Travel for Business: Blueberry Nib

Ah, Colorado, you beautiful creature, you. 

One of the luxuries of having a job that requires some travel is the ability to take full advantage of that travel for personal pleasure. Most of my travel includes visits to exotic destinations like Amarillo, Mobile AL, Tulsa, OK, or the ever-confusing Columbus, Indiana (every place has its charms, of course…), but every once in a while I get to go somewhere a little more compelling. A Memphis, New Orleans, Austin… or Denver.

When it happens, I usually try and maneuver the trip so that I’m there on a Monday or a Friday, and arrange to stay for the weekend. Cummins picks up the tab for the airfare, and I just have to arrange for lodging, transportation, and entertainment. Not a bad deal at all. In this case, my opportunity came a few weeks ago disguised as a Project Management class in Denver.

So, I left behind the 65-degree late-January weather of the DFW metroplex, and walked off the plane into a climate fully 40 degrees colder than what I’d left. Driving to the hotel, there were mounds of ice in the parking lots, where the snow had been ploughed to the side weeks ago and left to partially melt into rock-like sculptural formations. 

The project management class was informative if unremarkable, and I got to meet some key colleagues, tour the Denver branch locations, and gather helpful information for a number of projects. Beyond that, there were a couple of late nights of “networking” (aka, drinking and playing darts and pool), which made the days in class seem far, far longer than they actually were. 

On Friday, I put my coworkers on planes back to their various destinations, rented another car, and headed to Boulder where my dear friend Ben and his wife and kids have a house right in the shadow of the breathtaking Flatiron Mountains.

Boulder is one of my favorite places in the world – it is beautiful, big-hearted, and profoundly active, with an adorable earthy, hipster streak. The people here care about the integrity of their bike shops and sustainable sourcing of their food. The farmer’s market is a major attraction, and there’s a minor festival whenever notable new crops come in. There are bike and walking trails everywhere, buskers on the streets, and in the summer the local kids splash in bone-chillingly cold streams of pure mountain runoff. The Pearl Street Market is a heart-warming celebration of locally-minded shopping and craftsmanship, with shops specializing in everything from gorgeous old-school wooden puzzles, to tea and teapots, to beautiful hand-crafted hats, to art glass, to kites, to chocolate. 

Boulder is also a great chocolate town; one of the few places where kitchen supply stores and bookshops alike have entire end caps dedicated to gorgeous, delightful locally crafted chocolate bars.

This particular weekend was of the sweet, quiet, domestic variety, making up for the carousing of the week with plenty of wholesome company, good food, and early bedtimes. I went ghost hunting and made paper crowns with the 4-and-a-half year-old and cooed at the baby while he chewed on my knuckles. With the grown-ups, I talked a little work, some politics, and about parenthood, poetry, minimalism, family, bravery, and goodness knows what all else. We got the kiddo new boots and took a hike down a local trail, where I got to walk on water. For real. It was frozen, but whatever. I was psyched.

Ben and I also watched The Lobster which received a well-deserved nomination for Best Screenplay at the Oscars. It’s super weird, but truly amazing. (Like, SUPER weird. Be prepared. Definitely watch it, but be prepared.)

It was a soul-nourishing weekend at high altitudes, and although I didn’t get to spend as much time playing in the mountains themselves or perusing the chocolate selection downtown as I would have liked, I was able to snag a bar from the local bookstore while Ben & co. were picking up supplies for dinner. . 

Enjoy, my friends. Preferably in front of a crackling fireplace with a dog at your feet and a 4 year-old narrating Amelia Bedelia to you.

Item: Blueberry Nib
Percentage: 65% cacao 

Made By: Concertos in Chocolate
Made In: Boulder, CO
Purchased At: Boulder Book Store
Purchase Price: $4.25

Review:   At 65% this one is on the lighter end of what I typically go for. Concertos is a local Boulder chocolatier that keeps it simple and classy with classic, time-tested combinations of flavors combined in fun, interesting ways. Check out their "Dirty Chai" bar if you're feeling feisty. With both dried blueberries and cocao nibs this one is very texturally busy - the cocao nibs lend it a nice, darker edge and anchor the chocolatey flavor, while the blueberries bring an unexpected sweet, chewy pop. This is whimsical chocolate, folks. I still haven't really figured out how much I like weird textures in my chocolate, and my relationship with cocoa nibs is complicated, but this definitely is a fun, charming bar. Would eat again.
 
Recommend


With love, Kat

Christmas Cheer: Dark Chocolate Cinnamon, Chili & Nibs

Really excellent chocolate makes the perfect Christmas gift. There’s more or less infinite variety, so you can find something for everyone, it’s delicious, something people don’t typically buy for themselves, and it’s a consumable, so they won’t have to carry it around for the rest of their lives. It requires no storage, wrangling, organizing, maintenance, batteries, assembly, or remembering to take it to a store and use it up.

So, over the course of the year I’ll pick up various other presents for the people I love. A piece of art for so-and-so, a book that screams to belong to what’s-his-name… In December, though, my research starts in earnest. I look at best-of articles for the year, scour the lists from local directories and chocolate shows, and peruse the selections of chocolatiers, both local and in other parts of the country, trying to locate the perfect, most excellent, enjoyable, preferably local, creative selection. Last year it was the inimitable Dude, Sweet Chocolate in downtown Fort Worth.

This year, after much deliberation, I settled on Kate Weiser, who has her flagship store in the swanky Trinity Groves shopping center in Dallas. After all, who couldn’t use a little something beautiful under the tree after this crazy year?

Kate Weiser makes what can only be described as art chocolate. Her work is gorgeous, creative, and whimsical in a deeply satisfying way. I have never had this much fun wrapping presents, you guys. Carl the drinking chocolate snowman sits in a pot of hot milk, melting away and releasing gorgeous clouds of hot chocolate mix from his tummy and marshmallows from his head, finally furnishing drinking chocolate for 4-6 people. There have also been white chocolate, peppermint, and chipotle versions of Carl in the past. She creates beautiful, truffle-stuffed chocolate ornaments, decked with gold leaf and saturated with the most beautiful blues and pinks and light greens you’ve ever seen in a chocolate shop. Her truffles are incredibly distinctive, ranging from the tame but solid orange butterscotch to the more outrageous dark chocolate and Japanese lime or the daring mango habanero. And her candy bars (like the Passion Praline! Yummmmm...) make the most beautiful stocking stuffers you’ll ever find.

It was a thoroughly magical Christmas. After Andrew and I madly worked through the last few edits for the Isaacs-Bryant Family Cookbook (my other big Christmas gift - thank you for all your help, my dear!), my mother and I joined him and his delightful family for their celebration; we sang, we laughed, we drank lots of wine and made delicious food and danced in crazed circles around the kitchen to joyous Irish Christmas reels (that was mostly me and mom, tbh). Fortunately I wasn’t the only one with the terrific idea of giving chocolate for Christmas – I received no fewer than five different chocolate bars. The most interesting, though, was a Redstone’s bar that I received from Andrew’s brother, Alex. Andrew had given him the terrific advice of sticking to 70% or higher on the cacao content (a really good guideline!), and, in a fit of inspiration, one of the bars Alex picked up for me was laced with cinnamon and chili. I guess I’ve got a reputation for gravitating towards the spicy stuff.

Here’s hoping your 2016 Christmas was every bit as delightful and chocolatey as ours!

Photo Credit: Redstone Foods

Item: Dark Chocolate Cinnamon, Chili & Nibs
Percentage: 72%

Made By: Redstone's
Made In: Carrolton, TX 

Purchased At/Price: Christmas gift!

Review: They’re not trying for too much subtlety here, but the result is excellent execution and a thoroughly enjoyable bar. There’s plenty of heat, with a clear, unmuddy balance between the cinnamon and chili flavors. The cocoa nibs are another success story here – in many bars they’re just simply too big, too hard, or otherwise obnoxious, but here they’re perfect. Toasty, dark, crunchy bits that don’t shatter your teeth or taste burnt, don’t disrupt the experience of the bar, and overall add a nice complement to the smoky, dark heat of the bar. The chocolate flavor isn’t the star of the show here, but it’s good and clean enough to provide a nice backdrop for everything else going on. This one could even be a little (prepare yourselves) sweeter and it would be a lovely contrast to the heat, and could definitely stand a few flakes of sea salt, but it’s still very well done as it is, though. Overall, this is an elegant practice in things being exactly enough – exactly enough heat, enough cinnamon, enough nibs, enough sweetness, enough brute chocolate flavor – to be thoroughly enjoyable. One important caveat - the cinnamon and chili flavors are both super strong, so if you're not a fan then I'd steer clear.

Well done, Alex. Way to capture the Christmas spirit.

RECOMMEND
 
With love,
 - K