So, the World Cup has ended, Spain won on a rather uneventful note, no Blue-and-White ice cream I could make (as promised in the previous post) in the event Argentina won (or alternatively, if Uruguay with any remote possibility did actually win) and no way am I experimenting making a Red-and-Yellow ice cream (as a tribute to Spanish colours) because any ingredient originally red usually turns bright pink when converted into ice cream form.
It will just look ridiculous.
And for more than two weeks this blog has gone sterile. Was I cutting back on sleep to watch the World Cup and ran out of time for blogging? Not at all. Have I simply stopped making ice cream for two weeks? Not exactly either.
And here's what it was: I just didn't felt like making anything worth blogging about. It was the same-old-same-old working on past techniques I developed and fine-tuning the rehashed recipes over again and again because the human taste and palette evolves organically over time and what you make goes through phases of reinvention.
But that doesn't mean I wasn't scheming about what to do next while resuming my voracious appetite for reading (a periodical process of more input and less output). Which usually sets me thinking. And comprehending. And seeing things a little differently.
But what I did earlier today got me thinking more than anything else. (Well, just a little context about what I did today: Teaming up with more than a dozen of the tireless folks who are employees from Singapore Tourism Board, we headed to a home for kids to teach the little ones the basics of making ice cream. It was purely charitable on their part to want to spend some time mingling and getting to know the kids from the home.)
And boy, it was rowdy (as expected) with more than 20 of them. But the kids were more into it than any group I have ever encountered. They sure beat any adult group any day in wanting to do something! Most importantly, they didn't mind the endless stirring and the seemingly mindless task of mixing one ingredient after another without really understanding what the heck they were really doing it for. Or the fact that they had to toss a bag of emulsion in a larger bag of ice. And freezing their fingers off in the process.
All they were interested in was the payoff. The payoff that they were going to eat what they made and seeing for themselves the transformation of that brown messy mushy squishy emulsion turn into solid ice cream.
Damn right, I'll pay anything for that kind of fascination. It is a payoff in itself for me. Because with fascination, you can take everything and anything you ever read or know about making ice cream (or making anything for that matter) and toss it right out the window. You rely less on theory, and more on doing. You don't really know how it turns out, because you just can't wait to get there and find out for yourself by making it from scratch.
I think in the right environment, kids or adults can rely on their natural curiosity to get them through from fascination to boredom to routine to overhauling the establishment and back to fascination again.
And I think the bottomline of what I'm getting at is this: I'm really glad I agreed to do this ice cream making gig for the kids on an absolutely washed out Saturday morning. It really reminds you what you were in it for in the first place. To re-live that fascination of making something out of nothing while knowing close to nothing about what you were doing in the first place.
And that's fun.
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