I was trying to explain to my 10 month old what Christmas tastes like. It was a fairly one-sided conversation but I’m pretty sure she got the gist of it.
I was cutting pomegranate seeds in half for her like the paranoid mom that I have become and she was mmmm-ing as she swallowed fistfuls of them whole. These had been preceded by some sage-y buckwheat with mushrooms, all flavours that seem very Christmassy to me.
This is meant to warm you up, down to your toes, but a side effect is happiness, it’s made of chocolate, after all.
I was reading about ‘Champurrado’ in Lucky Peach magazine the other day. I had never heard of it before, but it is a chocolate version of ‘Atole’, a masa (corn)-based drink that they drink in Mexico to warm up ). Because apparently it gets cold there. As it turns out, this will warm you up whether you are Mexico-cold or Canada-cold.
The recipe in the article was created by Rick Bayless, and whenever I see his name I pay attention because his specialty is traditional Mexican cuisine, a cuisine I don’t know very much about, but find really interesting.
I would have pictured a warm chocolate drink from Mexico more like warm chocolate drinks that I’ve had in Europe, basically melted chocolate ganache (not that I’m complaining), but this is more like a mixture between hot porridge and a smoothie. That’s why I’ve called it breakfast hot chocolate, because it doesn’t resemble the hot chocolate that comes in the rip open packages with little dried marshmallows that you may or may not have enjoyed beside a roaring fire after a chilly summer night time swim. It’s actually pretty healthy, even if it leans towards the sweet side (chocolate without the sweet would taste more like black coffee).
One of my favourite things is discovering that a specialty food item that I buy on a regular basis is actually really easy to make at home. It’s not just about saving money, it’s about being able to choose the base ingredients and having control over the processing variables too. Cleaner, fresher, less processed food is right up my alley, and the money saving thing is pretty awesome too.
You may have heard of (or spent a lot of money buying) coconut butter (aka coconut manna). It is different from coconut oil, as it is made with the whole coconut flesh as opposed to being extracted from the coconut flesh. Physically, it is like the difference between puréed avocado and avocado oil.
