7: What I know to be true: Beeeeeeautiful!

Bumble bees are important. I know this.  Häagen-Dazs knows this for sure. They donate some of their proceeds from every sale to help honey bees, totaling over $700,000 in bee-saving help according to their website! This is fantastic, but a lot of the bee-saving help needs to come from us. Every day little things that we can do to help save the bees and keep around the every day indulgences that we take for granted. Without the bees, there wouldn’t just be no more Häagen-Dazs ice cream to indulge in. There would be:

• Apples
• Mangos
• Kiwi
• Plums
• Peaches
• Nectarines
• Guava
• Pomegranites
• Pears
• Strawberries
• Onions
• Cashews
• Apricots
• Avocados
• Lima Beans
• Kidney Beans
• Green Beans
• Cherries
• Celery
• Coffee
• Walnut
• Cotton
• Macadamia Nuts
• Lemons
• Limes
• Quince
• Carrots
• Cucumber
• Hazelnut
• Cantaloupe
• Tangelos
• Chestnut
• Watermelon
• Coconut
• Tangerines
• Boysenberries
•  Beets
• Broccoli
• Cauliflower
• Cabbage
• Chili peppers, red peppers, bell peppers, green peppers
• Eggplant
• Raspberries
• Elderberries
• Blackberries
• Cocoa
• Vanilla
• Cranberries
• Tomatoes
• Grapes

AND THAT’S JUST NAMING A FEW! This isn’t counting the obvious things, like the beeswax used in hair, skin and makeup products, which are a favorite of mine because of their sensitivity to skin. These foods and products are just a small portion of what will be gone when the bees are gone.

An apple farm in China recently had to start using humans working as the bees by pollinating each individual flower with a paintbrush. While the work was done just as well, and the economy in that area rose (people get paid and spend their paychecks, bees just do their job and save some pollen for their own use), the effect was simply not the same. Apples grew, sure, but would we rather individually pollinate every flower, just to have the same foods we take for granted every day now, or do our part to save the bees, no matter how small?

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One of the easiest ways we can all help the bees is by growing a garden, but with most of us being VCU students, we really don’t have the room for a garden. Think smaller! A few potted plants on a fire escape or on a front porch won’t take up much room and will impress your parents when they come for a visit.

Here are some easy plants to try out this spring, just be sure to wait until there is no more chance of a frost to take them outside. Starting them easy from seeds inside your house is another easy and cheap way to grow plants. Just remember that 7 year olds can grow plants, so can you!

Lavender is a pretty purple flower that can also be cut and dried to be kept in your house!

Herbs!

Lavender, catmint, sage, cilantro, thyme and fennel are all great for bees and can be easily picked up as seed packets from your local Lowes, Home Depot, Target or Wal-Mart. These seed packets will cost you no more than a couple dollars each and can be used for your own cooking whenever you want! Double duty!

Zinnia’s a hearty flower that can be grown in pots. They need lots of sun though!

Flowers!

Try to pick bright colored flowers of several different colors to attract the bees. Blues, purples, whites and yellows attract bees the best. Zinnia is a flowering plant that can be easily started from seeds and won’t die immediately when you forget to water them for a couple days. They also come in seed packets that are a mix of colors, so it’ll be a surprise as to what you get. Don’t be afraid to mix flower seeds together either. Bees come in different sizes and look for different sized flowers.

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To continue to enjoy Häagen-Dazs, we need bees. To continue to enjoy a lot of the little daily indulgences we take for granted every day, we need bees. Keep ice cream as the indulgent treat we all love. Plant something outside this spring and do your part to help the bees!

6: What I know to be true: Fully baked

I know that I am damn good at baking! I bake white bread from scratch every weekend. When I feel fancy, I bake cinnamon rolls. This isn’t the baking that starts with a frozen loaf of bread from Wal-Mart, which is what both my mother and grandmother do. This is the baking that says “I buy yeast in jars, not packets, and the flour that reads ‘Better for bread’.”

But I know what you’re thinking. Ice cream and bread don’t mix, unless if it is in some sort of ice cream sandwich or pie scenario. That’s where you’d be wrong! Ice cream bread is a thing that exists. I didn’t know it existed until recently either and I know my breads pretty well. Like I said, I buy yeast in the largest container they sell at Kroger.

Since I make fresh bread as a daily indulgence in my life, why not combine two different indulgences? Fancy ice cream and fancy bread maker should work right?

The ingredients! Flour, baking powder, salt, and Butter Pecan Haagen-Dazs.

The Process:

This stuff would not melt together. It looks lumpy and not at all like a bread or cake dough, even as I try to melt it. I have very little faith in this now… Time to bake it for 45 minutes and see what we end up with!

The batter looks gross. I don’t trust it.

The Final Product:

Looks promising…

This is… not what I expected a recipe billed as “Ice Cream Bread” to taste like.  It’s cooked! It has turned into a bread-like consistency! If I were to make it again, I would add sugar. Heaps of sugar. This seems like a novelty the way it is. “See what I can bake with 2 main ingredients?!” Yes. I do. And it tastes like flour.

Actual photo of my first bite of this so-called-bread.

What I learned: These two indulgences were hard to combine during the mixing process. It doesn’t have the same indulgent satisfaction that I get from baking my own fresh bread. The dough rising and the house smelling like victory! None of that. After it baked, this is still not an indulgence. This is weird, bad tasting, breakfast bread that cost me more than cinnamon rolls do to make. And cinnamon rolls always taste good!

I learned that these two indulgences of mine cannot be combined into one, much better indulgence. My experiment was a failure in product, but now I know that Haagen-Dazs stands alone as an indulgence ice cream.

5: What I know to be true: Clean house?

Something I know to be true is that I hate studying. I hate household chores. I hate cleaning. I hate things that are obligations unless if there is a reward at the end of it. A good grade is often not enough of a reward for me. I’d rather just lay around, watching bad TV and not doing the things I need to do. In order to get anything done in my life, I have a system of treating myself with sweets or an activity that I want to do. I won’t let myself bake brownies until I finish cleaning the kitchen. I won’t let myself dye my hair (a favorite activity) until I read everything for my class the next day.

This is where Häagen-Dazs comes into play. Since it is an indulgence to get this nice ice cream, it isn’t the kind of thing you would get for any old occasion. Häagen-Dazs should be a reward: the ultimate reward! This isn’t the reward I give myself when I clean all the dishes in the sink. This is the reward of “I cleaned the whole apartment and didn’t just dust all the dirt on the floor under the fridge!”

This weekend, I set up to test this theory. How long could I clean my whole apartment before I gave up and needed a treat? Would I get further because there was a larger reward at the end? Would I give up halfway through because I wanted the ice cream too badly to continue?

LET’S FIND OUT!

An entire sink full of dishes. Most of them with food still stuck on.

The Verdict!

I managed to do an entire sink full of dishes, emptying the drying rack halfway through to continue, which I would have not normally done. I always do dishes until there is no more drying room and give up. I call this a victory!

There aren’t even food bits left in the sink!

All in all, the Haagen-Dazs wasn’t enough of an indulgence/reward to keep me cleaning my whole house, but it did keep me cleaning more than I normally would have. I’ve figured out now that Haagen-Dazs is an indulgence. It’s something you have because you feel like you deserve it because you are just plain awesome! It is not the ice cream that you eat as a reward for a job well done.
Indulgence=redefined!

SUCCESS! kind of… Now I have a dirty spoon to clean.

4: Comfort Zone: Sweet ice cream and salty tears

Crying and eating ice cream. It would be a cliche if it wasn’t already true.

Stupid boy in your class rejected your date offer? Stupid girl stood you up on a coffee date you had been looking forward to all week? Stupid cat prefers to sleep at the cold, foot of the bed instead of being hugged tightly by you all night because your roommate turned off the heat? The answer to all of these problems can be crying and eating ice cream.

But what makes crying and eating Häagen-Dazs different? Häagen-Dazs is an indulgence. It is not the ice cream you eat just for any occasion, let alone every crying occasion! There needs to be some real heartbreak involved for a Häagen-Dazs infused crying fest. This is where my story of eating Häagen-Dazs all night and crying starts. Not just with any old ice cream.

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Last year, I had a few months where nothing seemed to go right. I was having trouble in school, with both my grades and whether or not I actually wanted to be here. I was doing poorly at my job and since most of my friends were work friends, they all knew that I was doing poorly and had decided that that would be a great topic of conversation whenever we hung out together. On top of all that, I felt like my friend circles were all changing and that I didn’t really have anyone to turn to during this time.

One night, I finally had had enough and called a friend that I had not spoken to in several weeks and told her that I needed someone to talk to about my problems. Just someone to pass a few hours with. For me, this was especially difficult and a moment where I was not at all comfortable with what I was saying to her over the phone. It worked out in my favor though. Within 5 minutes, I received another call from her. She was at Kroger and wanted to know my favorite ice cream flavor. She’d be at my house very soon. “Chocolate. Anything with chocolate,” was the only response I could get out in between the sobs. I never said a brand name, but my friend seemed to already know that dramatic moments call for a more dramatic ice cream like Häagen-Dazs.

While the night ended perfectly fine, with both of us crying, blowing our noses a lot, wiping the smeared mascara away from our eyes and eating 2 whole containers of chocolate Häagen-Dazs, it was a moment that really put me out of my comfort zone. I’m not normally a person to ask for help and prefer to handle my problems myself, but I stepped out of my box and learned that it was all perfectly okay. My friend did not think any less of me for asking for help and the time spent together made our friendship stronger.

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I’m not saying that had my friend showed up to my door with Ben and Jerry’s, that it would have been a completely different night. The same thing would have happened. We would have cried, eaten ice cream and told stories about bad dates just like we did with the Häagen-Dazs. But I think there is a certain aspect of caring that comes with the nicer ice cream. It wasn’t an ordinary night, so it called for an extraordinary ice cream.

3: Thinking Outside the Box/ Comfort Zone: Keep on (Ice Cream) Truckin’

Hand-drawn ice cream truck, complete with giant plastic cone on top.

Accent color for trim of ice cream truck.

Main body color for ice cream truck.

Häagen-Dazs is credited with being the first company to make ice cream bars marketed to adults. Before then, ice cream bars were seem as a treat for kids. No self-respected adult would be caught dead with an ice cream sandwich, unless if they knew and were confident in the pure joy caused by ice cream sandwiches. Häagen-Dazs started making ice cream bars that were rich in nice ingredients, which adults could treat themselves with and not feel like they were a child, or stealing from the kid’s dessert stash.

To further this idea, I considered ice cream trucks. Ice cream trucks are a very child-like thing to enjoy. Sure, there are adults that still run out to the street when they hear the ‘Pop goes the Weasel’ tune, but like with the ice cream bars before Häagen-Dazs, those adults are invading on a child only world. Häagen-Dazs could open up a new world to adults like they did with ice cream bars by starting ice cream trucks for adults. The trucks would carry the same ice cream bars and sandwiches that children love and know to be delicious, but made with the quality ingredients that Häagen-Dazs is famous for.

I have also included a few color squares for the simple truck design, to give it a retro feel. Even if adults grew used to the idea of an ice cream truck just for them, it would still have a nostalgic feel to them and to me, nostalgia says 1950’s diners.

2: Comfort Zone: A non-dairy hospital

A view from my hospital bed after having been there a few days. All of my coffee creamers were non-dairy as well. The flower was a gift from my lovely nurses who helped me in so many ways!

For the past week, I have been sick in the hospital with an atypical pneumonia that sparked a lot of underlying asthma which I’ll now be dealing with for the rest of my life. I was bed-ridden for a week. Every 4 hours I was checked for my blood pressure and temperature and given a 20 minute breathing treatment. The 4 am breathing treatments were the worst. Every morning between 4 am and 6 am, a technician would come into my room and take blood for testing. Sometimes it was 1 tube, sometimes it was as many as 8 tubes. Every 6 hours, I was given steroids and antibiotics through an IV. After 5 days, my IV was changed from my left elbow to my right hand, but not before it was tried in my right wrist and hit a valve, leaving a lot of blood and a bruise. The next day it was discovered that my IV in my left elbow had developed a minor blood clot. The steroids I was given raised my blood sugar to dangerous levels, so I was tested with finger pricks and given insulin 4 times every day. Every day at 4 pm, my nurse would give me a shot in my stomach to prevent blood clots in my legs that come from being confined to a bed. Since the steroids accelerated my heart rate to over 120 bpm, I was not allowed to walk any further than the bathroom in my room, and even that 10 feet walk left me breathless and wheezing. I could not keep my blood oxygen level at a safe level, leaving me to be hooked up to an oxygen tank for the whole week on both a nose mask and a mouth tent.

Despite all these set backs, I am doing well now. I will be carrying an inhaler around with me for the rest of my life and probably taking some sort of medication to help with any underlying allergies and breathing problems.

Since being released from the hospital, I am on 9 different medications, including one that I cannot take with any sort of dairy. After being poked, prodded, stabbed with needles, made bleed, and bruised for a week, the only thing I want is a giant container of ice cream all to myself and that is the one thing I can’t have.

Thankfully, Häagen-Dazs Sorbet is dairy free and  almost as satisfying as eating an entire pint of super chocolate ice cream. Now, I can eat my handfuls of pills every morning and evening with sorbet and mentally recover from my week spent in the hospital.

1: Thinking outside the box/Comfort Zone: Pistachio Mustachio

Hand-drawn image of my mock-up for the packaging of Movember ice cream.

Color for the main body of the container.

Color for the lid, which fits with the gold color often used by Häagen-Dazs.

For my first objective to think outside the box, I decided I would first make lists and from those lists I found a few things that I consider to be a stretch for Häagen-Dazs. Häagen-Dazs does a lot of charity work to help honey bees, so I considered what other organizations they could easily help. After looking through their flavors, I saw their pistachio flavor, which is my brothers favorite and a difficult one to locate in other brands. After some choice puns, pistachio flavored ice cream themed to No-Shave November (Movember).

My idea is that Häagen-Dazs could run a special flavor for November that would donate some of the revenue to charities focused on prostate cancer, which is the main focus of Movember. This is in line with Häagen-Dazs’ previous mission of donating money to charities and helping the community, while still being outside of the box for them to run with a charity not directly tied to the deliciousness of ice cream.

With my drawing of the packaging for the Movember Special Pistachio ice cream, I have included the pantone colors for the packaging, including a pistachio green for the body of the container and a Honey Gold for the lid, which is in keeping with the normal Häagen-Dazs colors and looks awesome with the light green!