It's been a while! Various things came up, we had packed weekends, softlykarou was gone for a retreat, she made me a tasty olive oil cake with no chocolate whatsoever--yes, I do sometimes eat desserts that contain no chocolate at all!--we had a Call of Cthulhu game...you know, things. But this weekend we didn't have much to do other than one thing that I'll ( Read more... )

This is going to be a shorter post because we've both had a lot to do today, but I didn't want to go another week without trying more chocolate! The chocolate is piling up faster than we can eat through it. Pretty soon, softlykarou's spring break is coming up and I took several days off to coincide with it, so we might do some Darker than Black supplementals ( Read more... )

Yesterday, softlykarou and I went with my parents to the orchid show at the Chicago Botanic Garden. The weather wasn't great for garden-viewing, but fortunately this was an orchid show, so all the flowers were indoors. When I was a child, I hated looking at flowers, hated being dragged along with my parents to flower shows, and didn't understand why they ( Read more... )

It's been a while, but we're back! This is a bar I've been wanting to try for a while as well, since part of the reason I wanted to write about dark chocolate was to see if there was anything to the single-origin trend. Does chocolate, like wine, have terroir? The advertising certainly makes a bit deal of it, and I'm exactly the kind of person ( Read more... )

I was wavering on doing Darrker than Black this week, but since softlykarou will be gone for a large part of next weekend, we decided to go ahead with it. And also since every time I stopped pay attention to the internet for more than thirty minutes at a time, I'd come back thinking, "So are we a fascist dictatorship yet?" And last I checked, the ( Read more... )

Monday isn't the usual day, but I already skipped last week and I didn't want to skip another week.

Over the end of the year, we had a lot of candy and other desserts that wouldn't fit Darker than Black, so we stopped updating quite so much other than the marzipan, which only barely qualifies here. But now we've worked our way through everything ( Read more... )

I've loved marzipan basically as long as I can remember. My father always used to get boxes of See's candies for any holiday or birthday available, and eventually I developed a taste for them too. I presume that my father picked up his love of marizpan from his time living in Germany, and that's also why he pronounces it without the R (which is ( Read more... )

This week softlykarou and I received our shipment of mirin, the sweet cooking sake that we use to make some meat and all the だし巻き (dashimaki, "dashi-flavored fried eggs"). It took us months to use up the last two bottles and this time in a fit of exuberance, I ordered five, which will probably take us years to use. Fortunately, since it's mildly alcoholic, it ( Read more... )

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softlykarou and I don't celebrate Christmas, but every year we go to Christkindlmarket in Chicago for the German food and crafts. A lot of it we can't eat because the Germans are fond of their pork, but the Döner Men have a booth there where they serve chicken kabobs that are wonderful with some spiced apple cider and a cold wind blowing around you. Though ( Read more... )