The Perils of Homemade Mint Chocolate Ice Cream

Perhaps it isn't entirely fair to blame the travails of this past Sunday night on the ice cream maker we got as a wedding present. In fact, the incident probably would have happened later in the week anyway. But it makes for a more interesting title if we blame the ice cream maker.

And so we begin our tale with M's suggestion that we have some ice cream. I found this to be an excellent suggestion, as M's homemade mint chocolate ice cream, and, indeed, all varieties of her homemade ice cream, are very very good. My brother recently dubbed our mint chocolate ice cream The Best Ice Cream He Has Ever Had. I happily scooped out some ice cream into our gobletesque ice cream bowls, and we settled down to have some ice cream and watch the Amazing Race finale.

But then came the foundations of disaster. Having finished her ice cream, M handed me her dish, so that I could relay it to the table that eluded her reach. My hands were full - the spoon in my left hand and the dish in my right - so I put the spoon in the dish to free up a receiving hand. Some may call what happened next an accident, others an act of cruel fate. My spoon proved to be insufficiently placed in my dish. I had slipped it underneath some ice cream, to keep it weighted down, but the ice cream was soft (in ordinary circumstances, delightfully so) and did not provide enough weight. Instead, the imbalance between the inside-dish half and outside-dish half of the spoon created a catapult. Its ammunition: a big glob of ice cream. Its target: the front of my sweatshirt. Collateral damage: the front of my jeans, as that is where the ice cream glob ended up after ricocheting off my sweatshirt.

Chocolate is not only tasty, but also an author of stains. Thus, we felt it wise that I quit myself of my chocolaty vestments and put them in the washing machine with a preventative spray of stain remover added for good measure beforehand. It only followed that I activate the washing machine immediately to complete the chocolate removal. I did the usual washing machine procedure and returned to the adjacent TV room to watch the only team we wanted to see win The Amazing Race actually succeed in winning The Amazing Race.

After a time, the sounds of the washing machine ceased, and we knew it was time to switch my now cleansed garments to the dryer. I entered the laundry half of the basement and immediately sensed something was amiss. Something in there was different somehow...

The significant difference between pre-wash laundry room and post-wash laundry room was that post-wash laundry room had about 5 gallons more water on the floor than pre-wash laundry room did. Also, the sink in which the washing machine water entered and (normally) drained was much fuller than usual. Indeed, it was filled to the brim! After a short investigation, another difference was discovered: the aforementioned sink had a sponge at its bottom in the vicinity of the drain (on top of it, in fact), whereas before it had not had any such thing.

Questions came immediately to mind. First (after, "what in the hell???", of course) was "Aren't sponges supposed to float in water?" The answer to that question eludes me to this day, but I suspect that because it had a rough scouring side to it, it didn't have the buoyancy of your average sponge. Also, it had some paint on it.

The next question was how was this situation was going to be resolved. Most people would have gotten a mop and bucket, but this solution proved to be impractical for us, primarily because we have neither a mop or a bucket in the house. We use a Swiffer for our floor cleaning needs, you see. So we had to resort to using towels to soak up the water, frequently wringing them out to renew their soaking capabilities.

This ended up being a very slow and tiring procedure, but eventually the water on the bare portion of the floor was all soaked away. That just left us with the carpet that covered most of the room and had become soaked up to about three feet from the washer and dryer. The towels could provide some assistance in ridding the carpet of water, but not much. It looked like we would just have to point some fans at the still-sopping wet carpet and hope that the breeze and the dry winter air would dry the carpets before mold and mildew set in. M threw in the towel, literally and metaphorically, and I let her go with nary a complaint, since she's pregnant and easily tired. But I wasn't ready to give up!

Then I was struck with inspiration. I could use the aforementioned Swiffer to wring the water from the carpets and onto the concrete floor where the towels could take over. I got said implement and started pushing. It worked to a certain degree, but the pole was a bit too flimsy to really put sufficient pressure to coax the water out. Also, it kept getting caught up in the shag of the carpet. What I needed was something that would roll.

A rolling pin. We had a rolling pin. And, as a bonus, we had no foreseeable use for it in a food preparation capacity, so it was available for use on a waterlogged carpet. I retrieved it from the kitchen and got down on my knees and started rollin'.

It took about an hour, but in the end I went from producing a small lake with every roll to producing a little trickle, to finally producing pretty much nothing. The carpet was still damp, but it wasn't giving up any more excess water. Satisfied, I left the rest to the fans and went to bed. After checking the Saints-Cowboys score, of course. Yeah Saints!!!

The next night, Monday night, M had an inspiration of her own and pulled up the carpet where it was damp so that the fans could dry the floor underneath and dry the carpet from the bottom up. Between this and the rolling pin task, we managed to end up with a completely dry carpet by late Wednesday night.

In the end, the damage was minimal. The carpet still looks damp, even though it isn't, so I guess it's stained (or it's still wet in the middle, where we can't feel it?). I had a box of magazines on the carpet that got wet on the side touching the carpet, but aside from slightly damaging the issue that contained the first appearance of a now-famous person, an issue that may have had some significant monetary value among collectors, I'm not too worried about that. The sweatshirt and jeans were completely relieved of the invading chocolate, so at least it wasn't all in vain.

As I've said, we can't really blame the ice cream for all this. If it hadn't had happened on Sunday night, it probably would have happened tonight or tomorrow night, when M typically does the weekly laundry. I don't think checking the sink for sponges would have been any more likely to occur to us now than it did then (of course, we are now conditioned to check for such things, having seen what happens when you don't.) Neither of us has any recollection of using the sponge and leaving it in the sink, so the blame can't really be placed either of us (our guess is that it was on edge of the sink, where soap would be kept, and the vibrations of the washing machine finally toppled it over the edge and into the basin.) And so, we must blame the ordeal on where it began - the ice cream maker we got as a wedding present.

Given how the ice cream turns out from that thing, however, I'd say it was worth it.

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Just a heads-up, there's another new post right after this one!