Ice Cream Has No Bones

Perhaps you remember this jokey little ditty from your childhood:

"If you're paddling upstream in a canoe and a wheel falls off, how many pancakes fit in a doghouse?

None! Cause Ice cream doesn't have bones!"

Well, something has changed.  There is now a remote possibility your ice cream may have bones—at least if you are eating ice cream in Ecuador.

What I am about to tell you is not for the squeamish.

In many Latin American countries, guinea pigs are not just another adorable house pet.  Often, they are also what’s for dinner.  In Ecuador, a favorite dish is guinea pig prepared with salt and served with potatoes and peanut sauce.

Enter now, stage left, María del Carmen Pilapaña, owner of a tiny two-table eatery in a stall next to a highway linking the Ecuadorian capital of Quito to the city of Sangolqui.

Pilapaña recently launched a new flavor of “ice cream.”

You guessed it: guinea pig flavored Ice cream.

Pilapaña concentrates her guinea pig flavor after cooking and preparing a pate from the animal’s flesh.  She adds milk or cream and refrigerates the concoction until it has the rough consistency of ice cream. Those brave enough to taste the concoction say it tastes like…

wait for it….

wait for it…

chicken.

Well, in my hometown of East Helena, Montana, we might eat Rocky Mountain oysters (bull cow testicles), but we don’t eat chicken ice cream.  Not on purpose.

If you ever visit María del Carmen Pilapaña’s booth and are not interested in guinea pig ice cream, you might try another of her specialty flavors instead.  Perhaps you might try her beetle flavored ice cream.  Maybe mushroom flavored ice cream.

I will stick with vanilla, thank you.

—Mitchell Hegman

Source: Huffpost.com

AP Photo/Dolores Ochoa