Cures for Boredom | Chocolate Covered Strawberries

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Use less salt.

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I love Mayan style chocolate, which I like to call "chocolate with a kick" since it's been flavored with savory, spicy peppers. I love the homey warmth of honey in my sweets, as well, so when I had an 11PM sweet craving the other night and ZERO desire to leave my apartment, I checked the kitchen: strawberries, chocolate, cayenne pepper powder, honey.

It's GO time, people.

• 1/2 cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips
  
• 3 tbsp of milk (or cream, if you have it!)
  
• 1 tsp honey
  
• 1 tsp cayenne pepper
  
• 1 cup strawberries
  
  1. Set up a double boiler for melting your chocolate.
  2. Put the milk, chocolate chips, honey, and cayenne pepper in your double boiler and melt.
  3. Dip your strawberries in the melted chocolate, and set on a cookie sheet.
  4. Cool for 10 minutes, then take out and sprinkle rock salt over them.
  5. Cool for 10-15 more minutes if you can wait, or or just devour all of them as quickly as possible while watching True Blood on HBO.
  

I added a bit of rock salt to bring out a little more sweetness in the chocolate - but if you know what's good for you, you'll use a bit less than what's shown here ...

... looks good on camera, though. Enjoy!

Ready, Set, Stockpile

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This may cost a fortune in the future...

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Last week, an international hedge fund made a huge purchase of the world's supply of chocolate (roughly 7%). That amounts to the entire European stock of cocoa.

Prices for chocolate have already risen 150% in the past two years, and should anything go wrong in luxury vacation destinations like the Ivory Coast or Nigeria, the hedge fund's purchase could exert a huge influence on the price of chocolate.

Ready, set, stockpile that chocolate and start investing in cocoa futures!

Drink This | Rosa Regale

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Looks promising!

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I have a confession to make, and I fear that will uncover one of my little prejudices: I cannot respect women who drink overly sweet wine.

Yes, it is mostly women who order these sickly sweet wines in all of these restaurants I've worked in. Both of my readers know the type - she smiles coyly when asked what she'll be drinking and coos, "Oh, I don't like anything too dry. Do you have anything sweet? Riesling? Or a nice white Zin?"

These women have never tasted a full-bodied, sexy wine, and they don't care to.

Current snobbish wino enthusiast wisdom holds that it's OK to drink sweet wine. Indeed, people should drink whatever wines they enjoy and not worry about traditional pairings or any kind of "objective" standards.

I'm not a believer in most kinds of relativism, but wine relativism can be defended, I think, and I'm willing to make exceptions to even my own food and wine rules - which is how I, despite typically recoiling from sweeter wines, agreed to take a sip of Banfi's garnet-colored Rosa Regale at a wine tasting a few weeks ago.

Take a look at the photograph of Banfi's Rosa Regale with a little light shining through the bottle ...

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... there was no time to photograph the wine in the glass.

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My host at the wine tasting presented the Rosa Regale as the grand finale to a lovely procession of wines - a sparkling dessert wine, light but lively with bubbles and a sweet, rich aroma of berries. It is made from the Brachetto grape, which may be significant or informative to someone other than me.

I took a few sips of the Rosa Regale with small bites of rich milk chocolate. The combination of the raspberry tones in the wine and the chocolate induced a foodie euphoria I haven't felt in a long time. Saying that "wine x" pairs perfectly with "food y" is an overused formula, sure, but it (in this case) is rings true. It just seems natural that these two should be consumed together - so much so that I feel confident saying that this is pretty much the only wine I'll be pairing with chocolate from here on out.

SO, if I'm still single come Valentine's Day 2011, I'll be cuddled up to a fistful of dark chocolate and my own bottle of Rosa Regale, with a "Do Not Disturb" sign hanging happily from the door handle of my hotel room!