto. (And by “hot tip” I mean I consulted my RoadStoves iphone app, a comprehensive listing of all the working food trucks, and their GPS locations. And by “hot-footed,” I mean took the 101 to Franklin, and adhered to all speed limits.)

The Los Feliz Sunday farmer’s market was in full swing-a beating heart of artisanal scones and cheese samples. Love it. Wedged in the back was my first mark: the Gastrobus. This is good one, guys. Since this was my first truck-fooding to blog about, I overdid it for sure. I secured the perimeter. Clean. I noted the exits. Lots. It’s outside, so…lots. I clicked a few stealth photos, the novelty camera clicking sound effect on my phone ruining the stealthness of it all. And finally, I ordered. Despite the fact that truly absolutely everything on the menu looked fantastic, I decided to test the butterfly effect and get my beloved pancakes. PEACH AND ALMOND PANCAKES with whipped cream and cherry sauce. AND a Grapefruit mojito. I was served by Lana, who very sweetly indulged my zillion questions, and explained that they get to the farmer’s market in the morning to see what’s fresh, and create their menu from that. So simple. So brilliant. Soooooooooo delicious.

These were pancakes with a pedigree. Marzipan-y and full of peaches. The kind of almondness you smell before you taste. Whipped cream that starts to melt in the LA heat because it’s, well, real. The cherry sauce on top like the exclamation point, sweet and tart and perfect, as though saying “I know you just withdrew a million dollars, here’s an extra thousand for your trouble.”

I met some great peeps at the communal table, all equally as excited about the Gastrobus as I was. People with homemade blackberry jam on their hands, and roasted vegetable scrambles in their hearts. I threw down for the Grapefruit mojito-something I will now crave on every hot day. It’s summer in LA, so that’s quite a bit of craving I have in front of me. Fizzy, with the squinting hit of grapefruit, and the mellow freshness of mint. The kind of thing you could drink from a pitcher in a rocking chair in a Tennessee Williams play-while mopping your brow. You have to mop your brow with a handkerchief, they all do it, so you just have to. Over ice, naturally.

As I walked back to my car, drowsy with pancakes, but good-natured from drinking something from a straw, it occurred to me that thanks to Lana, the gastrobus, and a near-worshipful relationship with pancakes, the first truck-fooding had been about as perfect as can be. And it all went down at 1:00 in the afternoon. I didn’t even have to get up early.

THE CHALLENGE. (with a side of cream cheese)

Hi Everybody, and thanks for visiting my blog! I am an occasionally good speller, a very stubborn Taurus, and an absolutely obsessed foodie. My day revolves around food: where I can get it, who wrote about it, who's making it, why it's supposedly awesome, and why it's actually awesome. I've decided to channel my obsession into a venture at least semi-quantifiable this summer, and I'd like to keep you posted.

For those who do not know this, the recent food trend that has taken Los Angeles by storm is the explosion of food trucks that now roam the city with reckless abandon. These are not your run-of-the-mill construction site roach coaches, selling foil wrapped who-knows-what (which, by the way is always delicious. I am a big fan of foil wrapped who-knows-what, in fact.) They are gourmet, they are nomadic, they can be difficult to find, and they are only in one place for a couple of hours. Then they shut their door/window/counter/register/entire side of the truck, and leave without a trace.

If you're not organized, you will miss them. If you're not fast, they will leave you behind. If you're indecisive, the person behind you will get the almond pancake bites or gruyere grilled cheese that was meant for you. Well I intend to be organized. I intend to be fast. I intend to be decisive. And if all goes according to plan, I will hit every LA food truck by the end of the summer. At which point I will have every pair of pants I own let out.

But who am I? Well, I'm this girl:

I can remember nearly every meal I've ever eaten. The grilled cheese with tomato in an all-night locals only cafe in New Orleans. The epic frijoles at a Mexican restaurant in a shack in Houston. (Seriously, you don't even have to order them, they just come to every table. THEY JUST COME TO EVERY TABLE. And they are so good, I would pack them in my doomsday bomb shelter. They wouldn't last until the apocalypse of course-I don't have that kind of willpower guys. But thanks for going with me on that for a second.)

I once walked into a deli near the lake in Chicago. The city was windswept and frostbite-worthy, but I needed a black-and-white cookie for something, so I did what had to be done. They were about 5 minutes from closing, and this was a great deli-the kind you have to go down a flight of stairs off the street to get to. It was late, and the very lunch-popular place was empty. It was kind of like a scene in a zombie movie, after everyone's disappeared, but the swing on the swing set is still swinging, and the screen door opens and closes ominously. I could hear a soft whirring in the back room, and I was standing right at the register before I noticed the gentleman standing with his back to me on the other side of the counter. I couldn't really tell what he was doing, because I couldn't make sense of what I was seeing. With his left hand he was chopping mountains of green threads, while his right attended to a massive industrial mixer filled with...clouds. That's exactly what it looked like: huge, snowpeakish, smoothly whipped...clouds. It was almost cartoonish.

The smell was beyond heavenly: creamy, tart, grassy, and first-lawn-mowing of the summer fresh, on one of the coldest days I can remember. He eventually noticed me, and I was instantly the strange one in the situation. A girl suited up for the winter, standing there mouth agape, probably a five dollar bill in hand. "One black-and-white cookie please. And if you don't mind me asking, what are you doing." And then he said something that if I hadn't been stopped in my tracks already, would've done the job. "Making cream cheese." Making cream cheese. MAKING cream cheese. Making CREAM CHEESE! Of course! Making chive cream cheese destined for the next day's bagels! It doesn't all come in a foil-wrapped brick, or travel size tub. FOOLS!

Who doesn't like cream cheese?! But who thinks about it being made from scratch? It was as though I had stepped back from the Magic Eye desk calendar kiosk at the mall, and actually SEEN the sailboat. It all came into delicious focus. He was unaffected, I was agog. An odd couple, linked by a batch of chive cream cheese. I walked out of that deli that night with a black-and-white cookie in a paper bag, but not just that. I also had the most mystical dairy product related encounter of my life in my back pocket. I can't explain it, but the streets of Chicago were different after that. But I'm weird like that.