I spent the first day of summer blissing out on my new favorite ice cream. Cue the Rolling Stones, it's Brown Sugar in Häagen-Dazs's new "five" lineup. The premise of these straightforward flavors would surely make the world's most famous food purist, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto author Michael Pollan, cheer its minimally processed approach.
The "five" stands for the five simple ingredients used to make these creamy/cold treats, leading off with milk, cream, sugar and egg yolks, as well as the star flavor component: milk chocolate, coffee, passion fruit, ginger, vanilla bean and, the best of the bunch as far as I'm concerned, brown sugar.
Maybe I'm loving Brown Sugar because it goes so well with my Rhubarb Betty, the most requested summer dessert on my somewhat limited meal-ending repertoire. (I'm more a flash-in-the-pan kind of cook, not a baker.) The rhubarb I've found at farmer's markets this season are huge stalks, so I've had to up my cooking time, but the results are worth the wait.
