Culture No. 17: Hillside Farms

I love ice cream.

I love it so much that I could stop writing right this instant and still totally consider this a well-thought out and legitimate post. That is how much I love it. Enough to not even attempt to explain my love. It is sonnet-worthy. Ballad-worthy. I'm kind of a big fan.

Good ice cream is hard to find. There’s decent ice cream, of course. And okay froyo. And I’m-having-a-fat-day Italian ice. (Ice cream should never - at any point - exist in a powdered form ipso facto soft serve is not ice cream and shall not be discussed here.) Generally speaking, I have discovered two important factors in deeming ice cream “good:”

1. It must be American.

I know it’s July 5^th and all, but I promise I’m not trying to pull a patriot act here. I have just never had good ice cream outside of the States. (Minus the Ben & Jerry’s in London, but I don’t think that counts…) It’s either too icy or too…gelato. And there are never enough crunchy bits. (Read this post for my feelings on the appropriate level of crunch.) Conversely, there are some desserts that the US of A can never seem to quite pull off either. Crème brulee, for example.

2. It must be from a farm. (Extra points if it’s a stinky farm.)

The goodness of a particular kind of ice cream is directly proportional to the proximity of its producing cows. The closer the cow, the better the ice cream. Pretty simple.

In New York, we had Stewart’s. (Not a farm, granted, but when you’re Upstate, the farms are close enough.) In Connecticut, we had Tulmeadow. (Extra points for extra stink. Omg, that place reeks.) In Virginia, I almost died because Southerners don’t eat ice cream. (Hence, why they lost. The universe couldn't handle the perpetuation of such a travesty.) In Massachusetts, I had Stewart’s again. (Thanks to the close proximity of Vermont.) And in Pennsyltucky, we have Hillside.

Hillside Farms is a 412 acre processing dairy farm - the last of its kind in Luzerne County. The farm was originally built in 1881 as a summer estate for a coal-brokering Scotsman. In 1997, his descendants built an ice cream parlor and dairy store on the property, which was turned over as a nonprofit in 2005. They have beautiful gardens, a store full of delicious-looking local products, and a lot of educational programs, but - in case you only started reading this post at the beginning of this paragraph - I am pretty much all about the ice cream.

When Mama V. came down a few weeks ago, we brought her up to the farm one night so she could give it a go. She had a Whitehouse Cherry. I had a Red Raspberry with chocolate sprinkles. (Bert, being Southern, did not have anything and was forced to play photographer.) As you can see, both flavors were delicious and consumed in no time flat. (No lie: this is the best photo of the bunch. We were too preoccupied to be photogenic.)

After we polished off our cones, we roamed around the grounds for a bit. The Momster immediately connected with the pond full of ducks, while I tried to convince Bert that we needed to rescue the farm's two barn cats. (It didn't work. Nora's got him on her payroll.) Mama V. also totally blew me away by knowing the name of every single flower in their gardens. (Or at least making them up with authority.) Here I thought trophy wife-ing was all about cooking and tennis lessons. Now I have to know plants too?