Too Much Dairy

Recently, my wife and I received an ice-cream maker. It's been fun to experiment with various flavors, such as cinnamon ice cream or blueberry-bananna ice cream. However, the drawback is that, when I look at the list of ingredients for a recipe, I often don't understand what they want me to get. Much of this lack of understanding comes to my lack of awareness concerning the great variety of dairy products out there. I can't keep them all straight. And what is even worse is that they do not go by the same names in the recipes that they do in the grocery stores. For instance, my wife sent me out to find "regular" milk. I searched the highways and byways for some dairy product that went by the name "regular milk," but it wasn't there. Apparently, it's called "whole" milk, because all other milks are woefully inadequate and incomplete, what with lacking all that fat. Perhaps it's like the old days, back when we had "skim milk," before this "fat free" nonsense. It's kind of like switching to a new system of measurement or fragmenting the Soviet Union or something: "Come on, everybody, throw out your old odometers, we're going metric!" "Come on, everybody, Communism has been destroyed, throw out your old maps!" "Come on, everybody, throw out your old recipe books, now we're using fat-free milk!" While buying new globes because we have gotten rid of Communist dictatorships is okay in my book, having to do away with the old recipe books because we've bought into newfangled products like fat free milk is unconscionable.

People have not only ruined milk's good name; they have made cream confusing. My wife sent me to the grocery store in search of something called "heavy cream." In my naivete, I thought there was a substance out there that would say "heavy cream," and everything else would have titles that didn't say "heavy cream." But I was surrounded by different forms of milk, be it evaporated milk (how can this be?), half and half, creamer (it says cream in the title, is that it?), "heavy whipping cream," and "heavy whipped cream." How in the world could I figure out what I was supposed to get?

To put this in perspective: imagine that you are a monotheist who has just been sent by your wife to the local polytheist temple for altar-shopping. MONO: "Uh--can--can I have an altar to God?" CLERK: "Which god, sonny?" MONO: "Uh, I--uh, my wife said there was only supposed to be one. Uh, 'The God,' maybe?" CLERK: "Oh. Do you mean Zeus?" MONO: "Um, I thought--I thought his name was just God. I don't know. I left my cell phone back home. Maybe she meant this Zeus product of which you speak." And then the happy go lucky monotheist returns home with what he thinks is the perfect altar gift, when he gets home, his wife she starts screaming, WIFEO: "NO, you complete idiot! You went out and bought a false god! Do you want the only true God to smite us?" MONO: "But honey, the signs were all confusing, and I think they were out of God--" WIFEO: "You didn't look close enough! Do I have to do all the worshipping for you?"

Now, my wife didn't behave that way. My point is that shopping for someone else can be a very exhausting experience, especially when no item exactly matches what you wrote down, and your inductive skills when applied to groceries are not stellar. Frankly, I can't even understand how these products exist: I understand that, even if cream is fairly liquidy, it can be "whipped," but how in the world can it get a present participle like "whipping?" How does milk evaporate and still end up all liquidy? I may consume dairy, but I can never comprehend it.