My Personal Challenge

Hi, My name is Kathy, I'm an ice cream addict.
Ice cream is my go to comfort food. I want to eat better but I have a hard time walking through the freezer aisle at my local grocery store without stopping. There are so many interesting flavors out there.
I love reading books about food. I'm currently rereading The Omnivore's Dilemma for the dozenth time. I particularly love books that have an element of a challenge in them like The 100 Mile Diet, or Animal Vegetable Miracle. In both of those books the authors strive to eat only local foods for one year. I love the idea of becoming a locavore, and eventually I intend to feed my family mainly on foods that I've grown myself. Right now with two little girls under three years old I can't even keep my basil plant alive. (To be fair to myself it I did manage to keep it alive until we went away, during a heat wave, for a week.)
Michael Pollan collected folk wisdom about food into a book called Food Rules. One of the rules has played itself over and over in my head.
"Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself."
What really hits home in this rule is where he points out that the treats we consume regularly like fried foods, sodas etc used to be expensive and hard to make. This made them truly treats. Now food manufacturers have made them so easily accessible that we can, and do, eat them much more regularly. "If you made all the french fries you ate, you would eat them much less often, if only because they're so much work. The same holds true for fried chicken, chips, cakes, pies and ice cream."

I want to set myself a challenge. I'm not in a place in my life where I can do something extreme like No Impact Man. I wear too many hats right now to extend this challenge further - though I suspect I will add other foods to this list as my children become more independent and I can spend more time in the kitchen.

For the next year, (once the ice cream in my freezer is gone) I will only eat ice cream I've made myself.

This will be interesting since I have only made a shoddy kick-the-can vanilla ice cream before.