I just stopped by to share a few things.
One: I may have a small ice cream obsession. Not exactly breaking news.
Two: My new neighbor and part-time mixmaster, Billy Friley, isn’t helping my problem. I’m grateful he went through a quarter-life crisis, camped on his grandma’s couch for a week, tasted huckleberry ice cream at a tiny creamery in Montana and had an epiphany: he decided to make ice cream his next big thing.
Three: After that revelation, Billy spent about 13 months in a small space in a parking lot off 10th Ave SE learning to make ice cream from scratch, with only a Jessica Alba poster for company. She still presides over the machine in the corner. Over the weekend, Billy gave W a quick tutorial in making homemade salted caramel ice cream. His shop is now open as Village Ice Cream, tucked in a back parking lot by the train tracks. It’s worth hunting down.
He crafts imaginative flavors like huckleberry, freshly ground cardamom (sourced from a specialty spice merchant), Girl Guide mint with homemade chocolate cookies, toasted coconut using his mother’s recipe, and, of course, salted caramel.
Four: I’ve had salted caramel before, but never like this. I’m mildly obsessed with the idea of placing a creamy scoop on top of a stack of pancakes and letting it melt luxuriously down the sides. That will happen. I’ve also heard it makes a divine float with banana bread beer.
Five: I meet interesting people and taste new things all the time, and I don’t always write about them here. Sometimes I choose not to because many readers aren’t local to Calgary; unless you’re visiting or enjoy reading about food scenes in other cities, posts like this might not feel relevant.
After we went for ice cream one day, my teenage niece helped me figure out Tumblr while we lounged on the couch. I ended up starting a small offshoot blog — a spinoff like Frasier to Cheers — that sits somewhere between a blog and Twitter. I can post quick updates from my phone, short snippets rather than the long posts I usually write here. I named it The Gullet because I liked the name, and I’m experimenting with it as part of a summertime refresh for this site. This place could use an overhaul, and I’m also switching servers soon, which should fix the slow download problems.
So that’s the news. Meet Billy: his ice cream is seriously divine. They even make their waffle cones from scratch, one at a time. If you’re going to indulge in ice cream, this is the kind worth seeking out — exactly what ice cream should be.