Miscellanies

* For anyone who's wondering, I'm afraid the new unsweetened chocolate in an 8 oz bag for $1.99 at Trader Joe's...tastes like $0.25/oz chocolate. Surprise! I think the combination of irresistible price + fancy shape (they are little disks, 6 to an ounce) drew me in against my better judgment. I'm no chocolate connoisseur, but Trader Joe's' Pound Plus bars ($5/17.6 oz) seem to me to be much better chocolate than this; they're actually rumored to be supplied by Callebaut, a fine Belgian chocolate company. So these new unsweetened disks are cheaper per ounce even than the Pound Plus chocolate with less cocoa butter (which is where the money's at in chocolate, if I understand correctly). I should have done the math more carefully. Alas, buyer beware.

* Tonight for dinner I was going to try what looked like a fantastic eggplant-mozzarella roll recipe from CI's Restaurant Favorites at Home. I couldn't find smoked mozzarella, though I know I bought some a few months ago at Kroger and even made a trip to Trader Joe's confident that they'd have some. But that was a minor obstacle compared to the disgusting dilemma presented by the eggplant itself. I'd have preferred to buy it at one of the farmer's markets, but I wasn't going anywhere near them, so I tried to pick out a nice looking one at Kroger. On the outside it was spotless, but when I sliced down the middle getting ready for dinner tonight, there was a large black and furry mass, for lack of a better word, inside the seed cavity on one side that had "bled" over into the other side a bit. I did a Google images search for sliced eggplant, hoping against hope, but no, neither black nor furry seems to be a normal occurrence inside an eggplant. Plan B was a simple tomato sauce I had made for the same recipe earlier, over fresh (storebought) pasta with ciabatta and a Caesar salad. Boring, but it could have been worse. Like whipping the egg whites for your cheese souffle to perfect peaks, only to unwrap the cheese and find it rotten. Or something like that.


* I've been spending as much of the day as possible immersed in Spanish, with a little housework interspersed to keep my restless self from going crazy, and I can't afford to lose myself in cookbooks planning elaborate baking projects for the day, so stuff like the chocolate blackout cake happens instead. Five-minute pudding (the recipe in a previous post); an easy cake with coffee, chocolate, and buttermilk, which are as good as pantry staples around here; and an extra half hour's oven time after my bread was done baking. Since I throw everything possible into the dishwasher and have no qualms about running it twice a day when necessary, clean-up doesn't take long. The cake itself is fine, though it probably needed a couple more minutes of baking time; it's a little too moist and sticky, and so fell apart a little when I was halving it into layers. But it's something sweet that will keep in the fridge for a couple of days, which was all I was after.