As you may have noticed, I haven’t been in the kitchen much lately (except to make the requisite three meals a day).  I’ve been up to my neck in ghostwriting and avoiding the calorie overload that comes of filling the house with chocolate (and by the way, have any of you noticed that the price of chocolate has skyrocketed?  I’m thinking of taking up vegetable cookery instead).  At any rate, I thought I’d share this little piece I did for Huffington Post to keep you entertained until I return to the Chocolate Covered Kitchen.  Here goes:

When it came time for my daughter to start Kindergarten, it suddenly hit me.  I would have to get her to school each morning.  On time.  For thirteen years.  The thought had never occurred to me, and had it crossed my mind six years prior, she would probably not exist.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it after the first year,” a friend assured me.  A year?  I couldn’t imagine.  But somehow, she was right; by the time first grade rolled around I was a pro at manipulating all that six year old energy into a focused direction – clothes on, healthy breakfast efficiently consumed, hair unsnarled, combed and tied into a perky ponytail, shoes velcroed (thank God for that technological innovation), and my own frazzled flesh washed, painted, dressed and ready to go.

At first, the school years were adorable.  The cute little drawings she’d bring home (“It’s the Mona Lisa, with eyebrows”), the clever observations (“I think the principal needs to be expelled”), the major achievements (“We cut open dead people at school today to find out why they died”).  But when she had her first year-end project due, I realized things were going to get rough. She was supposed to turn in a collection of a hundred objects, collected over the school year.  We’d been meaning to get around to it for months, when one day, she came home with a notice that it was due the following morning.  I had something to do that evening or some guy to see and left her with a babysitter, like they do on TV.  I grabbed a big jar of shells she’d collected on the beach and told the sitter to count out a hundred and put them in a baggy.  She did, and my daughter dutifully carried her baggy of shells to school.

The following week there was a big event for all the parents.  I went, proud of my cute and clever little girl and all that she’d learned and done over the school year.  But when we got there, I was horrified to see the halls lined with amazing displays – the Battle of Gettysburg recreated with a hundred plastic soldiers; the food pyramid recreated with a hundred paper-mâché veggies and grains ; Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry recreated with a hundred hand-carved wizards.  Each elaborate diorama was a testament to parental dedication – and parental craftsmanship from the look of most of them.  Then there was my daughter’s – a plastic bag of shells.

Turns out the assignment was not to just collect a hundred things, but to tell a story with them, construct a display that would portray their deeper meaning.  How humiliated my daughter must have been, I realized, kicking myself for not paying more attention.  I sent an email to her teacher that very night, apologizing for my neglect.  “No problem at all,” she assured me, “part of the assignment was to explain to the class why they chose what they collected.  Most of the children didn’t really know, but your daughter told a wonderful story about how the shells told the story of the history of the world.”

I realized then and there that I was raising a con artist who could put Olivia the pony-tailed pig to shame, and that my parental neglect was teaching her to be fast on her feet, a skill that would take her far.  And so it was that I relaxed and figured if she passed Kindergarten, she’d do alright.

Years passed and I got better at paying attention to her projects, though most of them tended to require last-minute trips to the crafts supply store, hot glue guns and squabbles that inevitably ended with threats to put each other up for adoption.  I couldn’t wait for the project years to end, because all the other parents seemed to do it better, and I was never quite sure what it was the kids were learning aside from how to manage us.

Eventually, there were fewer and fewer three-dimensional homework assignments to assist with, and what few there were she did on her own, rarely even telling me what it was that she was up to.  “What in the world are you doing with that nuclear waste?” I would inquire, to which she would nonchalantly reply, “I’m just doing my science homework, can you hand me the uranium hexaflouride?”   I’d shrug my shoulders, do as I was told and go back to griping on the phone about how tough it is to be a parent.

Then she hit high school, and things really got rough.  Now the homework requires asking me intellectual questions, expecting me to explain all sorts of complicated things, quiz her on her accumulating knowledge and evaluate her brilliance.  “But I don’t know logarithms!” I protest, “You still need to help me with your times tables.”

“Mom, I learned times tables in third grade,” she scolds, “please can’t you test me on this?”

“Call your Dad,” I counter, “he’s the one who gave you those quantitative genes; it’s not my doing.”

“Fine.  Then you can help me with my social studies,” she suggests, confident that my Ph.D. in the social sciences will see me through ninth grade exams, “I just want to go over the fall of the Roman Empire.”

The fall of the Roman Empire?  All they taught me in graduate school was the fall of the U.S. Empire.  That’s outside my specialty.

“But I don’t do empires!” I plead.

She looks at me like she’s descended from apes.  Recently.

“That’s okay,” she sighs, clearly ashamed to be related.  “I have social studies down pretty well.  Can you at least help me with physics?”

I feel like a criminal, caught in a lie.  How can I get out of this one?  “But you don’t really learn effectively by being quizzed,” I suggest in my best professorial tone, “pedagogically, it’s a poor method for retaining information because – “ But she cuts me off.

“Admit it; you just don’t want to help me with my homework!” “Okay,” I concede, “I thought homework was over when I got my Ph.D., and now you’re making me go all the way through high school again.  That’s too hard!” I wail at the injustice, wishing only that she’d go to her room and study so I could turn on the TV and watch a rerun of Revenge.  But she won’t budge.  She hands me her study sheet and tells me to quiz her.

“Start with the Bohr principle,” she instructs, and I find it aptly named, because this homework is really a bore.

Two hours later, we’re done, and I’m confident I could score a low C on the test, and she’s confident that if I ever decide to put my head in the oven, I won’t have sense enough to make sure it’s not electric, given my inability to know the difference between a gas and an electron.

“I’m much worse off than I was before we began,” she points out in a teenager’s tone as she heads off to study without me.  “I would have learned more by studying with the cat!”

“It’s not my fault,” I protest, “I don’t know the answers!”

“The answers are right here!” she wails at me, shaking the study guide like it was some binding contract, “All you had to do was make sure you were comparing my answers with the answers I had written down – but you kept losing your place and telling me I was wrong when I was right because you were looking at answers to questions about neutrons when I was answering questions about density and matter! Anyone can tell the difference!”

I hang my head in shame. I look up sheepishly, “I’m sorry,” I plead.  “I’ll make you cookies . . .”  She perks up, gives me a big hug and suggests that’s a good idea.  She knows I can do math in the kitchen, figure out chemical conversion as long as it involves an oven, and master physics when it comes to calculating how long I should beat the batter before density kicks in.  Just don’t ask me about the fall of the Roman Empire, unless it’s the name of a soufflé (in which case I can tell you all about it).  As Socrates said, it’s not information that gives us knowledge, but experience.

And as Socrates also said, true knowledge is knowing you know nothing.  I really don’t know much about Socrates, but I can tell you one thing. He must have been a parent.

When my daughter asked me for a new pair of shoes I had to tell her the truth.  “We can’t afford shoes until I get a job or Bob Dylan dies, whichever comes first.”  She wailed about the injustice of it all and went away, as teenagers tend to do when parents are around.  But I hoped that Dylan wouldn’t die because I’m waiting for a new album and I rather like just knowing he’s out there, to keep Maureen Dowd in line.

A new pair of shoes, I figured, was a reasonable request.  After all, neither of us have had a new pair of shoes since the Bush administration, and what with her uncontrolled growth that started at birth and my throbbing bunion that started at mid-life, we both hobble around wincing like nineteenth century Chinese dowagers wearing shoes the size of thimbles.  But unless I can tear the ruby slippers off some dead witch I happen upon, I just don’t think shoes are something I should trade money for because, after all, feet walk by themselves.

If things had been different, of course, I would have bought my little girl a new pair of shoes, and maybe even thrown in a trip to the circus, but once I lost my job and the sky started crashing down all around us, before I could say pass the food stamps, we’d been downsized.  The big house was replaced with a small apartment, the furniture shrunk to size, and the cathedral ceilings replaced with walls not much higher than my head. The only thing missing was a beaker that read “Drink Me” to give me hope there might be an escape route.

In search of an escape route, I took inventory of what little was left.  I’ve never known much about money other than for some it grows on trees (until they get chopped down).  But once I started reading about what to do with what was left so that it might grow into lush abundance, I realized not even Suze Orman could save us.  That’s when I stumbled upon the Dylans.

The first one was innocent enough.  I came across it one evening in a moment of self-defeating despair, while following the internet trail from social media sites that measure my worth in virtual friends to a little art gallery in London that measured my worth in social pretense.  There were only a couple of them left, one that looked like the desperate scribbling of a gloomy ad man, but the other, a blast of color to rattle my walls.  Three chairs, standing empty in a hotel room bright with flaming orange and magenta.  Not much else. Just a painting of three chairs. We’d lost so many chairs.

We certainly couldn’t afford it.  But there it was, a painting by Dylan for less than the cost of a house.  Indeed, less than the cost of a window.  It wasn’t an original painting of course, that would cost a trailer in Tacoma, but it was a collector’s print, numbered and signed by Dylan himself, and I figured the signature alone was worth more than my bank was paying me in interest.  So in the click of a mouse, I’d bought it, then went into the kitchen to boil some cabbage and beans and ponder the rising price of designer vinegar.

I found the second one in a gallery in Scotland.  The third back in England.  The fourth . . . well by then there were no more walls, what with the other paintings and prints that have landed on our walls over the years, where they’ve become windows into intimate worlds of familiar mystery.

The flames may be dancing at our feet, but my daughter knows.  The Dylans are here to stay.  The roof might cave in, the floor be yanked out from under us, but it’s the walls that enclose and comfort us.  The walls have become our home, where with a single, tender gaze our eyes might slip into other spaces, other times, places where memories and fantasies linger in the shadows and lines of color brought to life.  And once there inside the paintings on our walls, what better place to pull up a chair and smile.

It wouldn’t be Christmas without chocolate, though, let’s be frank.  It wouldn’t be daylight without chocolate in some households, including my own. And it sure wouldn’t be evening without chocolate, because there’s no sense in the sun setting without a piece of chocolate on hand to sweeten the coming night.

But too much of a good thing almost always turns into a bad thing, and so it was that once I set off to learn how to make chocolate, I discovered I was popping it into my mouth like a newborn seeking the nearest nipple.  Ten minutes without it and I started to wail.  And, like a newborn, I began to grow exponentially until in less than a year I soared from an emaciated size sub-zero to a healthy size ten which pretty much feels like being trapped in someone else’s body.  Which would be perfectly fine with me if this someone else had come complete with her own wardrobe, and not just presumed that I would take her out to buy a new one.

Once I’d calculated what I was spending on chocolate, molding supplies and clothes that didn’t feel like sausage casings, I realized it would be cheaper to vacation in Monte Carlo than continue on the path to chocolate ruin.  So I cleaned up the kitchen, scaled back my chocolate melting mania, and got by with the occasional hit of a Theo’s chocolate bar to satisfy my cravings.  My finances wiped out by the rising cost of cocoa beans and polycarbonate molds, along with life and all it takes to sustain it, it wasn’t long before even the Theo’s was getting out of my reach.  Something clearly had to change.

And I sure did miss those mountains of pralines piled high as I unmolded one ganache-filled platter of chocolates after another, savoring the subtly-profound distinctions between a single-origin Venezuelan and a grand-cru from Madagascar.  Like a high class drunkard deprived of his Romanée Conti and facing a future of chugging Boones Farm straight from the bottle, I feared it wouldn’t be long before I’d end up back on seventy-five cent waxy bars snagged at the checkout stand.  That is so not me.

Then, just when I found myself down to my last 70% dark and reaching into the sofa cushions for lost coins to score another, a mysterious package arrived.  It was from France, and marked unpretentiously with a P.O. Box number and the single word, “Chocolate.”  I quickly rifled my brain for the possibility that in my Christmas shopping frenzy I had sent myself some European chocolate I could scarcely afford, but alas, I knew I hadn’t.  Who had sent it?  I hadn’t blogged about chocolate for some time, so it was surely not a promo.  Did I have a Secret Santa?  We all should, I reasoned.

I quickly tore open the package, half expecting a dozen toy snakes to fly out like those Can o’Nuts gag gifts, but instead, I saw only another box inside, wrapped in a plain canvas bag, stating only “Z Chocolat.”  A small pouch on the outside of the bag held a message.  It addressed me by name and ssured me that although the chocolates were outrageously expensive, whoever sent them was sure they were not beyond anything I could do myself.  Did that mean my Secret Santa thought I could easily afford outrageously expensive chocolates, I wondered, or that I could easily make these things myself?  The cryptic comment left me puzzled, as most things I read so often do.  “If you get inspired to try,” the message ended, “maybe I’ll enjoy a sample some day.”  I turned the message over, looked back inside the box for an invoice, but saw nothing.  Who had sent these?

Removing the silver box from the canvas bag I saw that it was quite heavy.  I cut open the seal with a razor blade and pulled out the first of four small boxes.  Each box held fifteen perfectly molded chocolates, dark, milk and white, each with a number on top.  A small booklet helped break the code – each number, from zero to 24, represented a different filling.  Some were filled with simple but elegant single origin chocolate ganache.  Others contained complex spices, crushed nuts or tart and silky berry-infused ganache.  I tried one, then two, and sure enough, they tasted as perfectly exquisite as they looked.

Yet it was not easy to just quaff these darlings – choosing and eating one required finding my reading glasses, examining the chocolate in the right light so I didn’t mistake the number stamped and circled on its top and end up gobbling a nutty milk when what I really wanted was a fruity dark, then looking up the number in the little book and cracking the code to know what I was eating.  A rather laborious procedure that could send any chocolate addict running for the nearest bag of M&M’s, but clearly a deliberate tactic to compel one to slow down and pay attention to what the chocolate looks and tastes like. How utterly diabolic.

The chocolates tasted divine, and I quickly looked up the website to discover that they are, indeed, outrageously expensive.  Whoever had sent these must like me very much unless, as my daughter suggests, the confections have been shot full of poison and sent by some disgruntled reader to finally shut me up, a possibility I would not dismiss given my proclivity to annoy the easily annoyable.   I read and reread the message again and again, but the only thing I came up with was Secret Santa may not be a native English speaker and they have good taste in chocolate.  Could it be my goofy Dutch friend Milly, I wondered?  Milly reads auras, sees invisible gnomes, and kicks people in parking lots, the kind of lovable friend that keeps me entertained.  Maybe she sent them, I wondered; they might not be so expensive in Europe, but still, they couldn’t be that much cheaper.  It wasn’t likely Milly sent them, I knew, but she was the only person I could think of, once I’d settled on non-native English speaker who knows where to find me.

So I wrote her the question people hate to be asked: Did you send me anything for Christmas?  Well, I was a bit more clear, I asked her, did you send me a box of outrageously priced chocolates for Christmas?  These are the kinds of questions that force the respondent to uncomfortably reply, “No, I didn’t send you anything,” or if they are quick on their feet they’ll play along and say, “Yes, you got them?  You didn’t think I’d forget you at Christmas did you?” and then you’d feel guilty and send them something terribly high priced in return.  The beauty with this tactic is that you’ll stop looking for the real sender, and the real sender, assuming you’d received their gift and not realizing it wasn’t signed, will stop having anything to do with you once you didn’t even bother to say thank you.

But Milly wasn’t quick on her feet.  She wrote back that she didn’t send me any chocolates, but she’d sent me an E-card and wasn’t that enough, must Americans always want more?  (Yes, of course, it’s our culture.  Super size us.)  Maybe I had a mysterious French admirer, she suggested, knowing full well that the French would be the last to admire me what with my bad haircuts, intolerance for lap dogs and inability to distinguish the gender of nouns.  No, whoever sent this box of chocolates didn’t come from France, though I didn’t rule out the possibility that some drunken Irishman with a gold credit card was stalking me from cyberspace and thought in his inebriated stupor that I might make a good catch.  Then again, drunken or not, straight men aren’t likely to describe anything as “outrageously expensive.”  That’s a woman or a gay man, I figured, since straight men don’t want women to think they consider any expense outrageous.  Ridiculous, yes, but outrageous?  That’s like describing a pair of shoes as fabulous.  Straight men just don’t do it.  Come to think of it, I don’t think they use adverbs much at all, it’s just one too many words.  No, whoever sent these chocolates is either a woman, gay, or well to do and confident in his masculinity.  Which pretty much limits the pool, if it’s the latter.

But I wasn’t about to ponder the origin of these chocolates much beyond Venezuela or Madagascar, once they were within my reach.  They are, dare I say it, fabulous.  We finished off the first box within forty-eight hours and then I hid them to finish them off by myself.  No sense letting my daughter eat something whose origin is unknown and could contain a deadly poison or mind-altering drug.  I’m a good parent, after all.

So I’ve decided to test each and every last one, just in case they’re tainted.  So far, so good . . . but anything might happen.  After all, if a box of exquisite chocolates can arrive from out of the blue, then who knows what the next surprise in life might be.  And what better way to start off the New Year, with a bit of chocolate, a mystery and many more nights of sweetened joy.

“I wish you were the kind of mommy who baked cookies,” my little girl said to me one day, a few years back, while I was taking dinner out of the microwave.

“Well I’m not that kind of mommy,” I retorted, “and you’re stuck with me.”  I peeled back the plastic wrap and gave the frozen mashed potatoes a stir, then gave it three and a half more minutes of radiation while I sliced an orange to garnish her plate.  How many moms did that? I wondered while recalling my own childhood so long ago, coming home from school to find my mother had baked a dozen cookies, sewn a wardrobe for my Barbie dolls and another dress for me while forming the ketchup-covered meatloaf into the shape of a severed limb. 

“You know I hate that one,” my daughter wailed, scrunching her nose at the sight of yet another melted plastic plate of rubber chicken glazed in sugary soy sauce.  “Can’t I have the one with the corn cob?”

“Alright,” I sighed in surrender, “you can have the corn cob and country-fried prime rib, again, but next time I get it.”

“I don’t know why you didn’t just get us two of the same to begin with,” she gripes as she takes her plate, now steaming, before I’ve even had a chance to peel off all the plastic to perfect the presentation.

“Because that would be boring,” I reply, “Don’t you want a bit of variety in your diet?”

She glares at me as she pushes her boiled broccoli florets around, making sure there are no bugs or sticks or frozen pellets of instant artificial flavor hiding underneath.

Years pass.  I lose my job and end up licking my wounds in the kitchen, covered from head to toe in chocolate.  I have too much time on my hands, and there’s no better way to fill it than watching chocolate melt.

Before long, the counters are covered in chocolate and chocolate-making supplies, polycarbonate molds are stacked so high we have to throw out all the extra towels and sheets in the hall closet to make room for the chocolate molds.  Dark chocolates filled with luscious ganache and molded into exquisite shapes are scattered throughout the apartment, arranged like symmetrical mandalas on porcelain plates, cake stands and tiny trays.  Antique sugar bowls are filled with pomegranate-mocha swirls and bittersweet fans, colorful boxes tied in gauzy ribbons are stacked high with op-art
orange domes and shimmering gold crowns dripping with saffron ganache.

But homemade chocolates can’t be frozen and must be eaten quickly or they will grow dark green fur. To resolve my dilemma, I torment my neighbors and friends with so much chocolate that they flee in fear at the scent of a cacoa bean.  I auction them off to the highest bidder, and pass them out to total strangers jogging by. I shove them into my mouth like popcorn to keep my spirits up.  They give me the energy to exercise but for some reason I’m still turning into a bipedal seal.  Meanwhile, my little girl is fast becoming a future super model, and learning new words like vitamins and minerals.

“I don’t understand why every time I unpack your lunch all you’ve eaten is your fruit and sandwich,” I scold as I toss out cellophane and wadded napkins, “Most kids would love a few truffles tucked into their lunch, but you don’t appreciate anything I do.  Look at these, they’re ruined. You crushed them under the weight of that orange and didn’t even eat them.”

“There’s only so much saffron ganache a kid can take,” she says tenderly.  “Mom, they don’t even have trade value anymore.  You have to stop making so many chocolates.”

The world spins as all my chocolate-covered dreams are shattered.  What’s wrong with my saffron ganache?  Should I turn out some green-tea hearts to win back my daughter’s love?  No trade value even?  I suddenly see the real reason Willy Wonka locked himself away for years.  No one appreciates a chocolate maniac, no matter what they’ll tell you.

“Okay, I’ll stop making chocolates for awhile,” I threaten, but see relief instead of heartbreak.  “Besides I need to write some books.”

It’s true; we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do.  Applying for jobs has gotten me nowhere, but people have been asking me to write brilliant books for them, so I’ve obliged to keep the rent and chocolate suppliers paid. It beats standing on a busy intersection with a cardboard sign reading “SPENT TOO MUCH ON CHOCOLATE.  PLEASE HELP.”

The weeks pass joyfully, the pounds drop, the books get written, the trade value of school lunches returns to an all time high what with the clever way I slice those veggies and blend those healthy dips.  But something’s missing.

I’ve strayed from my chocolate-covered blogging.  What can I say?  I’ve been so busy writing for others that I’m not spending much time in my culinary laboratory, meditating over a bowl of crystallizing sugars.  Oh sure, I stuff an occasional pork tenderloin, roll out the rare kale and raison-studded strudel.  And there’s always a cauldron of something simmering on the back burner or a casserole of roasted vegetables and who knows what roasting in the oven.  But I miss all that mess.

And that’s when I discovered flour.  Did you know that flour can coat a kitchen from ceiling to floor and turn into a gluey gum that hardens in the most hard to reach corners and fissures of the kitchen? It’s amazing, really, especially when you add some sugar and eggs.  Not quite as catastrophic as a chocolate-covered kitchen, but with enough flour and frenzy, you can pretty much recreate a winter wonderland any day of the week.

So I took up baking. I made salted-caramel brownies and then made them again and again.  They were worth it.  I made urban-myth chocolate chunk cookies and peanut-butter chocolate chip cookies loaded with pulverized oatmeal.  I made apricot rosemary shortbread squares then discovered that the rosemary shortbread with a touch of orange oil and orange zest was just perfect on its own, provided I upped the rosemary.  I made ginger muffins and blackberry-streusel muffins and cheddar-pumpkin muffins.  I made cheddar chipotle biscuits and chocolate-marshmallow cupcakes and coconut cakes with three different fillings and frostings.

It wasn’t long before muffins and cupcakes and cookies were tumbling out of the freezer and we had to use two hands just to close it.  So we had a rummage sale.  I had a whole wardrobe of size two clothes that for some reason no longer fit me, and once we sold the clothes and a few hundred academic books I had no room or use for, we were able to buy an apartment sized freezer just perfect for all my muffins.  My dream come true, a freezer to call my own.  I was in heaven.

I was taking another sheet of urban-myth chocolate chunk cookies out of the oven and hollering, “Come and get ‘em!” when she said it.

“I don’t want any more cookies!  Can’t you be like other moms and make me some sliced apples and peanut butter?  I want something healthy!”

After all these years, I’d finally become a cookie-baking mom but my timing was all off.  She was now in high school, which is all about glowing skin and muscle tone and drinking lots of water.  Where did I go wrong?  Wasn’t she supposed to be sneaking out and smoking pot and coming home with the munchies at this stage in her life?

I cooled the cookies, dropped a few plates off at my neighbors’ doorsteps and put the rest into the freezer.

Thank goodness she’d be asleep by midnight, I thought, as I cleaned the flour and sugar off the ceiling. Then I can whip up a small batch of muffins or cinnamon rolls for breakfast. Now wouldn’t that be a pleasant surprise for my little girl to wake up to?  In the meantime, I steamed the broccoli and drizzled it with olive oil and kosher salt and took the miso-crusted tofu out of the piping hot oven.

“Set the table!” I called in a melodious voice, as if little blue and yellow birds and butterflies were circling my head and lifting my flowing skirts and aprons as I danced across the kitchen barefoot.  “Wait until you taste this brown rice with quinoa and shitakes,” I crooned, “you’re so right about eating healthy.  It really does have much more flavor . . .”

Hmm, I thought as we crunched on broccoli and savored the grilled tofu, there’s a sale on butter at Spaceway, better stock up, and we’re getting low on sugar . . .

The other day I was in a restaurant-styled home kitchen complete with stainless steel counters, sinks bigger than bathtubs and stockpots the size of water towers.  But it was so disorganized and cluttered that when I tried to find a spoon I had to admit defeat and use my fingers.  In contrast, just the week before I was in a kitchen no bigger than my bed and it was so organized that I could have found Amelia Earhart had it occurred to me to look.

I’ll admit that when it comes to kitchens, I’m probably not your friend.  I am the last person you want to have in your kitchen because I am bound to either scream at you for what you’ve done to it or plot a way to steal it from you and make it all my own.  Women need not fear me sneaking into their bedrooms when they’re out of town, but if they have a good kitchen, watch out.  I’ll do whatever it takes to have it all to myself even if it means assuming their identity and simply moving in.

I know I’m not alone in my kitchen issues, because like most people, I’ve been toughened and embittered by years of bad kitchens that never should have been.  I’ve never had a kitchen that wasn’t designed by some prehistoric man who’d never cooked a meal in his life, except for the one my dad designed when I was living on the other side of the planet and came home to discover the sink had been moved to the opposite wall and the doorway was six feet to the right of where it was when I left (as was my dad once he started watching Rush Limbaugh).  But my dad wasn’t afraid to fix his own meals, so he at least knew that people stand in front of stoves to cook and that sinks require a place to stack the dirty dishes.

But most kitchens I’ve had were clearly designed by people who had no concept of what goes on in a kitchen other than opening the fridge to grab a beer and holler to the wife to get the vittles on.

One of my kitchens had a built-in mid-century stove that had four burners tightly aligned in a single front row framed by tall walls that left only the center two burners usable – there was no room for so much as setting a tea kettle on the others because the framing was only two inches from either side of the burners.  I managed to cook on it for two or three years before I finally had the money to have it replaced.  When it was tossed to the side of the curb a team of archaeologists arrived to analyze the material remains of early human cooking.  Either that or they were post-minimalist artists thrilled to find an avant-garde installation they could sell for ten or twenty grand if they presented it to the well-healed impressionable with a cheap chardonnay and mass produced Certificate of Authenticity.

Another of my kitchens was so big that I had to stride across the room just to drain the pasta which inevitably got cold from such a long journey from stove to sink.  I came home one day to find that my undocumented immigrant roommate had hung a clothesline from the fridge to the dishwasher and I had to pass through a curtain of unmentionables just to put away the dishes.  Another kitchen was the perfect size — but three quarters of the space was devoted to unneeded dining space with the stove and refrigerator shoved next to each other in a corner.  It was like cooking on a boat with less counter space than you’d find in a hot dog cart, but enough floor space to stage a ballet.  A kitchen in Paris had a shower curtain around the sink so we could shower and do the dishes simultaneously, and another in Madagascar was outdoors and consisted of three rocks beneath a thatched roof with a plastic bucket for fetching water from the crocodile infested water.

So when a reader asked my advice on how to cook in a small space with limited gadgets, I was up for the challenge.  A good cook, I replied, can cook in a broom closet, and the fewer gadgets she has in her kitchen the better.  After all, most must-have appliances weren’t even invented until late into the space age. We managed to fly to the moon before we came up with food processors; nice as they are, they aren’t exactly an essential.  The truth is, far too many “gourmet” kitchens are so stuffed with non-essential gadgetry that cooking a meal practically requires a rummage sale just to find a potato peeler.

Let’s face it, if it has to be plugged in and is only good for making a single dish, keep it out of your kitchen!  It’s like a politician in a church; it might look good, but it’s really just for show. That goes for anything ending in the word “machine,” including popcorn machines, ice cream machines, bread machines, and pretzel machines.  And get rid of any of those money makers disguised as nostalgic food makers.  You know what I mean, the donut makers, cupcake makers, donut hole and cake pop makers, cotton candy makers, whoopee pie makers, and pigs-in-a-blanket and appetizer makers.  I’ll make an exception for rice makers, though I personally find that a saucepan with a lid does the job just as well, but if you have and use one, then enjoy.  I have a counter-top rotisserie just to twirl my chickens while they roast so who am I to judge a toy that boils rice.

Any unused gadget of any sort in the kitchen makes about as much sense as a swing set in the living room unless of course you use it.  Ask yourself this question: do you actually cook?  If not, don’t buy another damned thing for your kitchen and go out and have some fun.  If it’s appearances you’re after when it comes to kitchen design, take a vacation instead.  It’s cheaper than a professional stove, and let’s face it, the truly hip and rich know that there’s no better statement of obscene wealth than to have no stove at all, and the broke and over extended who can’t cook so much as an instant pancake but just dropped twenty bucks on a plastic pancake pen are in need of medication. Get help now, before you come home with a ten pound pizza stone to cook your frozen pizza.  Your friends will love you even more because it means they don’t have to match you pizza stone for pizza stone and you can all throw away your devilish credit cards and order a large pear and arugula with goat cheese and pine nuts delivered in half an hour.

Next, clean your cupboards.  Most of us have cupboards so jammed with spices older and more tasteless than dust, and opened boxes and jars of ingredients we can’t pronounce or only use for that signature dish we make every lunar eclipse that there’s no room to put away the crackers.  I found a bag of marshmallows in my cupboard the other day that were so old I had to cut them apart with a knife (why I bothered, please don’t ask) and a jar of something I mixed up once upon a time that may or may not have been intended for human consumption or could have been a homemade facial toner.  I dared not open it when I saw that it had spawned an undiscovered life form, but I was reluctant to toss it out because I thought it might not be done aging.

Third, think vertical.  Throw up some cyclone fencing and S hooks and you can store your mother-in-law on the wall if need be.  Peg board, garden trellises, curtain rods with S hooks, and stainless steel grids or Teflon-coated cooling racks, can all be stuck on the wall and everything from measuring spoons to vintage bicycle baskets can live there happily ever after.  (I’m dreaming of the day I have a Velcro kitchen and everything can just be ripped off the wall and thrown back at it when I’m done.)  Hang a pot rack on the ceiling and dangle some tiered baskets in the corners, and while you may not be able to take three steps without sustaining a concussion after you bump into the swinging potatoes and hanging frying pans, you will not have to rifle through any over-stuffed cupboards looking for them either.

Finally, think work stations.  Keep things for baking in one place, things you cut and cook in another.  Put a large cutting board on every counter, and keep your oils, kosher salt (don’t tell me
you use table), and pepper mill within reach of the stove.  Don’t walk across the room to get a knife, keep them close by and sharper than scalpels and you can slice and dice your troubles away with no premeditation to speak of.  After awhile, you’ll get to be like Jack the Ripper in the kitchen and you won’t think twice about the time it takes to disembowel a hapless bird or mince a clove of garlic, because it all just happened on your way to get yourself a drink.

Kitchens are really nothing more than playrooms; they’re made for messing up and dressing up and having a good time.  But if you fill them with too many toys or don’t keep them clean or you design them to look like other people’s and not the way that works for you, then you just won’t use them.  Treat your kitchen like your own private playroom and cooking won’t be a chore.
Just be sure you don’t invite me over, because if you’ve put together a good one, I’m moving in . . .

Photo: Sadie’s kitchen; small but organized kitchen design for the tasteful hoarder in us all.

My mother died when I was eight-and-a-half-months pregnant.  Her last words to me were, “I just want to be left alone.” Mom always was a drama queen, and Greta Garbo had nothing on her when it came to comedic timing.  If she’d had her way, my mother’s gravestone would have been engraved, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Two weeks after my mother’s death, my daughter was born, and I set my grief aside to marvel at the new life I was suddenly in charge of safeguarding and directing, confident I’d be a perfect parent while completely befuddled by the complexity of diaper changing and figuring out how to secure an infant car seat without resorting to wedging it between a couple of bags of groceries and tying the baby in place with a bungee cord so she wouldn’t flop onto the floor every time I hit the brakes. 

Like most new parents, I swore my baby was smiling at me from the day she was born.  But all of the instruction manuals that I read assured me I was mistaken and she was just passing gas.  I considered that she could be trying out her new mouth to see if she could touch her tiny little ears with the corners of her slippery little lips, but in the end, I knew all the instruction manuals were wrong and my new baby was unmistakably smiling every time she saw me.

But then one day, when she was about six weeks old, I was talking on the phone about my mom, complaining about all the ghastly furniture she’d bought just weeks before she died. There’s only so much chintz one estate sale can pull off, I whined, offended that I had to live with the consequences of my mother’s tastes in sofas or find someone else who’d do so gladly. As I’m yakking away, sounding like the most put upon grieving daughter in all the world, I looked down at the little baby I held in my arms and I screamed.

She’d smiled the biggest, happiest toothless grin I’d ever seen, putting all the other lip stretches to shame and proving the instruction manuals to be right — everything that had come before was merely passing gas.  Now this was a smile! But no ordinary smile, I realized in that instant. There was no mistaking that dimple or that mischievous twitch of just one brow.  I’d know that smile anywhere — it was my mother smiling back at me, tickled baby girl pink to have stuck me with a room full of furniture that clashed with my décor.  It was clear as day.  My mother had died and come right back — as my own daughter!

It was just like her to do that – she had a devious wit and being reincarnated as my daughter was even more diabolical than the time she got me to quit smoking by packing all my cigarettes with little bitty explosives, or the time she scraped the meringue off the lemon meringue pie and replaced it with whipped up soap suds. She always did say death wouldn’t slow her down and apparently she’d meant it.  True to her word, now that she was dead and gone, she was going to teach me the lesson of a lifetime and come back as Daughter Dearest.

As the years passed and I mastered diaper changing and car seats, my little girl enchanted me with the cute little tricks she’d learn and her razor-sharp witty observations.  But I haven’t forgotten who she really is, deep down, inciting delight with every opportunity I’ve had to send her to her room, tell her she isn’t big enough to stay up late and scolding her for talking back at me.

But things really took a turn for the weird when my little girl became my little teenager, and wham! Mommy Dearest returned as Daughter Dearest and my entire teen years of decades past are relived each and every day. But this time, I’m the mom and she’s the teen.  And there’s nothing like having someone not even old enough to sweat pointing out your every flaw and contradiction to reduce you to a quivering penitent begging for forgiveness for all you ever put your own mother through, no matter how imperfect a parent or a human she may or may not have been.

And to think that my own daughter is ten times better than I ever was – in fact, that makes it worse.  It’s one thing to have a teenager stealing your cigarettes and lecturing you on being a bad influence as I did to my mother.  It’s quite another to have a teenager organizing her closets and her contact list while lecturing you on how disorganized your own life is, prefacing every sentence with “You need to” while suggesting with a perky smile that you start eating better and exercising more because she wants you to live to be a hundred, God knows why.

When she was my mother, it was no problem just dismissing her as archaic and clueless, but now that she’s my daughter, every reminder of my imperfections stings and sticks because let’s face it, we all want to be the perfect mothers our own mothers never were but once we have the power to confine and rule them, we won’t tolerate our kids always telling the truth, at least not where our own egos are concerned. I might need to be told I look ridiculous in hip huggers and spandex, but I don’t need to be told my jokes aren’t funny or my leftovers are boring.

Yet for all I did to master baby care, when it comes to teens I’m baffled.  I thought they were supposed to be sneaking off to Planned Parenthood and hiding bongs in the back of their closets.  But while I was lounging on the beach last night, discussing the national budget with my neighbors while my own domestic budget crumbled, Daughter Dearest was replacing all her wire hangers with felted flat ones to expand her closet space.

When the sun set, I came in to watch some TV and there she was, holding a pants hanger in her hand as if it were a stun gun and I very nearly confessed to stealing her makeup and having impure thoughts about the mailman as I imagined Joan Crawford beating me to a pulp while chanting, No More Wire Hangers!  Instead, she smiled like a cherub and offered me her organizing castoffs, the hangers that only a disorganized mother could love, and while she was at it, perhaps I’d care to live with that god awful throw pillow I thought was so cute and that wretched floral bedspread that was a waste of our good money?

The truth is, my mother makes a pretty good daughter, now that she’s come back to teach me a lesson in what it was like for her when the roles were reversed and she stood in my place. Every time I get a lecture on what is wrong with me, I remember what was wrong with me back then and what was right with my mom.  Now when my daughter starts nagging me and pointing out my flaws, as teens are prone to do, after a momentary scream fest I find myself storming away and announcing, “I just want to be left alone.”

But she knows, just as I did when my mother mumbled those words with her dying breath, that I don’t really want to be left alone.  She might nag me for my imperfections, she might spot every flaw and find it anything but funny and evidence of my hypocrisies, she might correct me in public and remind the whole world that I can’t tell a good story or get my facts straight when I do.  But I’m not worried that my perfect little girl is going bad just because she’s turned into a terrible teen.

Because I know something she doesn’t know.  I know that one day she’ll probably have a teen of her own, and when that happens wherever I am, nursing home, tropical island or cozy grave, I’ll be grinning ear to ear.  Here’s back at you, Daughter Dearest, I’ll tell her, it’s your turn now.  You’re about to discover flaws you never knew you had, imperfections you never thought made a difference, and an everlasting love for the source of all your troubles, your very own terrible teen.  It’s rough now, but frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn. It’s wonderful to know our parents and our children will never really leave us alone, no matter how weird we – or they — become.  And that’s what makes our imperfect families so absolutely perfect.

Photo credit: Flikr pic by Sandwichgirl

Making chocolate in the summertime ranks right up there with driving a convertible in winter, eating sushi in Nebraska and wearing white after Labor Day.  It’s just not done.  For one thing, summertime gets hot, and tempering chocolate properly can prove to be more frustrating than doing needlepoint while driving.  For another, once the chocolate’s done and set aside, it gets dangerous.  If a single ray of sunshine hits it you may find yourself with butter-soft chocolate that only appears to be three dimensional.  Once you pick it up, you will swear you’ve stumbled into the Harry Potter Zone, where nothing is as it seems and those gorgeous chocolates transform into a slithering mess of chocolate goo the moment you touch them.  And finally, it’s too damn nice to stay in the kitchen and melt chocolate when you can buy a fudge sickle for a buck and suckle it on the beach while contemplating seaweed.  Chocolate making, I’ve concluded, is like suicide; it makes more sense on a crappy day. And even then it’s crazy if you do it.

When I set out to chronicle my efforts to master chocolate making, I presumed that because I was catching on to how it’s done and cranking out some good stuff, that everyone in the world should do the same.  Even more absurd, I thought that if I kept it up, I’d become a master and my life would hence be perfect.  The agoraphobic Willy Wonka aside, no one ever hears about unhappy chocolatiers. They are more loved and admired than newborn babies and alcoholic pop stars and are a lot less trouble.

But I’ve learned a few lessons in my journey from normal human to crazed chocolate maker, and before I blog another post about the philosophical revelations that come of melting and molding, I feel I must forewarn you.

Not only is chocolate making best done in the cold with the dishwasher turned off, it gets to be like growing vegetables.  If you are keeping your tomato plants alive by force-feeding them fertilizers, deadly pesticides, organic slug repellent, multi-super-vitamins and aura-reading vegetation healers, you’d better really love it and not care the least about how much those homegrown heirlooms are actually costing you.  I swear I’ve spent more on chocolate making supplies than I’ve spent on furnishing my apartment, and all I’ve got to show for it are a few perfect bon bons and an incredibly shrinking wardrobe.

Still, I have to say that I love my own chocolates more than the priciest ones I’ve ever bought, and a plate of perfectly turned out chocolates gives me more pride than a perfectly written paragraph or perfectly parallel-parked car, so I suppose if I compare it to the cost of therapy, it can be argued that it’s cost effective, and who needs a pension anyway when one has boundless self-esteem?

Second, making chocolate may be Zen-like as I’ve preached in the past, but until you get to that perfected state of Nirvana, you’d better have the patience of a GPS or your loved ones will come home one day to find you standing in the kitchen grinning diabolically and dripping with melted chocolate, the floors and walls and ceilings so splattered and smeared in dark brown that not even Dexter could clean up the mess, much less make sense of the spatter pattern.  The moment someone tries to take the laser thermometer out of your hand and sit you down they’ll discover you’re in need of heavy sedation and a tough-love intervention.  But you’re unlikely to cooperate because chocolate makers are a determined lot, determined to win the war on cocoa butter no matter the casualties.  Be forewarned, once you get started, it’s not easy to stop, and not even plumbing bills can bring you to your senses.

Finally, making chocolates takes a lot of time out of your life, time better spent watching prime-time soaps or shopping online for friends or jobs or temporary soul mates.  Once you’ve got your freezer stocked with leftover ganaches cleverly packed in disposable pastry bags and labeled with stolen twist ties from the bulk bins, you’ll probably get it into your head every now and then to just “whip out” a few batches of mocha’s and mints and saffron whites and while you’re at it, thaw out that award-loosing pomegranate dark that is so near and dear to your heart and pipe it into something hollow.

Before you know it, your children will be rifling through your wallet to snatch your credit card and order themselves a pizza, while you remain oblivious to the setting sun and convince yourself you’re rational and can tell the difference between ten minutes and ten hours.  After a few months of chocolate making, let’s face it, you just can’t.

But these last six months of melting chocolate have also taught me some things about myself that have made it all worthwhile.  For one, there is no culinary feat that I now fear – since I started making chocolates, I’ve discovered my inner Martha Stewart and now think nothing of whipping out a three-tiered cake from scratch and frosting it with Swiss Meringue and whipping up the yolks for a side of crème brulee.  Slicing a cylinder of tenderloin into a rectangular sheet of meat, stuffing it with household scraps and rolling in a pinwheel to roast and serve with sauce made from sage and wild berries is now my idea of fast food, and why would anyone buy rotisserie chicken in a store when it’s so easy to impale and roast your own with a bit of kosher salt and another essential countertop appliance.  In short, the confidence that comes of making perfect chocolates turns every gastronomic test into a mere pop quiz, because I now know that all those time-consuming, complicated recipes are no match for a simple chipotle fleur de lis (unless of course the recipe calls for boiling lobsters alive which is where I draw the culinary line and let other people do it for me).

Another lesson that I’ve learned is that it is okay to gain a little weight if it means eating well, but it is not okay to keep on eating well if it means gaining too much weight.  I have learned that I am like most every other human and that means that calories do count and so I now (roughly) count my chocolate calories.  And because chocolate making requires extra exercise I am now in better shape than ever but I must suddenly pay attentionor in no time at all I could turn into a glob of chocolate-covered fat with scrawny arms and wobbly legs – but with a healthy dose of anti-oxidants slugging through my bloodstream.  Which is to say, chocolate making does more to get you in touch with your body and to learn to love it and control it than any pilates class can ever do and it certainly tastes better.

Finally, I have discovered that my love for chocolates and chocolate making is far less about the substance itself than it is about my love for having fun in my own home and giving something wonderful to the people who surround me.  Had I taken up bread baking or pickle packing, decorative tiling or building pirate ships in whisky bottles, it would pretty much be the same.  I’d have the same fun and frustration, produce something to bring me pride and others a touch of joy, and gain that tender calm that comes of focusing on new creations and discoveries in whatever lies before me.

I still have far to go in my chocolate making adventures, and until I infuse my next fleur de lis shell with lime oil to balance the chipotle, or get that damn purple dye out of the airbrush and onto the mold for my lavender-chamomile oval swirls, my life will remain flawed and incomplete.  But goals are what get us out of bed in the morning, whether the goal is a strong cup of coffee and the kid off to school or orchestrating a corporate merger so deftly that no one even notices when half the workforce disappears.  Our goals drive us ever forward or at least veer us in wrong directions that often turn out far more interesting than our original destinations, give or take a broken heart or nervous breakdown as any country western song will tell us.

The goals of mastering chocolate are small and incremental, like the goals of getting through rocky times, raising a child or getting a college degree.  We take it one small mold at a time until the mistakes can be re-melted and remolded, the disasters chopped up and scattered over ice cream, and the catastrophes turned into comedy to keep us all laughing so the pain can’t be sustained and life somehow gets better.

And so it is with Labor Day approaching that I’m going to remodel the Chocolate Covered Kitchen to take my readers beyond my adventures laboring with chocolate  – which shall continue because frankly, now that I can do it, I like to keep doing it and just wait till I post my recipe for stuffed chocolate covered figs and other things to do with chocolate leftovers – you’ll go blind with hunger just to have a taste of them.  But the truth is, there’s only so much I can write about chocolate without wanting to write about other ideas and adventures that my readers can relate to.  (For example, just yesterday I became convinced that my neighbor was dead in her apartment, what with the pungent stench from her door and the volatile fight overheard just a few nights before – now who hasn’t been convinced there’s a corpse across the hall?  Word of advice to all carnivores and cannibals, please refrigerate your meat, at least in the month of August.)

So in the weeks and months to come, I’ll be including more essays on learning to master new skills in the kitchen as well as the rest of the home, learning to survive when life turns against you when it’s not supposed to, and writing my way out of this chocolate covered corner I’ve painted myself into, which is to say, cleaning up messes, whatever or whoever the cause, while bringing the people around me a smile.  Because let’s face it, just as long as we keep going in the face of despair and stay kind and loving to ourselves and those who love us, making a mess is always worth it.  Just ask your nearest toddler.  But not necessarily your neighbor, at least not until the coroner has gone . . .

So what’s your biggest mess that you managed to clean up?  The most memorable mess left in a comment here or on Open Salon gets a free box of chocolates from The Chocolate Covered Kitchen!  Assuming that it crosses no international borders or oceans or yellow police lines . . .

Even skinny people get fat.  This bewildering fact is slowly getting through to me.  After years of being so bone thin I had to shop for jeans in the toy department, I knew my chocolate consumption was out of hand when my daughter referred to my new size 10 jeans as “plus size.”  It’s true I’ve put on weight eating all this chocolate.  But it is also true that according to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, I am one pound over the “ideal weight” for my height.  Yes, that’s right.  One pound.  And I’m sure that pound is pure muscle.

And a quick googling of my age + “average weight” suggests that I am 25 pounds below what the average American woman my age weighs.  True, put me in L.A. or Paris and I’d be hog-tied and shipped off to the nearest fat farm, but send me back to Texas and they’d be force feeding me barbecued pork and deep-fried whoopee pies with extra butter cream frosting.

This whole weight thing has me very confused.  On the one hand, I really don’t care that eating has caused me to gain weight because I love to eat, I felt like a skeleton with loosely wrapped skin when I was a minus size, and sitting on a skinny rump just plain hurts.  But now I’m starting to feel like I’m wearing someone else’s body and it’s time to climb out of it before I mistake it for my own.  Which gets me back to chocolate.

The idea of learning to make chocolates, and more importantly writing about learning to make chocolates, is that it offers me joy and a sense of accomplishment in troubling times.  Having been an academic, I spent years writing and teaching about the problems of the world, and I was considered very wise.  But all that social critique eventually eats away at the soul as wisdom turns to cynicism.  By replacing my voracious appetite for news with a voracious appetite for chocolate, I have found far more joy than any academic knowledge ever brought me, but at the cost of having to buy a whole new wardrobe – which, when you are unemployed, is not nearly as fun as it ought to be.

So in order to tighten my belt, both figuratively and literally, I spent a week not making chocolate, not eating (much) chocolate, and drinking lots of water.  I did sit ups and pushups and jumping jacks and walked along the beach real fast.  I stored the everyday dishes way out of reach so I’d have to stretch to get them.  I watched from a psychic distance as my skinny teenager gobbled up store-bought cupcakes the size of hats, and took over our chocolate covered kitchen to bake brownies and cookies and devoured them with glass after glass of whole organic milk.  I ate barely-dressed salad with roast chicken and skipped the potatoes and stuffing and gravy.  I even trimmed the fat from my corned beef on St. Patrick’s Day, a first for me.  And I snacked on vegetables, apple sauce and dirty air.  Until I remembered the saffron ganache.

I’d made a double batch last time I made chocolates, thinking we love it so much, why not make even more.  I took it out of the fridge, rolled it in confectioners’ sugar, and piled the truffles high in a porcelain sugar bowl.  After a weekend spent eating a few, some just as they were, others piped into cored strawberries or sandwiched between Mira’s cookies, I felt another clasp fasten tightly on that stranger’s body I’ve been wearing.  Now it would be even harder to take off, thanks to those luscious saffron truffles.

But that’s okay.  I go outside and admire the beautiful women – the size tens, twelves, and even higher — the ones who walk like they own their bodies.  I watch Mad Men where the women look like women, not adolescent boys, and I think, a colorful sundress, a Wonder Bra and a few dozen martinis and I’d be Mad Men perfect.  I put on my size ten clothes and twirl around in the mirror and the only thing that looks “fat” is the bunion on my right foot.  Owning your own body, I’m coming to realize after years of being underweight and now nudging upward exponentially, is all a matter of perspective, attitude, and the right fit.

I go into the kitchen and look around for some chocolates and find they’re all gone after a week of not making them – and I realize this is my life, and my body, and I want chocolate in it.  Which is not to say that I am going to forsake exercise and consume a pound of chocolates a day, pile the food high on my plate or continue to eat like a sumo-wrestler as I did when I weighed ninety-five pounds and was so stressed out my hair was breaking off by handfuls like I’d come down with a bad case of chemo.  Life is precious.  And chocolate, like friendship, is best enjoyed in precious moments, moments when we feel in need, moments when we want to share our joy, moments when we feel good about ourselves and the world that cradles us.

So I put the saffron truffles in the freezer and got out the chocolate molds.  There’s more to the ideal weight than mere pounds and body fat.  The ideal weight is the weight we just happen to be when we love our bodies, we love our selves, and we love the people who surround us.  And when we reach that ideal weight, what better way to thank the universe than by celebrating with just a touch – or more – of homemade chocolates.

Lauren Adler, owner of Chocolopolis and Christopher Elbow

The following post was published in Foodista, the online cooking encyclopedia July 17, 2011

As readers of my previous posts on chocolate may know, my favorite all time chocolate maker is Christopher Elbow, whose chocolates are so stunning they could accessorize a Chanel suit.  (And taste so good I’ve already decided that if I should ever find myself on death row, my last meal will be five pounds of his assorted chocolates.)  So you can imagine how thrilled I was to hear that he’d left his Kansas kitchen and was in Seattle last Saturday to help celebrate the third anniversary of Chocolopolis, the designer chocolate shop that also ranks high on my grooviest things in this world list
(largely because they stock Elbow chocolates).

So I snatched up my camera and crossed town in the drizzle to play groupie to the chocolate rock star whose colorful airbrushed chocolates shine as if they’d been dipped in glass and taste as if they were made by angels.  I wanted to know, how does he get such a perfect temper, so shiny and so delicate? How does he master those ganaches – fillings that taste so fresh you’d swear the chocolates were picked from a tree that very morning, with textures that feel like satin slowly sliding from tongue to memory?  And when would he put out a chocolate book telling me exactly how to make these masterpieces in my own Chocolate Covered Kitchen, so that I could die knowing I’d achieved the perfect confection?

Despite the drizzle and gray of a typical Seattle day, the store was crowded – with women.  There was only one man, Christopher Elbow is after all, a chocolate lover’s rock star, and we, his groupies.  I slowly meandered up to the table where dice-sized bites of his chocolates were artfully offered – a dark chocolate, a nutty something or other (I was too star struck apparently to recall what it was exactly), a mint and a lemony white chocolate.  The chocolate wizard could wait; first things first.  I will confess I would probably trample the man himself just to get to his delicious chocolates, and the chance to eat them for free?  Why it’s right up there with winning a trip to heaven, all expenses paid.

Each bite was perfect, none too sweet, all so fresh, the mint tasting like the leaves had just that moment been crushed, the lemon tasting like a fresh picked Meyer lemon, it’s sugars delicately sweetened by the sun.  My tongue was so excited it nearly fluttered right out of my mouth and licked my face (and the display table) clean and asked for more.  While the women ate and chatted among themselves, the sole man in the crowd wasstanding next to me, quizzing up Mr. Elbow about chocolates and wine.

“I don’t think wine goes well with chocolate,” the master said, heretically.   Were my ears playing tricks on me, again?  Please, tell me Christopher Elbow doesn’t insist we wash his chocolates down with water; that is just so not right.  Then again, I don’t drink, or rarely so, so what was it to me?  I could still sit back with a few flame colored Passion Fruit truffles and black and white Caramel Fleur de Sels and a pot of Harney tea, and no one would be the wiser.  Still, I have great sympathy for those who do drink wine and the thought of all those yuppie wine and chocolate tasting parties come to an end made me sad.

“You don’t pair wine with chocolate?” I interjected, incredulously (throwing in the verb “to pair” to mark me as a connoisseur, damned the abuse to the English language).

“Not really,” he said, “I find that you taste the chocolate, then the wine, then go back to the chocolate, and the taste of the wine has changed your palate, and it changes how you taste the chocolate.  But there is an exception,” he added with the slightest hint of the devil in his eyes, “Moscato!”

“Moscato?” I asked, curiously, wishing we had a carafe and a box of chocolates right that very minute to sit by the fireside and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings.  It seemed fitting at the time.  I imagined a delicious sparkling Asti Spumante with a plate of his Grapefruit Campari chocolates, or a small glass of a vintage sweet fortified Moscato with his Cinnamon Hazelnut and Bananas Foster confections.

Grapefruit Campari, worth a trip to death row

“Yes, Moscato isn’t always that good on its own, but with chocolate, it works.”  He went on to say that spirits of any kind are also great with chocolate – Scotch, Cognac, or even a vintage Port, but definitely not red wine.  I was suddenly reassessing this not drinkingthing and considering taking up cigars. But back to the chocolates themselves, and my quest to pry from him his secrets.

So I blurted out, “How to you get such a great temper?  Is it true you don’t wash your molds?”  Like seasoning a cast iron skillet or a wok, polycarbonate chocolate molds acquire a cocoa-butter patina with age, and whether or not to wash with soap is a topic as divisive among chocolate makers as whether to hang the toilet paper on the outside or underside is among obsessive compulsives.

He then proceeded to spill all his chocolate making secrets, unaware that I would blog them to half a hemisphere and let Norman Love in on how he does it.  The secret, it appears, is in the flour sack
towels, along with a dummy batch – pouring chocolate into the mold and turning it out, unfilled (re-melting the chocolate, which remains in temper).  The dummy batch leaves a fresh coat of cocoa
butter and preps the mold for show time.

The searing white streaks on his geometric Fleur de Sel chocolates?  Far too white to be white chocolate, I wondered did he drizzle them with White Out? White dyed cocoa butter from Chef Rubber
he confided.

And the ganache?  Ah, now that is easy.  He has a machine like a vacuum cleaner that sucks out all the air and concentrates the flavor.  Now I was beginning to wonder if he wasn’t putting me on.  What was next, his transfer sheets were really temporary tattoos and his purple-haze hued Lavender Caramel dyed with Goofy Grape Kool-Aid?   What did it matter, I’d fall for anything at that point, I realized as if I were watching a magician saw his wife in half and pull his mistress out of a hat.  But I realized as he described the Rube Goldberg gizmo he’d invented that unless Williams Sonoma comes out with a chocolate air sucker for the home kitchen, I could never replicate Christopher Elbow chocolates and might as well just buy them.

Which is exactly what I did, begging for his autograph as if I’d just run into Picasso (and which I promptly smeared, which isn’t half as bad as the time my brother threw his bandana hand-signed by Ken Kesey, into the washing machine and obliterated it with super-powered Tide).  Then I went home, greedily holding my box of Christopher Elbow chocolates tightly in my hands like a miser running home with a bag of gold.  But my daughter tossed aside her M&M’s and forced me to share.  And share we did, each and every exquisite last bite.  When the last of them was gone, I pulled out
the chocolate molds that have been idling in their hideaway, waiting for me to get back to business and turn out something rich and fattening and worth every pound of flesh they cost me.

And as for that chocolate making book to teach me how to do it?  Not yet, it appears, he’s too busy making chocolates.  But that’s alright; I know it’s only a matter of time.  And once he gets around to it, look for it in the fine art section, right smack dab in the middle of Tiffany glass and Cartier jewels, because that’s where Christopher Elbow chocolates rightfully belong.

“Our Gazelle has left Utah,” I said to my daughter, Mira, just as we sat down to watch an episode of sex and violence.  She gave me a blank look and said, deadpan, “Next time a telemarketer calls, say that.  They won’t call back.”  Then she turned back to catch a commercial for incontinence medication while pondering how soon before she’d have to take away the car keys.

It seems I’d gotten it into my head to add a gymnasium to our one bedroom, one porch apartment.  With two sofas, five fat chairs, a dining table, three desks, two hutches, three and a half dressers and two beds already expertly arranged like valet-parked cars in a corner lot near a ballgame, adding a gym was a challenge. 

But I’ve been adapting to challenge.  Downsizing has required creating a home office out of a corner of the dining room that would better be served by a small potted plant and a ceramic giraffe.  Chocolate-making supplies are stored in a dresser parked in the hall because the kitchen was designed by some man in the 1950s who’d never cooked a meal in his life, and my closet is three rooms away and my clothes scented by whatever my neighbor is cooking.  My chicken flavored lingerie and tomato flavored sweaters are totally cool, I have decided.

And while I cringe at the site of televisions openly displayed, I’ve learned to live with a screen the size of a billboard turning our living room from a cozy salon for conversing with friends into a drive-in movie theater for staring straight ahead at fictional lives while shoving instant popcorn into our faces.  Far worse, visible gym equipment parked anywhere but a gym makes me tremble.  It’s just wrong.  Gym equipment for the home is best left to movie stars who have gymnasiums the size of refugee camps and spray-tanned personal trainers to force them to use them.  The last thing any home needs is a set of monkey bars in the foyer and a portable torture device next to the coffee table.

But I had to make some adjustments.  After downsizing from a house to an apartment, I realized my body had constricted.  I was no longer running up and down stairs, striding from room to room looking for my Bluetooth, or shoveling dirt from garden to garden in search of the perfect burial ground for tulip bulbs or disappointing boyfriends.  In short, I’d stopped moving, and found myself coming down with early-onset rigor mortis, while I got bigger and bigger like Alice in Wonderland after succumbing, as girls often do, to the command to Eat Me.

But joining a gym was pricey and unlikely to persuade me to go there.  I knew this to be true when I blew thirty bucks on a Groupon coupon for a yoga class in a room as hot as a crematorium and fifty weeks later and two weeks short of the expiration date, I continue to assure Mira that I’ll go there first thing tomorrow morning.  And so it was that when Amazon dot com thoughtfully recommended that I add to my cart a cute little chair that looked like some Italian designer had made it for the MOMA gift shop but was really a clever little gizmo to do my sit ups for me, I clicked buy now and the very next day it came knocking on my door.  It took about ten minutes to assemble but that was all it took to have me cursing that it’s only a matter of time before we buy brand new cars and the dealer hands us the keys and an Allen wrench and tells us assembly is a snap.  But I channeled my inner feminist and once my little Italian chaise lounge was assembled without calling for testosterone assistance, I was bouncing up and down in my spiffy sit up chair like a paraplegic determined to walk again through a manic approach to physical therapy for dummies.

“Wow! this is fun!”, I said to my Mira, who responded by laying down on the floor and doing a hundred sit ups in a minute, flipping over and finishing with fifty pushups, then walked away in grinning silence while I huffed and puffed my way to twenty-five.  I was relieved my father was deceased because if I ever told  him I’d bought a chair to help me do sit-ups, he would have muttered I was blowing my money and if I didn’t have the willpower to sit up by myself my life was truly hopeless.

But my father, being deceased, could only look down upon me from the heavens and shake his ghostly head while I bounced up and down with unenlightened mortal joy.  Why stop there? I figured.  If this cute little chair is getting me to do sit ups, what more could technology do for my body?  So I got on Craigslist and looked up treadmills and the like but all I saw were a bunch of things that looked like broken bicycles in need of serious cleanup and costing more than a summer vacation.  And that’s when Amazon dot com had another recommendation for what I could add to my cyber cart.

It was a little toy called a Gazelle and it had handle bars and running pads and I could tuck it between the couches and run and glide into perfect shape while watching Masterpiece Theater and all my favorite mid-century cartoons.  What could be more perfect?

So I ordered it with a single click and kept a close eye on the tracking so I’d know when to make room between the couches.  A few days later that’s when I saw our Gazelle had left Utah and was on its way to our apartment.

I thought getting from Utah all the way to the Puget Sound would take forever, but Gazelles move fast, and ours was no exception.  Two days later there was a knock at the door and I opened it to find a box heavier than a hippo waiting to be let in.  Mira wasn’t home and the cats wanted no part of this project, so I pushed and heaved the Gazelle-in-a-box through the doorway, down the hall, across the dining room and into the living room where I unpacked it, scattering blocks and beads of Styrofoam all over the place like a three year old eager to get to her new toy.  And as I pulled out the handle bars and connecting cables and foot pedals and bars, I realized, this damned thing is bigger than a swing set and not about to be squeezed in between two couches.  What in the world was I thinking?

There was absolutely no place for it, but it wasn’t like I could repack it and send it back.  It would be easier to move to a new apartment.  No, I was stuck with a gazelle and I’d have to learn to live with it one way or another.  After a couple of hours, or so it seemed, of putting pieces A inside pieces B and attaching with pieces C and wondering why native English speakers can’t be found to write up assembly instructions, I finally had it together, just as Mira got home.

She took one look at the Gazelle and you’d have thought I’d bought her a Jaguar.  Her face exploded into a thousand smiles and she leapt on board and started sprinting through the living room at five miles an hour without moving an inch.  “Stop it!” I ordered, but she kept on sprinting.  “You’ve been on it too long!” I wailed in maternal fear, as if she would burn away her very last calorie and dissolve before my very eyes.  But she just grinned and sprinted, her pony tail bobbing away while her legs flew back and forth like a pair of life-size scissors.  Fifteen miles later, she got off, wobbled away and declared, “You’ve finally bought something we can actually use.”

Easy for her to say.  She didn’t care about the apartment décor, just as long as she could run through the living room like a high-speed antelope.  I was the one with the problem.  There was no way I could fit something the size of a Chevrolet in between two couches.  It was going to have to stay there, parked, front and center, smack dab in the middle of my spectacular ocean view.  I’d might as well have bought myself a small Walmart for the patio and grilled my salmon in the parking lot, it was that absurd.

But l welcome a decorating challenge.  I pondered the possibilities.  I could drape it in Christmas lights, but that would wreck havoc on my low-light ambience and it was only a matter of time before I was tripping over Christmas presents I’d wrapped in tin foil and the comic pages to surprise myself each morning.  I could drape a cloth over it, but then my gazelle would turn into an elephant in the room, and there are enough of those in any life, who needs another one?  I thought of turning it into a tubular easel by propping a painting between the handlebars, but that was far too avant-garde for my tastes and would only attract misguided art collectors who’d get in bidding wars and they don’t need to be encouraged.  No, it was unmistakable.  I’d have to live with my mistake.

I picked up my totally mod Italian designer sit-up machine and hid it between the two couches, and jumped on board the Gazelle.  A mile and a half later, I stumbled off, exhausted, and staggered into the kitchen for some water and chocolate.  I stood in the dining room, tossing truffles into my mouth and considering the future that lay ahead.   I asked myself, what would Jonathan Adler do?  Having it covered in faux fur was just so not me.  Planting some up-lights at the base to cast dramatic shadows on the walls was simply scary.  No, it was clear, sometimes we have to live with our mistakes.  Like acquiring spouses, children and garish table lamps, we can’t always get rid of them, but we can learn to love them.

I begrudgingly climbed on board the Gazelle and a few miles later, I’d burned enough calories to justify a milk shake and re-programmed my mind.  Accessorizing is everything, I told myself, though draping it in tassels was simply not the answer.  If Coco Chanel could pull off plastic costume jewelry and hats that looked like mixing bowls, surely I could tweak my scale and patterns and I’d be set, I figured.  All I needed was a zebra rug and a suit of armor standing by, I realized as a three-foot light bulb lit up above my head, and my Gazelle would go from trash to chic.  Every living room needs a swing set, after all.  I turned on the megalomaniac TV and streamed in some vintage Doris Day and Rock Hudson and climbed back on board my new Gazelle.  Eat your heart out, Utah; finders keepers, losers weepers.  This baby’s mine, all mine . . .

Photo Credit: Flikr pic of “Dollarstore Gazelle” by Doug Pedersen Art