Monkey Monday: books, chocolate, and mushrooms 21 April 2008 6:18 pm
Posted by Tracy in : books, cooking, friends, geekery, meat, not even vegetarian, vegan, vegetarian , trackbackThis week in Tracy’s culinary schizophrenia: thanks to the best library hold request coincidence ever, I’m currently borrowing and thoroughly enjoying both The River Cottage Meat Book and Veganomicon. To my ever-loving surprise, they have not mutually annihilated, and I am very happy to recommend them both. Highly. Oh, and by the way, I first learned about The River Cottage Meat Book by reading The Ethics of What We Eat
Not so confidential note to Allison: Veganomicon features a recipe for what I believe may be your ultimate dessert: pears poached in tea. Oh, and by the way: the pear-infused tealicious poaching liquid? Gets used as the base for chocolate sauce. Awwww, yeah. We are so making this the next time we hang out.
Speaking of chocolate, Peter and I had a little tasting last night: São Tomé Foresto 75% cacao by Pralus. Fancy fancy! Made with single-source beans from the Claudio Corallo plantation on São Tomé, which I totally had to look up because I had no idea where it was. I’m guessing Foresto is the cacao cultivar in question, but basically as I noted in my paper journal last night, this is like freaking designer chocolate, dudes. It was on special at Market of Choice a while back: $3.99 for a 6 ounce/170 g bar, and is normally much more expensive, so I figured I should take my impulse-buying chances while I could, and woo! Worth it. According to the tasting notes, this chocolate is “fresh but intense, spicy, fruity, earthy and acidic” but mostly what I noticed was that it was Repo Man-intense, proving once again that percentage of cacao isn’t everything. This is chocolate that seems to turn liquid as soon as it hits your tongue, filling your mouth and even your nose until you can hardly think of anything else. I had maybe half an ounce, and it was plenty, like I needed a cup of tea to recover. It was awesome.
Speaking of awesome, check out the results of the No Croutons Required mushroom challenge, for which I wrote up Mushroom Miso Soup last week. There’s a lot of good stuff there; I look forward to voting for my favorite, although it’s going to be hard to choose. Mmmmm, mushrooms.
And speaking of mushrooms, organic cremini are on sale for the same price as conventional at Capella right now, and I scored a big pile of both regular button and cremini from their dinged produce pile today, which means it’s time to go play “I win” and make all kinds of super-cheap deliciousness. Yay!
Comments»
Don’t really have time to read this tonight– I have two chapters to read for my class, guitar to practice, getting all the stuff done so the roof can be done on schedule, and I probably should meditate tonight before bed– but I will be back. Because I have a passion for books, chocolate, and mushrooms that surpasses big and little peoples’ fondness for such things.
Yes, quite worth the wait. I will have to keep an eye open for Pralus chocolate.
Most people spend their lives trying to avoid intense situations…