Today's food expedition

Today the Unemployed Slackers Local 89 headed into downtown Boston for the Scooper Bowl: $8 (proceeds to the Dana Farber Institute) for whatever ice cream you can handle. It turned out we could handle a fair amount of it. Personal consumption:

• Edy's: Orange sherbet, Rocky Road ice cream. I was reminded that Rocky Road is not, generally speaking, my preferred ice cream (the other options there were mint chocolate chip and cookies and cream, both of which I like less). Still, not at all bad, and the sherbet was perfectly pleasant.
• Friendly's: Vienna Mocha Chunk, which was serviceable, and Nuts over Caramel, which was similar.
• Breyer's: Dulce de Leche, for which I probably needn't have broken my general rule of not eating misspelled food (it was labeled "Dulche..."). Perfectly fine, but not as great as I'd hoped (why, oh why, did they not have their strawberry or coffee, my preferred Breyer's flavors?).
• Ben & Jerry's: Jimmy Fallon's Late Night Snack, which wasn't really much better than Stephen Colbert's AmeriCone Dream, which I also hadn't liked very much; and Bonnaroo Buzz, to which the whiskey swirl didn't really add anything exciting.
• Baskin-Robbins I skipped entirely, because the options were Oreo, mint, Atomic Fireball, and S'More. (I'm told I chose wisely.)
• Ciao Bello Gelato: worth the price of admission on its own. The wild blueberry and the mango were stunning, stunning enough that we all went back for more after we'd finished our circuit of the ice cream.
• Soco Creamery: a nicely local (well, far-west part of the state, but that's still local) ice cream company, worth keeping an eye out for. The Dirty Chocolate was perhaps too strong, insofar as I'm just not that much of a chocolate fan, but the Mexicali Chocolate had a very nice flavor.
• Brigham's: Mocha Chip, which was probably fine, but really anything after the gelato was an anticlimax.

Then, because we were in the neighborhood and why not, we went to Saus and plit a large (sorry, "Belgian") pommes frites. This is how fried potatoes are supposed to be: made to order, hot out of the fryer, beautifully cooked. Plus, homemade ketchup, homemade mayonnaise—which finally made sense of the "putting mayo on fries" thing, because this was not the weird bland thick American stuff—and the Cheddar Duvel (i.e., cheddar cheese and Belgian ale), which I could easily have gotten a spoon and eaten a soup-bowl of. If you're anywhere near City Hall (and you might as well be, since the Scooper Bowl continues tomorrow), go there, it's excellent.

That was most of my day, though I went ahead and swung by the Arlington Farmers Market with another USL89 member and picked up a few things. We also had a very nice chat with the chef from Flora, who is as amiable as his food is terrific.

All things considered, a good food day.