Ice Cream

In an age of long commutes, late sports practices, endless workdays and 24/7 television programming, the image of Mom hanging up her dish towel at 7 p.m. and declaring "the kitchen is closed" seems a quaint relic of an earlier era. It also harks back to a thinner America. And that may be no coincidence. A new study, conducted on mice, hints at an unexpected contributor to the nation's epidemic of obesity - and, if later human studies bear it out, a possible way to have our cake and eat it too, with less risk of weight gain and the diseases that come with it. Just eat your cake - or better yet, an apple - earlier.

The sleepy Central Coast town of Arroyo Grande, population 17,000, is the ideal place to shut out the mayhem of city life for a few days. There's not much to do except relax, drink wine, read your book and take sunset strolls. The bed. House of Another Tyme Bed & Breakfast (227 Le Point St.; (805) 489-6313; http://www.anothertymebnb.net ; rooms for two, $120) is a remodeled Victorian home that dates to 1916 and contains three guest rooms. The B&B is run by husband-and-wife Jack Tiedemann and Judy Zwarg.

For patients with high levels of so-called bad cholesterol, doctors routinely reach for two remedies: cholesterol-lowering statin drugs and a diet that cuts out foods high in saturated fat, such as ice cream, red meat and butter. But new research has found that when it comes to lowering artery-clogging cholesterol, what you eat may be more important than what you don't eat. Released online Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., the study found that incorporating several cholesterol-lowering foods — such as soy protein and nuts — into a diet can reduce bad cholesterol far more effectively than a diet low in saturated fat. In fact, the authors assert, levels of LDL, the "bad" cholesterol, can drop to half that seen by many patients who take statins, sold under such names as Lipitor, Crestor or Zocor.

Mark Walter lives in Chicago. Stan Kasten spent most of his adult life in Atlanta. Peter Guber is an L.A. guy. So, when Guber pitched a nostalgic idea on behalf of L.A. fans, his partners in the new Dodgers ownership group listened. "Curly Coo," Guber told Kasten. "There is nothing like a Curly Coo. " Google that, and you get a bar in Scotland. Kasten had no idea what the heck Guber was talking about. Millions of Dodgers fans could have explained, the ones who cheered on Garvey, Lopes, Russell and Cey, the ones who rooted for Valenzuela, Hershiser and Piazza, all with ice cream dripping down the sides of their faces.

After he was laid off last fall from his job driving a delivery truck, Ricardo Lara couldn't find another full-time position that would pay the bills. So he went into business for himself driving an ice cream truck. At first, he was making as much money peddling Heath bars, Bomb Pops and ice cream sandwiches as he did at his old job. But that didn't last. As the economy melted down, so did sales, despite his seven-day workweek plying the streets of South Los Angeles.

Dear Karen: How can I make a good decision about buying an ice cream franchise? Answer: Request a document called the Uniform Franchise Offering Circular, which franchisers are required by law to provide. Next, do your own research on this opportunity. Is it within your budget? "Food concepts are some of the more expensive franchises, but ice cream franchises are on the low end in terms of capital requirements," said Garth Snider, president of FranchiseOpportunities.

  Beer ice cream Total time : 20 minutes, plus freezing time Servings: 2 to 4 Note: Adapted from Matt Schreiber, who adapted it from Antoine Westermann at the restaurant Beurheisel in Strasbourg, France. Our recipes, your kitchen: If you try this or any other recipe from the L.A. Times Test Kitchen, please share it with us: Click here to upload pictures of the finished dish. 4 egg yolks 1/2 cup sugar 1 cup beer 1 cup heavy cream 1. In a medium bowl, whisk the egg yolks with the sugar until they are pale and lemon colored.

The City Council this week approved an ordinance requiring all ice cream trucks that cruise local streets to bear signs warning motorists about the presence of children. Although the law went into effect immediately, city officials said they would not enforce it until they can get the signs made and distributed to the three ice cream vendors licensed to do business in Bellflower, possibly within two weeks.

William A. Dreyer never met William A. Breyer, but their ice creams are having trouble getting along in Southern California frozen dairy cases. Breyers, an East Coast brand, isn't used to being an underdog. It is the nation's best-selling brand but has only recently made its way to Southern California, where it is trying hard to overtake Dreyer's, the leading premium ice cream in the West.

Leave it to Italy --- a country where food and tradition go hand in hand — to be home to the first university dedicated to the art of making gelato. In fact, the Carpigiani Gelato University, located outside Bologna, is doing its all to ensure that the future of ice cream's closest relative, gelato, will continue to be that of a fresh product made from all-natural ingredients for local consumption. Carpigiani, which has sold gelato-making equipment since 1945, started teaching the classes in 2003.

HTC Corp. on Wednesday offered a few more details about which of its phones will receive an update to the Android Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, expanding the list to 16  from  12 . HTC said in February that its Sensation line of smartphones would move to Ice Cream Sandwich in March, but things are still a bit vague now, with the company saying in a statement that "as for timing, we're in the early stages of rolling out Android...

Roboto, the custom-designed font Google introduced in the Android Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, is now available for free download for developers, designers and font geeks. Google has released Roboto in 16 different typeface variations (bold, italic, condensed and differing weights) and with an Action Bar Icon Pack of user interface icons found throughout Ice Cream Sandwich, such as a search glass, pencil, phone, trash can and others. "You may use the materials in this file without restriction to develop your apps and to use in your apps," Google said in a note included with the download, bringing to mind the question of whether we'll see a developer use Roboto in an iOS app at some point.

Acer's Liquid Glow smartphone, announced Friday, is bringing Google's Android Ice Cream Sandwich operating system and a bit of an odd name to market this summer. The Liquid Glow smartphone will be detailed at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Spain, next week, but for now, Acer says that the new handset will bring a "balance between style, performance and affordability -- ideal for today's fun-seeking, social-networking youth. " With a pitch like that, it's likely that the Liquid Glow will be a lower-cost, entry-level handset.

First it was dual-core processors. Then it was big screens. Next up in Android smartphone trends: the quad-core CPU. And getting things kicked off is the LG Optimus 4X HD. Sadly, what has yet to become a trend in Android smartphones is running the latest version of Google's mobile operating system. But the Optimus 4X HD, thankfully, will ship running Android Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest and greatest version of the OS, LG said in a Korean statement . Powering the Optimus 4X HD will be a 1.5-gigahertz Nvidia Tegra quad-core processor, along with 1 gigabyte of RAM. The new Tegra chip also includes one "low-power drive 'companion core' " that will be used when the phone doesn't need four cores to power operations, a move that should save battery life.

We can now add Motorola to the growing list of Android gadget-makers that will be waiting until the second half of the year to update the majority of its devices to Ice Cream Sandwich. On Wednesday, Motorola announced its road map for upgrades to Android Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest version of the Google-built operating system, and everything that will get an upgrade will have to wait until the third quarter of the year except for the Motorola Xoom tablet and the non-U.S. versions of the Razr smartphone.

Samsung surprisingly announced a new 7-inch tablet, the Galaxy Tab 2 , on Monday, that will be the company's first to run on Google's new Android Ice Cream Sandwich operating system. But, while the device is new in name, the hardware specs aren't much of a leap forward, but rather a variation of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus with less powerful hardware. The Galaxy Tab 2 is powered by a 1-gigahertz processor and packs a 4,000  mAh (milliampere-hour) battery.  The Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus runs on a 1.2-gigahertz processor and a 4,100 mAh battery.

Dear SOS: BLD's brownie sundae is the BEST brownie EVER! Please get the recipe! Lynn Frankel West Los Angeles Dear Lynn: Yeah, we were at a loss for words when we first tried this sundae, too (actually, we just couldn't stop eating it). The fudge-like brownies are super-rich and not too sweet, perfectly topped with creamy homemade coffee ice cream and hot fudge sauce. The components are each great on their own, but together they might just leave you speechless.

Haagen-Dazs has won the first round in its food fight with Double Rainbow Gourmet Ice Creams of San Francisco as a federal court approved the super-premium ice cream maker's policy of prohibiting its distributors from selling competing brands. U.S. District Court Judge Charles A. Legge in San Francisco ruled Wednesday that the Teaneck, N.J.-based producer of ice cream with lots of buttermilk and little air did not break the law when it abruptly ended a distribution agreement with Two Count Co.

Good news for owners of HTC's Sensation line of smartphones -- you'll be getting an upgrade to Google's Android Ice Cream Sandwich operating system in March. Everybody else with an HTC phone, disappointingly, you'll have to wait until later this year to get in on the latest Android sweetness. Bummer. The announcement, which HTC made on its Facebook page on Thursday, is a delay of the time frame the Taiwanese smartphone and tablet maker set for its Ice Cream Sandwich upgrades back in November , when it said all the updates would take place in "early 2012.

Two of  Google's  most successful products, Android and Chrome, have come together. On Tuesday, Google released a Chrome Web browser app for its Android Ice Cream Sandwich mobile operating system. The new Chrome app serves as an alternative to Android's Web browser named, uninspiringly, Browser, and brings to phones and tablets many features from the desktop version of Chrome. As users can do in the Android Browser app, Chrome users can use the "omnibox," where a website's URL appears as a Google search box too. Chrome offers tabbed browsing as well, and a private "Incognito" mode is built-in for when a user may want to surf the Web without leaving a trail behind.