Mt. Tom's Homemade Ice Cream (Easthampton, MA)

Mt. Tom's Homemade Ice Cream
34 Cottage Street
Easthampton, Massachusetts
413-529-2929

From almost the first minute that we arrived in Massachusetts our friend Vanessa was raving about Mt. Tom's Homemade Ice Cream. It took us a few days to get there, which is probably good, since I wanted to go every single day after that.

Mt. Tom's is named after the nearby mountain, and is in the heart of Easthampton. Not only do they sell fresh, homemade ice cream, they sell candy too. Vanessa told me about the dark chocolate with almond and sea salt and I couldn't wait to taste it.

It was so, so good. I wanted to marry it. There were many awesome sounding flavors though, and Warren & Satchel had a hard time choosing.

Ultimately, Warren had to go with Maple Bacon and Satchel simply can't pass up anything coconut.

Jiro, my littlest monkey, nearly got himself disowned when he opted to get candy rather than ice cream.

His crazy half brother followed suit. They seemed happy, so I let it go, but dang.

Mt. Tom's sells ice cream by the pint, and it's actually just a dollar more than a large cup. For that reason alone, I'd have my freezer bustin' if we lived nearby. Actually, on our last night in town, Vanessa, Jiro and I made a late night Mt. Tom's run and totally stocked up. I tasted several more flavors on that trip and they were all awesome. I had to go back to the dark chocolate with almond and sea salt though.

Jiro finally tried the ice cream--coconut almond fudge--and admitted it was better than candy.

We can also highly recommend the burnt sugar and peanut butter banana. Yum.

Mt. Tom's, I love you. Won't you be mine?

La Casita Azteca (Easthampton, MA)

La Casita Azteca
58 Cottage Street
Easthampton, MA

(413) 203-5050

After our hike up Mt. Tom, we were in need of food. Liz & Vanessa's friends suggested we try La Casita Azteca. They said it wasn't the best Mexican food in town, but it had great outdoor seating, which would be good for both the kids and our dog.

I loved it from the minute we saw it.

Even Satchel was impressed. "This is nice," he said. We had some disagreement about where to sit, but eventually settled on one of the picnic tables in as much shade as possible. The service was fairly laidback so it took awhile to get menus, drinks, etc.

We were able to secure Juaritos for the kids and drinks for ourselves. After a quick trip inside to use the restroom, I noticed that most people were drinking sangria. I couldn't resist trying one myself. I went for the mango.

Once we all had a drink, we put our orders in. There was a pretty decent kids' menu which had what the kids wanted--taquitos, rice, and beans. By default they came with lettuce and salsa so I had to do some adjusting, which later proved problematic. As for the adults, we had a hard time deciding for ourselves since the menu was a bit different from what you'd normally see. Liz was especially perplexed and was never quite happy with her order. I think we were all just hungry. Chips and salsa don't come free, so we ordered some to keep everyone calm.

The salsa was pretty unusual, and definitely not the best I'd ever had, but we ate it because we were hungry. The kids played tic tac toe and drew pictures.

When they tired of that we played many rousing rounds of 20 Questions. Satchel had us all stumped with his person, who ended up being "the boy who saw Mommy's butt at the beach." Yes, a poor child happened to see me changing near the car. Butt humor is hilarious to the 6-9 year old set.

The food came out pretty quickly and everyone dug in. Liz soon realized that the soup she got was almost exactly like the salsa, which was kind of funny. The kids' taquitos weren't fried as usual, but they were hungry enough not to care.

My crunchy tacos ended up looking more like the taquitos I thought the kids were getting.

Warren said he burrito was pretty good. I think he was bummed it didn't come with rice and beans though.

Our total bill was $76, which was a bit more than $10 a person--a tad more than we'd normally pay for Mexican. If I lived nearby, I think I'd go by for a drink and maybe some guacamole because the patio is so awesome, but I don't know about a full meal.