For those of you who are not up on their condiment-based holidays, this past Saturday was National Mustard Day. In honor of that day, French’s Mustard decided to do something a little wacky. Specifically, they teamed up with Coolhaus ice cream to make a mustard flavored ice cream. Yes, really.

I was immediately intrigued. You know how sometimes things that sound like they’d be terrible are actually pretty good? So maybe this was like that. However, this limited-edition treat was only going to be available in a few locations – unaccountably, Anchorage was not one of them. But not to fear! McCormick published the recipe for home cooks to give it a try.

On reading the recipe, the ingredients didn’t sound too crazy. However, it is a no-churn recipe that has you mixing it up in a blender, which did sound dubious. I have an ice cream maker which I am perfectly happy to whip out at a moment’s notice. And while my blender certainly tries its best, I did not feel like it was going to be up to this level of blending. So I wasn’t sure about that, but decided to follow the directions.

Then there was the pretzel brittle recipe. It calls for malted milk powder and nonfat milk powder, which are not things I have lying around the house, and wouldn’t use if I did. Mustard ice cream sounds interesting, but not something that justified specialized ingredients. However, a quick Google search brought up a couple pretzel brittle recipes, so I picked one and went with it. This part is my fault – I have a great peanut brittle recipe that works perfectly every time, so why I didn’t just make that and put in pretzels instead of peanuts I don’t know. But I didn’t.

Sunday morning we started on our dessert experiment early, so it would have time to chill. The blender blended away with mixed success. What mostly happened was the cream near the blades got really whipped, while the cream on top and out on the far sides didn’t get blended at all. But it got close enough. So that went in the freezer as per directions.

Then we made the brittle(which was not McCormick’s recipe, but a random recipe I got off the internet). It was not a success. It got hard as a rock and yet stayed sticky. You could kind of eat it by just sucking it like hard candy, but then the pretzel bits were mushy. Bleah. It went in the trash, as I was afraid one of us was going to break a tooth.

Then it was time for the ice cream to come out of the freezer. DH declined to be involved. Mom and I decided to just try a spoonful each before we committed to dishing any out.

We took up our spoons. It was… not bad, exactly. The closest description is vanilla ice cream with – for some reason – mustard sauce on it. Mom and I tasted and reflected. “It’s… OK, I guess” Mom said. “Yes,” I agreed, “But I wouldn’t fight anyone for the last bowlful.” “No,” she said.

And there it has sat, in the freezer, lurking. Every evening since, one of us has brought it up. “There’s the mustard ice cream…” one of us will tentatively say. “Yes”, the other will agree. And then we don’t get bowls and spoons and eat any of it. So tomorrow I am throwing it out. Every once in a while it’s good to have a reminder that when things sound like they are going to be terrible, sometimes they are really good. But sometimes they aren’t.

How about you? Tried any weird food lately?