After Eighties, a mint meltdown and a vanilla erection :)

It's somehow strange how taste for something may vary whereas other things keep tasting good or bad all the time. This event happened around 1980. The purpose of mentioning the year is to point out how long my taste has stayed unchanged. When it comes to vanilla and mint, that is.

It was a bit earlier, when I was licking a mint ice-cream cone. It was a novelty those days to have something else than vanilla-strawberry-chocolate ice-cream flavors. Everything new was appreciated. But mint was already everywhere in chocolates (After Eight), chewing gums and especially tooth pastes, which I didn't consume as much as I should have. Anyway, I suddenly - while still licking the mint cone - realized that I really didn't even like mint! I didn't dislike it either, but it was worth nothing compared to the other, old tastes. It wasn't bad, but I started to avoid mint after that incident and have done so succesfully ever after. Mints belong to toilets, if you ask me.

Soft ice (pehmis, mjukglass) came to Finland, well at least to Tampere area about 30 years ago. It was an overnight succes. Only vanilla was available in the beginning. Soon came chocolate and strawberry. I started to have those mixes too like everyone else. Then I realized that, hell, the vanilla part is what I really like. Why not take 100 % of vanilla instead of 50? I had found my taste.

At first it was only soft ice. Later I started to add vanilla sugar to cocoa, pancakes, milkshakes etc. When it comes to normal ice-cream, vanilla alone is not enough, but in soft ice it still is. It's incredible that my wife shares my taste for vanilla. Even today, as I buy vanilla soft ice, the shop assistant almost always says: "We have other flavors here too, you know." (It happened in Sweden as well) To me, vanilla is the real thing and it keeps being hard for someone else to accept. In this tolerant world, LOL!