Ice Cream Social

Last night, I got carried away. While most of my work friends piled onto a chartered bus to go down South to see Arcade Fire in concert ("why aren't you going?" was the common refrain that day), I hopped onto my own bus over to the lower Haight to attend my dear friend AB's ice cream social birthday party. Here she is fixing drinks while discussing the mating habits of seals (really—stuff she learned on her weekend away at Costanoa).
But back to the subject at hand: the ice cream social. AB had run around town, picking up all manner of toppings and accoutrement, from wafer cigars and cups to marshmallow creme, rainbow jimmies and chocolate sauce. And the ice cream? Only the best: a rainbow of colors and flavors from Bi-Rite Creamery and Mitchell's Ice Cream. I'd been looking forward to this event all week long. As such, I had a game plan coming in. Well, kinda. I made sure to eat a light meal so I could get at least two rounds in at AB's. And after surveying the flavors, I decided to start out savory—as savory as you can get with ice cream (!)—and then finish out sweet and citrusy.
My first course: small scoops of salted caramel, kahlua mocha cream, butter pecan, cookies 'n cream in a wafer cup, topped with rainbow sprinkles, chopped nuts and a small drizzle of mocha fudge sauce. The second course: mango jasmine, strawberry basil and purple yam (which tasted simply like a buttery vanilla). It was a wild night to be sure; Arcade Fire, eat your heart out.
And before, after and in between, I squeezed in a couple of pomegranate cosmos and chocolate choco chip cookies and chased them down with a lot of great stories. (The one about the sprinting archer and seal murder and the other about the 12-point buck and BMW will certainly get retold by me and others—they were that good.)