Parisian Adventures: Extra Strong Dark Chocolate

Although this is a blog about chocolate and adventures, I wouldn't feel right publishing this without a brief note on the recent attacks. If you'd rather skip directly to the travels and chocolate, please scroll down. :-) 

 I have little patience for those who mourn for the state of the world and speak of simpler, less frightened times: every age has its terrors and tragedies. The only thing that has changed is the level of visibility, 

Most of us are relatively untouched by this tragedy aside from our Facebook photos.
Still, as heartbroken citizens of the world, we weep for the Parisians because they are our friends. But they are not the only victims, and this tragedy is far greater than the 127 lives taken on Friday. 

As we weep for Paris, let us also weep for the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, broken and destitute, who will now be denied much-needed asylum because of the abuses of one. Let us weep for the millions of peaceful Muslims across the world who must now, yet again, follow their faith into a place of persecution, prejudice, and fear. Let us weep for those who will use this most recent tragedy as selfish justification to retreat even deeper into the darkest ruts of their own prejudice, building their internal walls higher, further separating themselves from humanity, compassion, rational thought, and generosity.

I will not ask for forgiveness or understanding for the attackers; it's far too soon for that. Rather, I simply ask that each person, in their own way, find the courage and compassion to simply be kind in the wake of this tragedy. Boundless, foolish, immoderate, overflowing kindness. Let us throw open our collectives arms to the needy and destitute, recognizing that it is a far greater tragedy to willingly condemn thousands of Syrian children to destitution and death. Let us find it in our hearts to smile at the woman in the hijab; she needs your kindness far more than you need your anger, and right now she is the closest thing in the world to the Samaritan in the New Testament.

This is a dark time for Islam, but that does not make it or its adherents to blame. In the scheme of the world, there have been far more Christian and Jewish terrorists than Muslim ones. 

We are each the last line of defense against our own inhumanity; some people lose that fight and shoot up cafes or teach their children hatred and intolerance. We don't have to, though. Let us find the strength to respond to injustice and violence with courage, justice, and kindness. May our outrage and fear not taint our humanity, and may we work through our anger and shock to find some kind of peace beyond this tragedy. 

Peace, y'all. 


And now, for your regularly scheduled chocolate post: 

This is part 3 of 4 chronicling my two-week adventure in Europe. For more pictures and stories, take a peek at my Facebook photo album HERE.  

I've only wanted to visit the City of Lights since I was, like, oh, I don't know... 12? This place has been calling to me from across the Atlantic since I've been old enough to tune my ears to those melodious French phonemes. I took two useless years of French in college, just so I could get my tongue around those beautiful syllables and somehow feel a little closer to the place where bread and cheese is a sanctioned lunch. This place that birthed impressionism. That was and is so beautiful, even Hitler's loyal commander and Governor of Paris, Dietrich von Choltitz, could not bring himself to destroy it, in spite of Hitler's order to level the city before letting it fall into Allied hands. Where butter and wine are major food groups, and, under the Tour d'Eiffel, we paid a man €2 to open our bottle of wine, and when we furtively asked if it would be ok for us to drink it on the street, he cheerfully chastised us, "Of course it's fine! This is Paris!"

I truly don't know what people have been talking about - I found the Parisians to be delightful, kind, and accommodating. Maybe it was my desperate but well-intentioned attempts to dredge up the fading remnants of my college French, or maybe it was our wide-eyed admiration and general footsore benevolence that bought us some goodwill. Regardless, the French people were very patient and generous, even coaching me gently through phrases and vocab mysteriously misplaced from my memory banks from long neglect.

We visited the catacombs, where, 130 steps below street level, 7 million deceased Parisians lay at peace in the city's old stone quarries. So many bones... It's easy, in the face of so many deconstructed skeletons, to forget that they each belonged to people who fought with their parents, hated peas, teased other children, bought plums and flour at the market, woke up to feed the baby at 3 in the morning, loved fresh bread, whose friends gave them playful nicknames and teased them about the way they mispronounced street names, longed to see the sea, fell in love, fell out of love, maybe buried their parents or children or friends, and in the end suffered all the indignities and fear of death themselves. Even their names are gone. These were full lives, far larger than the sum of their skeletal frames, and now all that's left of their multitude of unrecorded subtleties, quirks, phobias, and preferences is laid to rest in this simple and sobering labyrinth of humanity. This is no lurid, frightening exhibition of leering horrors, it is rather a respectful monument to the magnitude of death, and a powerful metaphor of how, both literally and metaphorically, we have built on the unknown and forgotten millions and billions who have gone before us. For, in the beautiful words of George Eliot, "... the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

As the perfect send-off, on Sunday morning we attended Gregorian mass in the breathtakingly beautiful Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris - a living, breathing reminder that wonders from the 12th century can still be as transcendent and relevant today as they ever have been. Even as I got frustrated with the tourists milling about and taking pictures during mass (really, guys - you're giving tourists a bad name. If the sign says "silence," that refers to your shutter clicks and whispering), the music was positively ethereal, the voices of just four singers filling the cathédrale to bursting with all the marvelous help of the magical 12th century acoustics.

 
Even so, I have a confession: I did not eat any Parisian chocolate. 

Maybe I was distracted by all the macarons, croissants, and baguettes. Maybe I was too busy stepping into a new patisserie every third block to try a new tart, pastry, or yet another croissant. Maybe I was too preoccupied with the fifth bottle of wine in three days, or our perfectly delightful hotel balcony, where we drank wine and talked and laughed in our pajamas until all hours of the night, or watching the Tour d'Eiffel light up like glittery lace against the night sky. Regardless, I don't know how it happened. I'm bewildered. 

Fortunately, I had a backup plan. I never travel without chocolate. 

So, when we found ourselves in a boat on the Grand Canal in the park at le Chateau de Versailles, I was able to pull out a bar from back home for us to munch on. Sadly, the chocolate was less than stellar, but Versailles made up for all chocolatey deficiencies. The gardens alone were bewildering in their beauty and grandeur, and the palace was staggering and swiftly overwhelming. One can only take in so much gilding and mythological imagery before gasping for the open air and seeking reprieve in yet another croissant.

Paris was everything I thought it would be. Every bit as beautiful and delicious and affirming as I have been anticipating. This place, pinned together with a powerful appreciation for beauty and an elegance of execution rare on this earth, calls to me. I am so incredibly grateful I could answer. 

Item: Extra Strong Dark Chocolate 
Percentage: 77%

Made By: Chocolove
Made In: Boulder, Colorado
Purchased At: Whole Foods Market - Arlington, TX
Purchase Price: $3.50

Review: Sadly, in the realm of plain, dark snacking chocolate, this one ranks rather near the bottom of my list. The texture is oddly chalky and tough, it doesn't melt nicely, and the flavor is uninteresting at best. I could blame that on traveling across the Atlantic in the bottom of my backpack, but I tend to think that's just the way it is; better than nothing, but just barely. I should have gone for another baguette instead. 


MEH

With love, 
 - K 

All the World's a Stage: Beatrice Honeycomb Milk Chocolate

This is part 2 of 4 chronicling my two-week adventure in Europe. For more pictures and stories, take a peek at my Facebook photo album HERE. 


          We continue with England, the Motherland...

England was full of delights: renting bikes and cycling through Cambridge to have tea in a beautiful apple orchard. Sitting in camp chairs beside the river in front of Glory's charming home, drinking Pimm's and watching the swan making lazy circles around the house boats. The simultaneously reverent and whimsical Beefeater tour of the Tower of London, concluding in the beautiful chapel in the heart of the Tower where the lovely young Lady Jane Grey was buried in an unmarked traitor's grave, mere days after her coronation, along with hundreds of others with nothing to mark their passing. And the Borough Market! If you find yourself in London, go there. Just go. Delicious, abundant, affordable street food from all corners of the word, a mere hop across the Thames from St. Paul's Cathedral, right in the heart of the city. 

The sightseeing was wonderful, the Russian tea house captivating, and I cherished the opportunity to see Glory in her natural habitat, but altogether, more than any of our other destinations, England felt like the connective tissue of our journey. Although I came to enjoy the well-mannered countryside as it flashed past in the train windows, England was primarily a staging ground for us to shuttle back and forth between our various other destinations, and I feel like I barely got to know it.

In spite of the brevity of our visit, there was one brilliant, captivating, perfect highlight of our time in London... 

 
Allow me to set the stage, so to speak: I curate my bucket list very carefully. There are about 120 things on it, all of which I've carefully considered and selected from a much larger and ever-changing pool of possibilities. However, out of these 120 items, there are a handful which serve as immovable focal points for the rest of the list. These are the things which are so integral to my vision of myself and my life that I truly can't imagine them not happening at some point. 

 
Attending a Shakespeare play at the Globe is one of these. And it was the best kind of happenstance that the show running while we were in London was "As You Like It" - my favorite of Shakespeare's comedies, and one of my fondest Austin student theater memories from my youth. The stars simply aligned, and, £5 later, there we were - standing in the yard, watching some of the most joyful and skillfully executed theater I've ever seen. In that beautiful, historic venue, where so many remarkable actors have trod the boards, just a few hundred yards from where Shakespeare himself once performed, those precious three hours seemed to fly. It was a gift I won't ever forget. 

Afterwards, in the gift shop, amidst the First Folio facsimiles, tote bags, and lapel pins, I made a delightful discovery: 

Named for Shakespeare's beloved heroines, these sweet little things made perfect souvenirs. I had a hard time narrowing it down (Milk sea salt for Miranda! Dark chili for Katarina! Milk cinnamon for Desdemona! Dark espresso for Portia!), but in the end the choice was clear: I couldn't possibly pass up my beloved Rosalind (dark and raspberry - how appropriate for such an intelligent, headstrong young lady), but the one I was most intrigued by was Beatrice. Milk chocolate with honeycomb. Honeycomb? Yep. Definitely honeycomb. Fascinating! Well worth dipping into the 32% realm to try it out.

In a broader sense, so much of my personal history and personality is tied to the culture and literature of this place that it almost seems like home in an odd, disjointed kind of way. Although my connection to England wasn't as visceral or emotional as Ireland, I will certainly return to walk the halls of Oxford, track down 221B Baker Street, visit the hallowed Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon, and meander the well-tended lanes of Hyde Park.

In the meantime, I will content myself with learning to make scotch eggs. Heaven help my poor, abused kitchen. 

Item: Beatrice Honeycomb Milk
Percentage: 32% cacao 

Made By: Sweet Theater presents Shakespeare's Leading Ladies
Purchased At: RSC Shop, Globe Theater - London, England
Purchase Price: £1.00 (Full-size bars available for £3.50)

Review: I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from honeycomb chocolate, but it is curiously satisfying. Our good friends, the bees, deliver deliciousness once again. Admittedly, this darling (albeit gimmicky) bar probably isn't the greatest treatment of it - the chocolate itself is a fairly standard 32% milk setting, which is both overly sweet (unlike it's designated namesake) and a little overpowering. That makes it even more remarkable how well the honeycomb manages to hold its own. Delightful, surprising fragments, alternately chewy and crunchy, serve as the culinary equivalent of glitter, except that you don't have to vacuum it out of the carpet for three years. The honeycomb is remarkably savory, carrying a light, centering honey taste without stacking more sweetness on top of the already very sweet chocolate. Would highly recommend honeycomb chocolate, although possibly not this particular instance as much as some others. More investigation is needed.

Recommend

With love, 
 - Kat 

A Retrospective in Cheap Chocolate: Lindt Intense Orange

Disclaimer: this post might seem excessively verbose and irrelevant at first, but it all ties into the theme of this particular bar of chocolate and how it affects me personally. Stay with me.

      Rosebuuuud.    *Snow globe shatters on the ground*.

A little bit less than one year ago I was living a mere two blocks away from the ornate, old house where I live today. A small, darkly-lit, but nicely furnished two-bedroom apartment above a fancy diner was the place that I called home, and I shared that home with a good friend, who also happened to be my other good friend's girlfriend (which was not a weird situation, as it seems to be in writing). The place had charm and character. There was a large red brick wall which divided the kitchen and the living room, and it looked as if it had been through several wars and just as many re-modelings.  I was often awakened at 7:00am by the staff of the diner below, who liked to blast the same upbeat polka music at extreme volume every single morning while preparing the kitchen for a day's work.

Also, within the red brick walls of that village apartment, I experienced the harshest winter of my life (which doesn't mean a lot coming from a Texan, but most of the New York locals agree with me). The cold, precipitation, and wind chill were as bitter as they were unrelenting, and most of the regular activity in my life was slowed to a sluggish, groaning halt; gigs were few, and they were often cancelled due to weather conditions; my regular job of teaching music was snowed-out half the time, and when it wasn't, only half of my students would show up on any given day; traveling anywhere in the region was a pain in my freezing posterior, if not outright hazardous; on top of that, my roommate was very often gone for days at a time. 

Many people would have had an awful, cabin-feverish time in that situation, but that was not the case for me. On the contrary: it was one of the most interesting and creative times in my memory. I managed to split my seemingly-infinite free time equally between work (music practice, composition, writing, art) and play (daydreaming, reading, talking on the phone, sleeping in, the occasional movie), and each one inspired and sustained the other. It was one of the few times of my life when I had a very regular routine which I lived by; the beauty was that abstract thinking and artistic productivity were included in the routine! Patience without indolence; structure and abstraction; focus and freedom; poetry and prose; it's the only time that I've sustained a disciplined-but-bohemian lifestyle like that for any extended period. In many ways it was a dream-come-true for an artsy introvert such as myself.

Of course, the winter came to an end, as did my lease, and that era of my life; I moved a block-and-a-half away, to the spare room at my friend's place (the aforementioned ornate, old house which I live in now). It was such a short distance to move that I could have walked all of my stuff over from one place to the other in less than a day, but the mere block-and-a-half of concrete and cracked stone sidewalks that separates me from my old apartment seems to be a much farther distance, because, to me, it represents the distance between two chapters of my life. A lot has changed since then, and it often seems as if the vague memories of a year ago are the memories of another person; another life; another set of motivations, impulses, desires, and capabilities. Nostalgia has never suited me, and I very rarely hold on to objects purely for sentimental value; there's too much real value in the here-and-now. That being said, meeting a stranger from my past, or a taste or smell from years ago, can trigger something deeper, darker, and more irresistible than any bar of chocolate: the memory of being another man.

One of these memories is of the only decent bar of chocolate sold at the village grocery store during the harshest winter: Lindt Excellence Intense Orange. Consequently, it was one of the chocolates I ate all winter. It was usually accompanied by a steaming mug of spiced black tea, and a long session of songwriting.

 Item: Lindt Excellence Intense Orange Dark Chocolate

Made By: Lindt and Sprungli Inc.

Made In: Stratham, NH

Purchase price: $2.50

Review: Firstly, this is cheap chocolate. Very cheap. It's made by a massive, mindless, corporate, chocolate-making machine with a yearly revenue of more than 3 billion Swiss francs, and a work force of more than 10,000 people. The recipe has been maximized for price-effectiveness and consistency. They over-roast their beans to cover up their mediocre quality; this process leeches the character from the beans, and makes each batch perfectly consistent. They add exorbitant amounts of sugar to hide the coarse, over-processed flavor of the beans. The 'orange pieces' in the ingredients list are actually a homogenized and hardened pulp of oranges, apples, sugar, thickening agents, and the blood of a virgin. Long story short: this is one step up from a Snicker's bar in quality.

But I love a good Snicker's bar. And I love this. The flavor is a blunt and sugary mix of almond and orange; the chocolate flavor is barely noticeable, and I'm surprised that they can get away with calling this 'dark chocolate'. There's no subtlety to it at all, but there's a joyful, purely-indulgent character to it. It's candy, plain and simple, and the quality is actually very high, considering the price point. When people want candy, they're usually looking for one thing: sugar, with some other stuff added in. That's what this bar delivers, while simultaneously being half-decent chocolate.

Cream of the crap, ladies and gentlemen.

-Will

That's All Blarney: Irish Coffee Truffles

About two months ago I woke with a start from a terrifying dream: I was giving a customer loyalty workshop. A perfectly mundane, fully clothed, everyday, customer loyalty workshop. Exactly the kind of workshop that I conduct on a monthly basis at work. *shudder*

Ladies and gentlemen, when you start dreaming about work, it's past time for a genuine, honest-to-God vacation.  

Fortunately there was light at the end of the tunnel - it took us almost two years to go to the UK to visit our friend Glory, but we finally got around to it, and no one will ever be able to accuse us of lacking ambition. Four countries and eight cities in 13 days? Madness! Nevertheless, that is exactly what Taryn, Heather, Glory, and I set out to do a few weeks ago - and I'll be bamboozled if we didn't accomplish just exactly that. 

Ireland, England, France, and Scotland. I return to you weary and footsore, with a backpack full of dirty laundry and an uncontrollable craving for Mexican food, but my heart is full to bursting. I have seen so many beautiful things and places.

This is part 1 of 4 chronicling my two-week adventure in Europe. For more pictures and stories, take a peek at my Facebook photo album HERE.  


          So, I begin with Ireland. 

I wanted so desperately to love Ireland that I was almost afraid to go there and see it for myself, for fear of being dramatically disillusioned. Silly me. 

 

 
There is a spaciousness about Ireland. The people seem to live here alongside and in spite of the landscape; Ireland has not been tamed. It is still alive and well, and coexists with its inhabitants, rather than being contained or reshaped by them. Driving down the narrow, gorgeous, winding, terrifying roads, after choking down the fear of imminent death by tour bus, the next impression is that of expansive, rustic beauty. The entire landscape has an effulgent, brilliantly green case of perpetual bed head. 

 
This place has an almost umbilical tie to things that are old and beautiful, and everything they do is teeming with life. The Gaelic language is everywhere, and castles and ruins are preserved, but not obsessively restored. The past speaks for itself here. Goats openly roam the historic cliffs, and cattle graze just across the stream from castles and gardens teeming with tourists. Ancient things are not relegated to irrelevance and incongruity, to be gawked at behind glass; they are as indispensable a part of life as the nearly universal WiFi. 50-cent penny whistles with plastic mouthpieces co-exist seamlessly with 300 year-old pipes which have been passed down through generations.

In everything from the ballads, street art, and reels, to the effusive gardens spilling over the little winding rock walls, there is an uncontrollable impulse to express. One can well believe that "Irish writers are either completely incomprehensible, or they win Nobel prizes. Or, in the case of Samuel Beckett, both." (A gem dropped by they host of our musical pub crawl in Dublin.) I could almost believe that these people dream in poetry.

We spent a day and a half in Dublin, drove to the Cliffs of Moher, spent the evening in Cork, then continued on to Blarney before departing Ireland for England, but those few short days have adopted a much larger profile in my memory than their brief tenure would suggest. Like fajita steam, Ireland clings to my clothes and hair, prolonging the enjoyment long after the dishes have been cleared.

There is something about this country which resonates with me in a way I don't entirely understand, but one thing is clear; somewhere in the spaces between listening to the uileann pipes and Gaelic ballads in a cozy Dublin pub, sitting on the Cliffs, and climbing the winding stairs to the ramparts of Blarney Castle, Ireland has eased its way into my heart and settled in to stay. 

 Item: Irish Coffee Truffles

Made By: Blarney Chocolate Factory
Made In: Blarney, Ireland
Purchased At: Blarney Chocolate Factory - Blarney, Ireland
Purchase Price: €1.95

Review: In the interest of full disclosure, I'm not generally a white chocolate fan, but this beautiful creation was too perfect to pass up. This is a particularly busy truffle - White and dark hard chocolate shell, a smooth, whiskey-spiked ganache center, and topped with a delicate poof of cinnamon-sprinkled cream. Frankly, I found the white chocolate briefly overwhelming, but after that it's all uphill - smooth, downright creamy center with a beautiful, boozy finish. The coffee flavor kind of disappears, but it's still an enjoyable, charming tribute to a classic, heart-warming Irish drink. 

Recommend

With love, 
 - Kat