It may be February, cold and rainy, but we can still dream about summer. The other night, we had root-beer floats for dessert and they were perfect. Our favorite babysitter had the inspiration to get ice-cream (french vanilla) and cream soda. There were a couple of root-beers in the fridge, holding down a back corner of one of the shelves, and voila: dessert was made. We were divided on cream-soda versus root-beer. I'm a purist on that one.
It's hard to beat this dessert. We used to go to the drive-up A&W for chili dogs and floats when I was a kid and something about that creamy, fizzy concoction always says summer and fun to me.
When I was lucky enough to be relatively penniless in Greece for a week one summer, a long time ago, I convinced the woman at the cafe in the village I was staying in to mix me a float. She didn't have root-beer, and she didn't have vanilla (or maybe our language difficulties got in the way on that one) and she really didn't *want* to mix soda and ice-cream. I finally convinced her to sell me a glass of sprite and a dish of pistachio ice-cream. I plopped the ice-cream into the soda glass and handed her back the dish. Talk about the right kind of summer lunch! For the next few days, she sold me the ice-cream and soda, always in separate dishes, and looked disgusted when I handed her back the ice-cream dish.
I'm sure I didn't do the american tourist any favors, and I haven't heard about a new ice-cream-float craze in Greece since then. But sitting on the sidewalk, watching a couple of kids play, feeling the heavy heat and sunshine pour down after a morning of visiting ruins - well, it doesn't get much better than that.
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