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Unseasonable heat

When life hands you a box of melted chocolate, make chocolate ganache!

For the last year or so I've been getting my Baby Monkey (Endangered Species Chimpanzee bar) fix through amazon. Up until this summer, having chocolate shipped was not an issue. Even during the summers, the chocolate would arrive in bar form, albeit sometimes softened.

This past summer was a different story. The last two summers were downright pleasant by Northern Virginia standards and lulled me into a false sense of security. Then a few weeks ago my chocolate was in transit on a 100 °F day. It liquified and hardened back up into that two-toned chalky stuff. The seller agreed to replace it (Yay, Vitamin Shoppe!) and the replacement chocolate was shipped out on a 94 °F day. The replacement chocolate arrived less molten: the bars on the ends were ruined and the tops of the bars had gone chalky, but most of the chocolate was okay. I decided not to bug the seller because what were the odds of yet another batch of chocolate getting shipped on a cool day in August?

So, what to do with that ruint chocolate?

I figured there had to be some way of reconstituting it back into good chocolate. I did a little research. Re-tempering it sounded like more work than what I wanted and would probably just result in differently shaped, but still ruined, chocolate.

Then I remembered being at a restaurant and watching someone eat the dessert I should have ordered: chocolate ganache!

I broke up the ruined chocolate in a food processor and put it in a dish. I scalded an appropriate amount of heavy cream and gently stirred it in. Voila! The chocolate re-emulsified into a luscious, creamy mass. Time to lick the spoon and wait for it to set.

The ganache hardened up more than I was expecting (maybe I needed a little more cream, or perhaps butter). The process of scooping it out and forming it into truffles was not easy (a better scoop than a teaspoon might have helped) and the truffles ended up looking like little round ungulate droppings.

Oz made a few truffles too. He does not have the hands of a chocolatier. His hands are too warm and started to re-melt the ganache (making his truffles look even more poop-like than mine).

Then I rolled the truffles in cocoa powder, giving them the look of little French fungi dug out of the ground by a cute French pig. Fungi, I tell you, not poops!

Anyway, they taste great.

Truffles: easy to make, not so easy to make look good.

A million little chores

It's like death by a thousand cuts only with more swiffering.

Which reminds me, I need to …

My daily to-do list has gotten packed with an unending parade of little tasks. Cook food, do the washing up, set out lunch and breakfast for tomorrow, do some physical therapy, fill the little containers with tomorrow's little pills, do some laundry, empty the dehumidifier.

It doesn't seem bad at all, actually, when I write it out like that. But in practice everything seems to take much longer than it should and, with the evening ending so much sooner now that I've had to move up bedtime, not everything gets done. Since I tend to save the fun stuff for last (as a reward), the fun gets cut. Note the lack of "taking a walk" and "playing with the camera".

I think it's time to start doing things out of order.

Rats!

So we were considering the raccoon theory of things that go bump in the night because of the amount of noise and the fact that the noise was coming earlier as dawn grew earlier, what with raccoons being creatures of the night.

A few attempts at raccoon annoyance (talk radio, outdoor lights, moving the trashcan) didn't have much effect, so professional critter consultants have been consulted. They found gnawing and little poops outside near where some loose lattice might be easily banged around by passing rodents.

I even saw a rat out back a couple months ago, but it was little and (having been heavily influenced as a child by tales of the rats of NIMH), I didn't really think too much of it. Rats are stealthy and quiet, right? And not necessarily bad neighbors except for that whole plague thing.

Well, these rats are not such good neighbors and, unfortunately for them, the critter professionals' policy is "fluffy tail: trap and relocate, naked tail: KILL!"

When I told this to Oz, he said, "That's so species-ist!" and started talking about NIMH rats.

I'm sure these are not NIMH rats. NIMH rats would be quieter.

What gives?

So if I only have a half hour between chores and bedtime, do I spend it reading a mystery novel or writing a blog post?

For weeks some mysterious sound has been waking me up at 4:25 am almost every weekday morning. I don't know what it is: by the time I'm awake it's stopped. Maddening! And I can't get back to sleep after.

I am having crazy thoughts like maybe a homeless person is crawling into the crawlspace under my landlady's sunroom and sleeping on the other side of the wall from my room. This homeless person has a loud alarm clock set for 4:25 am so he can creep away before the residents of my house get up.

The sunroom and deck are a few feet off the ground, but lattice panels are securely nailed all around to prevent the dogs and hypothetical homeless people dreamed up by sleep-deprived brains from getting underneath. I know this because I checked.

Oz suggested that it might be a raccoon coming back under the sunroom after a long night of tipping trash cans, teasing dogs, and grinning at cats. I said, "Raccoons are not on the clock!"

The only solution has been to start going to sleep an hour or so earlier. Having an early bedtime is like being a kid again except that, because I am somewhat more mature, I don't cheat bedtime by reading with a flashlight under the covers.

After a couple weeks of early-to-bed, I'm a little less sleep-deprived, but still. I really want to know what's going on at 4:25 and whether I can hit it with a hammer.

Chocolate: The Sampler's Tale

We love dark chocolate. For some time, our favorite bar has been the Endangered Species Chimpanzee Bar (72% cocoa), fondly called "Baby Monkey" (the previous label had a baby chimpanzee on it, the current label has a more adolescent looking chimpanzee) (yes, we know that chimps are apes, not monkeys).

Lots of other people love the Baby Monkey too. It's always going out of stock. During this last interval of backordered chocolate deprivation, I decided to test the waters with some other brands which had the advantage of being available for purchase and eating. I stuck with the 72% cocoa except for a few 70% or 71% bars from producers who didn't get the 72%memo.

I thought that I would figure out which was the best, but as I munched my way along, what I really found was that they were all pretty good. Not surprising, it's chocolate after all. This was a side-by-side taste comparison done over several days. I used toasted almonds to clear my palate between nibbles. Our order of Baby Monkey arrived in time to go head-to-head with the competition.

In order from the best (for me, Baby Monkey and Vivani are tied, but Oz remains loyal to the Baby Monkey so it is listed first):

Endangered Species: Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate
Vivani: So good! Rich, creamy, very chocolatey with a cherry note to the flavor
La Suissa: fantastic aroma, sweetish taste (made me think of the smell of chocolate chip cookies)
Divine: smooth, rich, nutty (can't tell what kind of nut, but nutty)
Rapunzel: smooth, rich, caraway, rather interesting
Equal Exchange: sour, sort of chocolatey
Green & Black: kind of sour, not really chocolatey next to the best

After my conversation about chocolate and spoonfuls of peanut butter, I tested them all with peanut butter. Unsurprisingly, they were all great tastes that went great together. My least favorites actually tasted better with peanut butter than they did alone.

So I will be sticking with the Baby Monkey after all, but I'll add Vivani to my chocolate rotation to mix things up a bit. The next time I make chocolate chip cookies, I will break up a La Suissa bar and use that instead of chocolate chips.

Bad influence

I was talking with a friend about chocolate.

She is into the Cadbury eggs and can eat five at one sitting without getting nauseated. "I could go for another five."

I said, "I liked them when I was a kid, but they are too sweet."

"No such thing!"

"I've been eating dark chocolate lately. Endangered Species Chimpanzee bar. But it's been on backorder, so I tried all the other dark chocolate bars to do a comparison."

"Oh, Trader Joe's! You can get like a pound of dark chocolate for three dollars!" She's clearly into quantity too.

"Really?" I never go into Trader Joe's so this is news to me.

"Yeah. I eat it with peanut butter."

"Oh! You know what I used to do? I'd get a jar of the all natural kind of peanut butter, just peanuts and salt, and a bag of chocolate chips. I'd get a big spoonful of peanut butter and stick the chocolate chips all over it and eat it. That was really good. I didn't do it often because I always gained several pounds by the time I was done with the jar."

"That sounds really good! I want it now. You're a bad influence. If I come in here weighing three hundred pounds, it'll be your fault."

The next day I bought a jar of peanut butter. I'm a bad influence on myself. But the peanut butter is really good with all that dark chocolate.

Big trash

It was big trash pickup in Alexandria this weekend. All last week, big trash appeared on curbs throughout the neighborhood. Most of the trash consisted of refrigerators of all sizes, couches, and doors. One charmer threw a whole bunch of cardboard boxes down on the sidewalk and into the street, which is just littering as far as I'm concerned.

Many couches disappeared before the big trash pickup day. The run-up to big trash day is a couch exchange free-for-all. I wonder if some couches spontaneously originate on the curbs. It's hard to imagine that anyone ever paid money for some of those couches.

The most unusual big trash item this year was my neighbor's Tetanus Jenga: bundles of nail-bearing scrap wood held together with packing tape and stacked up Jenga style in the street. I had to parallel park between Tetanus Jenga and another resident's car. Fun! I checked the street for nails first. Is that cheating?