Things I Love Thursday: Shave Ice

 

Pregnancy and summertime are not the world's best combination. I am hot ALL THE TIME. Luckily, just down the road is a shave ice stand, and man, do I love that stuff.

In the past, I was a bit of a snow cone snob. As a teenager I spent one grueling summer slaving away at the Snow Shack, stuck in a blue metal box and surrounded by sticky sweet syrups. (Imagine how grueling it really was to sit on my duff eating snocones all day. I was addicted to playing all the contests on the radio, and even won a CD and a pair of concert tickets. To the B52s, which I did not attend but I heard was a pretty wild party.) Anyway, I grew to love the snocone and to feel a bit of maternal instinct regarding its' production and consumption. I can't believe some people make snocones without poking a hole with the straw first for the syrup to run down. Sheesh.

So for a long time I would not venture away from the traditional snocone. But now I've tried the shave ice, and I must admit, it is a thousand times better. According to wikipedia,

"Shave ice or Hawaiian shave ice is an ice-based dessert made by shaving a block of ice. While the product can resemble a snow cone, snow cones are made with crushed, rather than shaved, ice.

Shaving produces a very fine ice that appears snow-like. This extremely fine texture causes syrups added to it to be absorbed by the ice rather than simply surrounding."

So now you know. Somehow shaving the ice makes it taste better. And that is just what I need on days like today. Or like the other night when I was at my girl's Tball game and 5 different people within the space of 20 minutes came up to me and said, "Wow, you must be so hot." It's true, I was hot, and I used their comment as an excuse to get a little frozen treat on the way home.