little miss cocoa

So far, my baseball team allegiance has mostly been dependent on what shlock has fallen into my lap: a foam finger from the New York Yankees, and a worn down Red Sox cap my sister handed down to me. However, after this video, I may actually have a favorite team which, fortunately, happens to be my home team:

A good friend of mine is the Washington DC correspondent for France 24, which I believe is the newest news source in France. The newest news! Anyway, when the station launched, so did the Daily Show comedy, and the balloons:

People are disproportionately impressed by chocolate truffles. They think they are really special. These are not. They’re mindlessly easy to make, on par with brownies-from-a-box. And this makes them the perfect party food. You bring them, people crow, you bask, everyone loves you and asks you to make them always. It’s also a great way to use up some leftover wine. Or you could always just crack a new bottle, and swig as you go.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup heavy cream
8 ounces semisweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
1/4 cup plus 1 tbs. red wine
1 tbs. chocolate liqueur
cocoa powder

Directions:
Pour the chopped chocolate into a medium-sized bowl, and make a nice divot in the center. Bring the cream to a soft boil (lightly rolling bubbles) in a small saucepan over medium-high heat, and pour the hot cream into the chocolate. With a spatula, immediately stir together until smooth. Then stir in the red wine and liqueur until smooth. Extravagantly lick spatula. Refrigerate chocolate for about one hour, until firm.

Cover a baking sheet with parchment paper, and fill a small bowl with cocoa powder. One by one, with a spoon or melon baller, scoop out some chocolate and form into one inch balls. This should make about three dozen truffles. One by one, drop into the cocoa powder and roll around until covered, then drop onto the sheet. Refrigerate again for at least a half hour, or up to three days.

Since this recipe calls for fresh cream, it doesn’t keep particularly well. But I’ve never been able to keep the truffles around for more than a day, anyway.

It is a lazy, lovely hot in Philadelphia, the sort where you wander around in a humid daze, eating ice cream and drinking lots of cold water and generally feeling cheerfully careless. It is also perfect weather for gazpacho! Cool, a little spicy, and excellent after a long walk. I made a huge potful last week, and am still enjoying it. Serves 6-8, or 1 over a week’s time of lazy summer dinners.

Ingredients:
5-6 large beefsteak tomatoes
1 red onion, chopped
4 smashed garlic cloves
6 tbs. white balsamic vinegar (can be found at Trader Joe’s)
2 cucumbers, diced
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 yellow, red, or orange bell pepper, diced (I hate green peppers)
1-2 tbs. of cilantro, coarsely chopped
sea salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste

Directions:
This is the hardest part: Cut out the stem and core of each tomato with a paring knife. Bring a large pot about 3/4ths full of water to a rolling boil. Prepare a bowl full of ice water. One at a time, ease the tomatoes into the water and let sit for about 30 seconds. Then fish out the tomato and stick in the bowl of ice water to cool. Immediately peel off the skin. After this, you’ll have six naked tomatoes.

Now the easy part! Cut three tomatoes into smaller pieces and stick in the blender. Puree into a nice soup, then pour into a large bowl. Set aside.

Now stick the onions, garlic, and white balsamic vinegar into the blender. Puree. Pour into the large bowl with the pureed tomatoes. Whisk in the 1/3 cup of olive oil.

Coarsely chop the remaining tomatoes, and stick in the bowl with the pureed tomatoes and onions. Stir in the diced cucumber, pepper, and cilantro. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve immediately or stick in the refrigerator to chill.

This is a really easy recipe to mess with, too. Add different veggies if you like, adjust the amount of onions and garlic according to your tolerance for spice, or add an accompaniment of croutons, toasted Italian bread, or even some mozzarella cheese. It’s cold, it’s tasty, it’s refreshing, it’s like a drinkable salad without the hiss pop of V8 cans. All in all, great for summer, and picnics, too.

Last year, after a two and a half week trip to Korea, I sat on my sister’s couch for half a week, watching endless DVR-ed episodes of ‘Girls Next Door’ and generally vegging my brain out on crap-happy American television. I’m ashamed to admit that it was the ideal welcome home. And the best scene is this one:

Conversations with my mother:
Me – I love summertime!
Mom – I don’t.

Summer pleasures:
Thrusting a butcher’s knife into the pink core of a watermelon.
Licking sorbet off your wrist where it melted off the cone.
Sprawling out on a cool surface (hardwood floor, grass, bathroom linoleum).
Fresh-picked, sun-warm berries and apricots.
Windows left open all night, fans left on.
Leaves’ shadows.
Sleeveless cotton dresses.
The smell of sunscreen at the beach, and the white hot laziness of lying on sand.
Swimming at night with a golden retriever, followed by hot tub (minus retriever).
And the most basic: skin, sandals, sleep.

Natalie Portman is pretty and all, but I definitely watch this video just because I love the way Devendra Banhart dances. I also can’t get over the line ‘Grandma! I love you in a salad way.’ That’s just the sort of poetic brilliance found in the body of spam emails, where I’ve read some of the funkiest stuff I’ve ever seen.

This video also looks like it was a lot of fun to make, and I really hope it was. Why is it that the low-tech things always look like they were the most fun? Maybe it was awful, and Natalie and Devendra got in a big fight, and that’s when he wrote in Kali, the Destroyer, and together they fired Natalie and hired an octopus as a big insult. Speaking of which, I have a lot of respect for octopi. I consider it good practice to respect squishy things.

I’m confused about what exactly is being celebrated here, but it sure makes me happy anyway! Also, potatoes are an excellent staple food (especially cut into thin slices, doused in olive oil, salt, pepper, and rosemary, wrapped tight in tin foil, and stuffed into hot coals), and I’m willing to celebrate that.

I recently admonished one of my students for using wikipedia as a source, as I’m about to do right here.

But how great if it’s true!

And I quote: A recent study indicates that, because of the presence of theobromine in chocolate, 50 grams of dark chocolate may be an effective treatment for a persistent cough.

After growing up drinking thin-as-bathwater Swiss Miss hot cocoa, I was ill prepared for the thick, warm chocolate plunked in front of me at a Segovia café. It was pure chocolate and cream, paired with cinnamon and sugar rolled churros. After several hours of walking the chilly, hilly streets and eating a cold egg sandwich for lunch, the chocolate filled a dark hole I never knew existed. Also problematic was the realization that I didn’t know how to find a cup that good in the USA.

Until I moved to New York. I’d heard word of City Bakery’s fine hot chocolate through a friend who’d worked there, but I waited until winter to try it out. The City Bakery was sponsoring a winter festival complete with ice rink (plastic simu-ice plunked mid-roadway) and a snowman building contest (trucked in snow fashioned into a colored-dye-battered colony). The line was too long to get in, so my friend, Erica, and I went a few weeks later.

Inside, the City Bakery was spare and busy, with seating all along either side of its main island of pastries and drinks. Underneath another seating area was an array of buffet-style lunch foods, which I skipped in favor of the vats of hot cocoa simmering on the back end of the mid-bakery island. Erica and I both got our own small bowl of hot cocoa, complete with homemade marshmallow, and eventually wrangled a place to sit.

It was so warm, so rich, bubbling over with cream. It was like drinking from Willy Wonka’s chocolate river. It was a chocolate bisque, nectar, hot manna. The marshmallow, spinning like a square galaxy, was a solid hunk of fluff. For the first time since Segovia, I met a hot chocolate that could satiate me from my cold toes to my chocolate colored hair. It was grand. It was so grand I couldn’t finish it, and spent the rest of the night on a sugar-fueled high.

After that, any time I had to meet a friend around Union Square, we managed to find ourselves in front of City Bakery’s argyle sign, appetites primed.

City Bakery is located just off New York’s Union Square at West 18th Street and 5th Ave. Pair their hot cocoa (with marshmallow!) with a pretzel croissant, or one of their tray-sized, melt-middled chocolate chip cookies. And prepare to share. Even this gobbler can’t make it through a whole cup.