It's a miracle! It's chocolate!

This recent revelation explains a lot about the Easter bunny. As a kid, there were a couple of German chocolate makers in our little town who came out of hiding once a year to fill their soda fountain shop with chocolate rabbits like you only dream about because no matter how big none of them were hollow! This was definitely a spiritual thing to receive one of these bunnies. Theologically some more time spent with the Chronicles of Cadbury are definitely in order.  After all Easter was a miracle!

How to medicate to have the memory of a 30 year old

TPP worries about having more senior moments, episodes of memory lapses. Of course the darned things, memories, continue to accumulate, so if some one says TPP has the memory of a 30-year-old that would just mean he only has about 45% of the memories he should have now. So it is not completely clear whether this younger memory is a good thing to desire. The memory lapses are mostly quick recall, not the loss of the memory in toto, so this is about access time, and search time is going to increase the bigger the data base. Now here's the good news should you decide to medicate yourself, some of the constituents of cocoa, the base ingredient of chocolate, seem to improve recall memory. This year's cold, windy weather greatly curtailed the trick-or-treating with the result that quite a bit of "memory medicine" was left over in nice single dosage packets. Now if TPP could only remember where it was put? 

What next? Now threat to cacao.

Only two days after reporting to you that climate change is threatening wild coffee in its native land, now cacao is threatened in western Africa, not its native land, but an area that provides a lot of the world's chocolate, because climate change is making the area too hot.  1st coffee, now chocolate.  What next you may well ask?  Who knows?  But here is an absolute promise; this is only the beginning.  When will politicians figure out what is begining to happen?  More and more crops in more and more places will no longer be able to grow where they have been growing.  Hard to predict exactly how bad things will get, but finding viable alternatives, new places to grow displaced crops, new crops for farmers who have lost their traditional crops, is not at all easy.  When coffee and chocolate are threatened, so is civilization! 

Nobel prize chocolate connection

Who knew?  A highly significant correlation exists between a country's per capita consumption of chocolate and the number of Nobel prizes won by citizens of that country.   Naturally out there anchoring the upper end of the regression is Switzerland, the country that put the milk in milk chocolate (the Peter process) at a chocolate consumption of about 11 kg per person per year.  That seems like a lot until you see the Easter display at the Sprungli showroom in Zurich featuring a 4 foot tall chocolate egg with an entire chocolate diorama inside.  So if a country wishes to increase its number of Nobel prize winners it must simply encourage its citizens to eat more chocolate (0.4 kg per person per year to be exact) to increase the number of awards by 1.  That big rabbit in the back would be a good start on an individual basis, but for the USA it would take 125 million kg/yr in total.  Who wants to make this much of a sacrifice?

Cost of chocolate

The time-honored, although not honorable, practice is to get someone hooked on an addictive substance by basically giving it to them free, and then once the addiction hook is set, reel them in and charge them a fortune to maintain their habit or die trying.  In general chocolate doesn't seem to fit this scenario, but like its close cousin caffeine, theobromine is an addictive stimulant.  A local chocolate maker has a semi-sweet dark chocolate containing finely ground coffee beans.  A couple of pieces of this delectable stuff gives you a real buzz, and you wonder if there should be age restrictions for buying it!  At another level, such things as chocolate come from crops in distant places, foreign countries with tropical climates, and chocolate is just taken for granted along with its affordability, so what would you pay to insure that cacao (image - cacao tree with ripe fruit) as a crop is protected and sustainable?  Well, there is a protection strategy and a price tag (visiting this link will be a good time to try out your scratch and sniff monitor).  On a world-wide basis $2 million annually is probably not too much, but you know, a couple of million here, a couple of million there, multiplied by all those other commodities people would still like to have and pretty soon you're talking real money.  Unfortunately the human race has borrowed against the future using natural resources without really paying the price for their conservation, maintenance, and sustainability.  This cost, these costs, are now going to come home to roost over the next few decades.  The free lunch is over, and things like chocolate may become pricier, a luxury.  Pay up, or go cold turkey.  HT to Agricultural Biodiversity. 

Too good to be true!

Nuts, doesn't it just make your day when you find out that something you really really wanted to think was true, probably isn't?  My Father was one who always said, "If it seems too good to be true, it probably isn't."  So all these stinking wonderful stories about the health benefits of chocolate are probably bad science at work!  Well, drat!  What a buzzkill that sort of thing is.  What to do?  Well, deny it of course!  What kind of left-wing, commie-pinko, agenda is being pushed here?   As a good chocolate-eating, red-meat consuming (Oh wait, that's not as bad as they thought!  Sorry.) partiotic 'Mercan, the Phactor is just plain suspicious of their motives here, or just doesn't care all that much to change habits.  So, get that steak over here; hold the chocolate sauce.

Chocolate is good for you

Well, duh!  But just in case you think this is simply a good "healthy" rationalization for indulging, here's the actual list of health benefits attributed to chocolate. Whether chocolate will actually extend you life expectancy or not matters little because without such delectables life would seem short and miserable indeed.  So this falls into the "that's nice" category because even if someone gives the Phactor 10 reasons why eating chocolate was bad, he still intends to enjoy it, in moderation.  This is why it is hard to understand all these people who deprive themselves of so many things simply because they heard somewhere that something was bad for them.  It's not how long you live people, but the quality of the life you live.  This is why in spite of a entering an era of weight consciousness, the Phactors enjoyed their spring asparagus with a big dab of aioli.  Unfortunately, chocolate does not go with asparagus.  

Mole Poblano - spicy chocolate sauce

Everyone is familiar enough with chocolate as a confection; thank you Daniel Peter. But chocolate was used as a cooking ingredient long before that. This weeks lab deals with stimulants, caffeine, nicotine, and theobromine, and the latter means chocolate, not as a confection, but as a traditional Mesoamerican cooking flavoring/spice. No better way of spicing up chicken or turkey than to make a simple mole. Sorry, my timing is bad especially if you had turkey leftovers from Thanksgiving and ran out of ideas. Here's a simple and milder version for my food wimpy and cooking averse students.

10 dried ancho** chili peppers
5 Tbsp almonds
2 cloves garlic
1 can chopped tomatoes
1 Tbsp sesame seeds (OK mixing some metaphors here*.)
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups chicken broth (save from cooking some chicken)
2 cups boiling water
2 onions chopped
1/2 cup raisins
2 Tbsp masa harina (maize flour)
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground coriander
4 Tbsp cooking oil
2 oz Mexican chocolate (or use semisweet chocolate plus 4 tsp sugar, 1/8 tsp cinnamon, 2-3 drops of vanilla extract)

Soak peppers in boiling water until soft. Discard stems and seeds; save water. Put peppers, almonds onions, garlic, tomatoes, raisins, masa harina, sesame seeds, spices, into a blender with a few Tbsp of the pepper water. Blend at medium speed until a paste is formed. Add more water as necessary. Heat oil in a saucepan. Add chili paste and cook stirring 2-3 mins. Add chicken broth gradually, stirring. Add chocolate & stir until melted. Sauce should be the consistency of heavy cream. This can be frozen or refrigerated until later. Serve on tamales or chicken and cheese filled tortillas.

Poblano peppers are not scary hot, so this isn't as spicy hot as you might think. As as an even easier alternative, you can go to a Mexican grocery and buy a jar of Dona Maria or some other mole sauce, and then like everyone else, use the empty jar as a juice glass. Enjoy.

*Sesame, cloves, cinnamon, coriander, almonds, garlic, onions, and raisins were not part of moles prior to 1492 as all are of Old World origin, so traditional recipes would have used other ingredients, e.g., allspice instead of cloves.

**Poblano and ancho chili peppers are the same thing, but called the former when green and the latter when ripe, red, and dried. So why isn't it Mole Ancho? No idea.

Your Christmas Present - Bourbon Pecan Truffles

Didn't you know the Phytophactor would think to get a present for all of you? Bourbon Pecan Truffles are very American composed as they are of chocolate, pecans, and bourbon. Sorry, some assembly required.

Bourbon Pecan Truffles
3 cups semi-sweet chocolate bits (680 g)
1 can (14 oz.) sweetened condensed milk (425 ml)
3 Tablespoons Bourbon (50 ml)
1 cup chopped pecans (225 G)

Melt chocolate pieces in top of double boiler over hot, not boiling water. Stir in condensed milk; combine until smooth. Remove from heat; stir in bourbon. Chill for 2 hours. Shape into 2 cm diameter balls. Roll in pecan pieces. Chill until firm. Store in cold; serve at room temperature.

The easiest, but rather messy way to form the balls is by rolling balls between the palms of your hands. In a pinch or act of sheer desperation congnac or rum could be substituted for bourbon, and walnuts could be used instead of pecans.

Drink of the gods

This is a pretty interesting rain forest flower for several reasons. One it's sort of hard to figure out what parts is what; two, the flowers appear right out of the trunk of the tree; three its generic name, Theobroma, means "drink of the gods"; and four, the common name of the most famous product from this genus is Mayan for bitter water. This is a wild species, but the cultivated species is also called cacao, the source of chocolate, or "chocolatl" (bitter water). And a spicy, fatty version of hot chocolate was the royal beverage of Aztecs. In the evergreen tropics many trees produce flowers on "old wood", their limbs and trunks where the leaves don't obscure the flowers, a phenomenon called cauliflory. Back up in Lincolnland red bud is one of the few temperate trees that do this. Red pods will follow. The mature seeds are the source of chocolate.

On other fronts the students are proving to be a great lot this year, very interested and very industrious. It has been wet, raining every night, and showers almost every day. However nothing like last year's forest-field station flooding deluge. Woke up this AM to the gargling call of oropendolas.