Can you harvest artificial flavor?

Happened to pass a store in Greenwich Village the other day, called Pure Dark. Their advertising hook is "Harvested from Nature". [Duh, where else would you get chocolate?] It sells custom made blends of dark chocolate, nuts, fruits, etc. (In other words, what we used to call trail mix.) You can have the mix made to your specifications; or, you can pick up one of the ready made combos. I tried a few samples. They were fine - but one has to wonder whether 10 ounces of a chocolate and nut mix can really be worth $20. And - this is key to me - if you want to use the 'nature' route to up the price, your chocolate ought not to list 'artificial flavor' among its components. So I think this company has some fine tuning to be done.

I had the very onerous task of taste testing a second batch of chocolate provided by my nephew. As I said before, I am somewhat of a traditionalist on the chocolate front. So I am not looking for odd or interesting, I am looking for tasty. My thoughts on the latest batch:
1. Marti Chocolates: six chocolates, but I couldn’t match them to the illustrations! So I can’t enumerate them individually, but I can say they were pretty good. But perhaps if I needed the illustration to know what was in them, it was too subtle for me to give it an A rating.
2. Joy Chocolatique - six pieces of solid dark chocolate. Very good but perhaps lacking in some element of toothsomeness that would rate it exceptional.
3. Saratoga chocolates; six chocolates. Sad to say, some visitors descended on this box and ate most of them before I even got to identify what was in the box. However, I did manage to get to eat one chocolate and it was delicious.
4. Neococoa - excellent quality; especially loved the crushed bittersweet, freshly zested lime with bittersweet ganache and the toasted coconut. Less enthused about the warm ginger root and the toasted coconut, but overall thought this collection was outstanding.
5. Amano Ocumare - this brand has consistently great dark chocolate. I did not like this as much as the Amano Jembrana, but it was very nice indeed. For my money, the overall winner and best in class!

Keyboard cat - I am so not impressed

Now, this is one talented boxing cat!

If you can't live by chocolate alone...

If you feel that it is important to balance your chocolate eating with the occasional green vegetable, here is a great recipe; it's courtesy of one of the readers of this blog, Esta, who provided it as a Comment. Having eaten at her house, I can verify that any food she recommends will be great; so I am re-printing the recipe here, in case you missed it in the Comments section:

Here is a very simple and fabulous recipe for sugar snap peas. Serves 4 as a side dish.

1/2 lb sugar snap peas
1 tbs. olive oil
1 tbs. chopped shallots or red onion
1 tsp. chopped fresh thyme or 1/3 tsp dried
Kosher salt to taste.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Spread foil on a large cookie sheet and arrange peas in one layer. Sprinkle with oil and shallots and thyme and coat well. Sprinkle with a bit of salt. Bake for 6-8 minutes. Absolutely delicious.

A conspiracy so immense...

I mentioned two reasons for this blog. As the blog title indicates, I am somewhat fascinating by the tendency of people to believe there are great conspiracies everywhere and that, rather than advancing any proof themselves, they feel it is the job of the skeptic to prove they are wrong. This recently came to mind when viewing "The Amazing Buck Howard" a movie which in a slightly fictionalized way depicts the career of the magician The Amazing Kreskin. This movie in turn led me to read "The Psychology of the Psychic." This book should be mandatory reading for all high school students. It takes some of the more commonly held 'proofs' of ESP's existence and debunks them. One I found particularly fascinating, and it involved Uri Geller, a great fraud who has millions believing that he could bend spoons and telepathically re-start old watches. It turns out that 60% of the time, any old style watch (with internal movements rather than batteries) will restart when held for a few minutes in anyone's hand - because the warmth thins down the oil that has thickened from disuse and stopped the movement from operating. If you happen to have a fever, you could probably beat out Uri Geller. The 'take-away' from this; just because you don't have a rational explanation at hand, it does not mean that there isn't one.

And the loser is...

A followup to my posting on chocolate. A question was raised as to which pairing I most dislike. There is a lot of competition for this coveted title. The top three from my perspective:

3. Chocolate with ginger and chunks of fortune cookie
2. Chocolate with chilis and cinnamon
And the winner:

1. Chocolate with goat cheese. The only way to make this worse would be to substitute feta cheese.

Any other candidates?

Why did I get myself a blog? I could tell you that the aliens who have taken over my body directed me to do this. But more prosaically, two reasons, one of which I will discuss in this posting: my wonderful nephew showed me how easy it was to do it and through a very generous gift, he also provided me with an item I would like to discuss - the proliferation of weird chocolate pairings. I yield to no one in my worship at the altar of chocolate. But I don't get the idea that virtually anything you can toss into it is worth trying. I don't see where adding tea has value; why not just have a "cuppa" and a slice of chocolate cake? What do Chinese 5 Spice, balsamic vinegar, and (yuck) goat cheese bring to the party? And who invited them? They have their own soirees to attend. I say if you are a heroin addict, you want your heroin uncut. And if you are a true chocolate fan, you will want only a few trustworthy additives that enhance the experience rather than make you wonder what fell into the vat by mistake. Comments welcome.