The Foundational Chocolate

I came to this place, where the hills flow with cheese and chocolate (easy milk and honey allusion, right?), and managed not to immediately gorge on either. The cheese fast was broken a couple days ago when I made some homemade mac'n'cheese, which ended up being shell pasta with cheese melted over it. Without the patience to make a proper sauce, it was simply a nice stringy mix of emmentaler, gouda, and gran padano cheeses, tossed into the pasta with sliced leeks and mushrooms sautéed in more butter than you want me to mention.

Out of this, I was trying to figure out how to turn the cheese into a proper sauce. After thinking of a few extra ingredients that would help, I realized that I basically intended to make a cheese fondue and pour it over pasta. And then eat it along with a glass of whichever white wine or vermouth had gone into the fondue. So mac'n'cheese fondue is now on my list of foods to make for a tasty, cholesterol-heavy meal (and now you want some, too).

But what about chocolate? I managed to last a full week without indulging. My only chocolate while still in the youth hostel was a Cadbury's Caramel bar, courtesy of Heathrow airport and about $2 more than should have been spent on it. Late last week, one of my friends from Chicago asked how much chocolate I'd eaten, spurring an interest and a craving. So on Friday I bought one. Something milk chocolate filled with something even milkier chocolate. Saturday I bought another. Sunday, a third. Honey-chocolate with nougat, and dark chocolate with orange filling, respectively.

The back of my mind knew what was in those chocolate bars besides mouthfuls of rich, Swiss culture and the fatty milk of cows raised on three languages and banking in alpine meadows full of edelweiss. The back of my mind knew what the future held if I kept eating those bars like that. Either a lot more running and biking (not as likely) or a whole lot less (much more likely).

After finishing each of the first three bars came the, "Why did I buy only one??" feeling. This is good. It reminds me how lucky I am to be here, and is a good indicator that I didn't eat myself sick.

I did buy bar number four today. It may even last until the afternoon. I will try to keep track of all the different kinds eaten, to move through the world offered by the Swiss chocolatier. My first inclination was to try to explore every nook and cranny of the local chocolate world, but dietary sense, fiscal sense, and the sheer magnitude of it makes that quite an undertaking. So I will start by trying to cover the basics - to run the range of bars that are readily available, covering the center of the local spectrum. The foundational chocolate.

pizza!!

Well, I have a couple days at home alone now with the parents taking Darin to Hesston, seeing as his classes start Monday. I decided to take a break from the job search this morning and googled "real pizza dough recipes" and came across this website:

http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm

I have not tried it, but he has some very good, very detailed information on how to make a great pizza. I plan to at least try a less time-intensive version, starting this afternoon (after a grocery trip). I have high hopes for improving my pizza-making skills over the next couple days. Though I doubt I will try to trick the oven into letting me bake it at 800 - 900 F (apparently that's what you need for a really good pizza). I'd say one of my favorite parts of this guy's site is the number of myths he debunks (he may be wrong, but he sounds like he knows what he's talking about, so I'm taking his word on them actually being myths; he took about 6 years to develop this recipe).

It has been raining a lot the past few days here in Archbold, which is probably all just as well. It does keep me from going out fishing (even after the rain's done it's not really worth it - fish usually don't bite too well after a good rain or two, or five). It also keeps me from getting motivated to run and/or bike. Yes, I said it: bike. Last week I actually went out again and biked about 25 miles with my dad and brother-in-law after a 2.5 mile run (I figured running first would make it more fair to the other two).

The job search is going slowly. Well, slowly in some ways. I've been able to cross a lot of cities off my list very quickly (it doesn't take long to go through a city when you only come up with 50 job postings and zero, maybe one, are jobs I could apply for). I've heard about a couple distant possibilities both in Chicago and in Knoxville, but neither of those are sure bets at all or happening in the next month. On the bright side, there's nobody to share the fair trade chocolate bars with that were left sitting on the counter in the kitchen... That and this extra bit of unemployment gives me a little more opportunity for a couple/few quick trips visiting friends and family (though this time by car).