It’s National Ice Cream Sandwich Day. (Can’t wait to lick my fingers…)

Somehow, I missed out on National Ice Cream Day, which was celebrated on July 21st. Given that, in my view, a day without ice cream is like a day without sunshine, you’d think that I would have picked up on that one. Given that I’m fine with cloudy days, rainy days, snowy days, sleety days, it’s even worse. A day without ice cream – in my case, that’s mostly fro-yo – is like a day, well, without ice cream. Pretty much, to borrow a bit from Judith Viorst, a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

So I’m certainly not gong to let National Ice Cream Sandwich Day escape me. No siree bob, an expression more commonly used when the ice cream sandwich was invented in 1899.

I pretty much like sandwiches of all sorts: toasted cheese, PBJ, tuna, BLT. But ice cream sandwiches hold an especially sweet spot in my heart.

We always had ice cream in the freezer when I was growing up. (Some things never change.) And sometimes that ice cream came in the shape of an ice cream sandwich: two slabs of soggy, no-flavor chocolate cookie surrounding what was likely fake vanilla ice cream. Yum! Nothing compares with the delight of licking the last of that sticky, gloppy, fall-apart cookie off your fingers.

A few decades ago, the Chipwich came on the scene, a treat that combined two of my faves – a chocolate chip cookie and ice cream – in one delish little package. Nice but, as it happens, the chocolate chip cookie part was never as good as a homemade Toll House Cookie. Plus, as I recall, they contained a ton of calories.

Anyway, I haven’t had one of them in years. But now that I think of it, slathering some vanilla ice cream between two almost-homemade-tasting Tate’s chocolate chip cookies might work out pretty well. Calories be damned!

But before I do that, I think I’ll poke my head into Roche Bros. this morning – after I go to the gym – and see whether they carry Hood Ice Cream Sandwiches.

And if they do, I will get me a box. And I’ll do so despite how the killjoys at Fooducate have rated the Hood Ice Cream sandwich. Which is to give it a grade of C- for containing all sorts of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad ingredients. Sugar. Trans fats. High fructose corn syrup. Artificial coloring. (What’s colored in an ice cream sandwich? Do they bleach the ice cream? Dye the cookie brownie-brown? Maybe I shouldn’t have read the review.) Plus they contain carageenan, which sounds like a town in Ireland, but which “in animal studies…  was shown to cause intestinal lacerations and tumors.” Swell!

Despite the risk of tumor, I’m leaning towards the Hood Ice Cream Sandwich because:

Here we have the classic ice cream sandwich…an oblong of vanilla ice cream between two rectangular chocolate cookies neatly stippled with holes. All is as it should be. There is tradition here. There is ritual. Are you a biter? Or do you linger, licking around the edges so the ice cream grows smaller and smaller and the cookies’ edges finally collapse around it? (Source: Boston Globe)

My approach is hybrid, a combo biting and licking.

However we choose to live our ice cream sandwich-consuming lives, we all meet the same end: sucking sticky cookie residue off our fingertips after everything else is gone. Thus it has been all of our lives — visiting the ice cream truck, at camp, on hot evenings at dusk when the fireflies start to come out. And thus it should always be.

Yes!

So I’ll definitely be on the lookout for a box of Hood’s Ice Cream Sandwiches today. I haven’t noticed – because I haven’t been on the lookout – but I’m guessing Roche Bros. will come through. They’re local. Hood is local. And Hood sold 2 million boxes last year. Surely some came out of the freezer at Roche Bros.

The Globe article mentioned some riffs on the ice cream sandwich theme, including one made with a Blackbird donut and soft serve ice cream.

I will confess to a fondness for Blackbird donuts, a fondness that I generally indulge in a couple of times a year as a reward for getting a long walk in on a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad weather day, which we have plenty of around here. While I don’t mind these sorts of days – I’m a New Englander, after all – they are not great for walking, and the thought of rewarding myself with a chocolate honey dip at the end of a hike to the South End or the Fenway area is enough to keep me putting one foot in front of the other.

Ah, Blackbird. A donut that will quite literally melt in your mouth. So (almost) worth it at $3 a donut (about a buck more than a Dunk’s). But I wouldn’t care to have it made into an ice cream sandwich. Bye bye, Blackbird, on that notion. I’ll stick with the Hood version. Roche Bros., don’t fail me now!