God Bless Haagen Dazs

What makes everybody happy? Ice cream! What makes single women who live alone happy? Tiny ice creams!

Yeah, I know, IR's. Y'all have families and spouses and whatnot, and your ice cream disappears. Meanwhile, if I eat genuine ice cream like Haagen Dazs, and I adhere to my Weight Watchers points, it starts to grow ice crystals that look suspiciously like fur. And if it doesn't...well, the scale lets me know. (It's like that horror movie "I Know What You Did Last Summer." But the scale's version is "I Know What You Ate Last Night: You'll Never Get Away With It!")

So when I found baby tubs of Haagen Dazs and baby vanilla almond ice cream bars, I was thrilled. Of course, they're crazy expensive (it helped that PathMark had them for half price with their store card), and they're still almost 300 calories apiece, but there are few surer ways to ensure that my binge potential is reined in. And I don't even want to know what the full-size versions weigh in at. I'll stick to the minis as my reward for a truly wretched week at work.

I think Ben & Jerry's is also doing single-service cups. Economically they horrify me, and they're definitely the hallmark of western overindulgence, but it is great to see an actual serving of ice cream anywhere outside my own home. I can't help but remember the first time that I realized that a service of my favorite Blue Bunny ice cream was something like 1/4 cup (about two days into joining Weight Watchers, if memory serves). It seemed absolutely insane--I put it in a children's rice bowl, because every other vessel in the house made it look positively Liliputian. Now I mostly don't bother. It's hardly worth getting the tub out of the freezer to get such a small serving, and I like other treats better anyway. But every once in a while, these little babies are just what the doctor ordered!