Hokey pokey.

My sincerest apologies for the recent drought in culinary experimentation. But please bear with me for a little while longer as it is that time of the year again when my meals consist of leftovers from the previous night, and I start using, dare I say it - the microwave oven.

This one, however, doesn't require any sort of radiation: ICE CREAM.

As my loyal followers know, I tend to lean more towards the savory than the sweet. I rarely bake a cake and I don't do chocolate. But ice cream... ice cream makes me weak in the knees. (Except chocolate ice cream, of course.) Once in a while, I come across an ice cream flavor that is inexplicably, indescribably, wonderfully, epically mind-blowing. A few years ago, it was the ever-elusive Green Tea from Häagen-Dazs. This time, it was Hokey Pokey from New Zealand Natural at L.A. Live. (Both flavors which my VONS now carries. I love VONS!) So how do I even begin to describe this to you? There are crystallized balls of butterscotch (yes, CRYSTALS of BUTTERSCOTCH) folded into a honeycomb-flavored ice cream that is thick and creamy and good.

I know, right?

This is probably a good time to say that I also love caramel, butterscotch, toffee and everything else in the "sugar + cream + crack" category. I get that from my dad. And he loves to remind me every time he finds a new pint of ice cream in the freezer, courtesy of yours truly. He doesn't know it, but we actually have much more in common than that, as much as it pains me to admit it. He reads the Korea Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal and msnbc on a daily basis. I check the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and BBC during my study breaks. (This is the basis of our conversations: health care reform, Sarah Palin, Dokdo island, etc.) We're both cynics, critics and conspiracy theorists at heart. He hurts easily, but he's quick to forgive. I'm always on the verge of tears, but I'm just as ready to swallow them. And most importantly, we both appreciate a scoop of honeycomb-flavored ice cream with crystallized balls of butterscotch. I just can't get over it...

Food for thought (courtesy of wikipedia.org): "Before the invention of ice cream cones, ice cream was often sold wrapped in waxed paper and known as a hokey-pokey (possibly a corruption of the Italian ecco un poco - 'here is a little') An Italian ice cream street vendor was called a hokey-pokey man."