It doesn’t really have a thing to do with Lent, although the timing is such that several people have suggested there’s a connection. My reasons for giving up chocolate in all forms for 30 days starting on March 17 were numerous, but Catholic tradition was decidedly not among them.
Regardless of the motivations, once I made the decision, I was curious to see just how difficult it would be to honor this pact with myself.
Now I’m 27 days in, and the answer is that it hasn’t been all that difficult at all, and the rewards have been significant. I didn’t give up sweets altogether, just chocolate itself, but I do typically indulge in a lot of treats and confections, and chocolate is almost always an ingredient, so doing this has cut down significantly on my dessert intake. Still, this really wasn’t about weight loss or nutrition; it was more just about shaking up the status quo. I felt like I was turning to chocolate every time I needed a gastronomic reward; this was a chance to give up some not-so-great habits (such as the bag of M&M’s every time I drive home from the supermarket) and challenge myself to do things differently.
Since giving up chocolate nearly four weeks ago, I’ve eaten a lot of vanilla crème wafers and a lot of marshmallows. Giving up sugar itself would be a lot harder for me; I don’t care that much about the chocolate itself as long as I can have a cookie or dish of ice cream now and then, and avoiding the chocolate varieties compelled me to be more experimental. The first time my family went out for ice cream during the chocolate fast, I had peppermint stick; the second time I had buttercrunch. One day at home I ate frozen shredded coconut to satisfy a craving for sweets; another time I melted white chocolate chips and stirred in broken pretzels to make a sweet-and-salty bark. (Semantics aside, white chocolate is not technically chocolate, I decided at the outset. Any confectioner would support this distinction, I believe.)
What I miss is homemade chocolate chip cookies, both in batter and baked form. My family misses these as well, as we generally have a steady supply of homemade cookies in the house, so yesterday afternoon I made oatmeal cookies, minus the chocolate chips. Like me, Rick and the kids feel less tempted by sweets when chocolate isn’t an option, so we’ve all been eating a little bit more sensibly during the chocolate fast.
It’s over in three days, but I’m not anticipating any great breaking-of-the-fast. My mother was in Europe last month and brought me back a box of chocolates which I’m looking forward to trying, and I do look forward to the wider selection of ice cream options that eating chocolate affords me. In general, though, the chocolate fast has been valuable simply as a way of shaking things up and making me more deliberate in my food choices. It wasn’t for Lent; it really wasn’t religious at all. It was just an easy, tangible avenue to a temporary change in behavior. Even if I can’t articulate a significant number of benefits that resulted, I’m glad I tried it.
Showing posts with label desserts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label desserts. Show all posts
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Thursday, February 3, 2011
A new culinary tradition for snow days
We’ve long had a tradition that when the kids have a snow day, I make bacon for them. It’s a cozy and pleasing habit: they love the taste and I like the way it makes the house smell for the rest of the day. I’m a fan of food-related traditions in general, so I’ve always found it satisfying to have one special food dedicated to snow days. And true, bacon is not good for them from a nutritional standpoint – “salted fat,” as a friend of mine referred to it recently – but surely for a special treat it’s okay. After all, if they have it only on snow days, how often are they really going to get to indulge?
Well, once or twice a week this winter, it turns out. And yesterday morning, as we embarked upon our fifth snow day in three weeks, I told them we’d have to skip the obligatory bacon. “It’s just getting to be too much,” I told them. “Thirty years from now, your doctors will ask you how you developed such a bad cholesterol problem and you’ll have to say, ‘Remember how much snow we had in the winter of 2011?’”
The kids took it pretty well. Either they’ve grown mature enough to accept the occasional disappointment, or they’ve grown old enough to appreciate a nutritional hazard when they see one, or else we’ve actually had so many snow days that they’ve reached the previously unimaginable point of being tired of bacon.
But we needed some kind of gustatory observance of the day, some ritual to mark the special ambience of a snow day even if snow days feel more like the rule than the exception this winter. “How about chocolate mousse?” Tim suggested.
That gave me an even better idea. “I’ll make something for you that I used to love when I was your age,” I told them, and pulled out my mom’s recipe for Pots de Crème. I instructed Holly to fetch from the china hutch the tiny covered porcelain pots that are specifically dedicated to this particular dessert. They are the same dishes we used for Pots de Crème when I was growing up, and because back then it was my favorite dessert, my mother gave me the set of dishes once I was an adult. Holly uses them occasionally for tea parties, but I couldn’t remember ever making Pots de Crème in them for my kids.
It’s an easy recipe, and as I whirred the chocolate in the blender and heated milk to a simmer, I reflected on how much delight I had gotten from this dish when I was little. Ineffably rich and concentrated in its dark chocolate taste, it’s one of the few desserts that works perfectly as single servings in these miniature white and purple-sprigged dishes; it’s so rich that no one asks for seconds. And there’s just something so special about a dessert served in its own dish, topped with a little lid as if what’s inside is a secret until you’re ready to taste it.
Like everything my mother made when I was growing up, I assumed this recipe was standard special-occasion fare in every household – until, when I was in second grade, my class put together a cookbook with each child’s favorite recipe. Within days after we all brought our photocopied (actually mimeographed) cookbooks home, other parents were stopping me on the school plaza to tell me how much they liked my contribution. It was the first time I’d discovered the social currency of a really great recipe.
We ate our Pots de Crème after dinner last night. When I was growing up, my mother even had tiny spoons to serve with it; I don’t, so we used regular teaspoons and savored every bite. My guess is we’ll make this specialty again on future snow days. It doesn’t fill the house with an aroma the way bacon does, but it definitely makes the day feel like a special occasion.
Well, once or twice a week this winter, it turns out. And yesterday morning, as we embarked upon our fifth snow day in three weeks, I told them we’d have to skip the obligatory bacon. “It’s just getting to be too much,” I told them. “Thirty years from now, your doctors will ask you how you developed such a bad cholesterol problem and you’ll have to say, ‘Remember how much snow we had in the winter of 2011?’”
The kids took it pretty well. Either they’ve grown mature enough to accept the occasional disappointment, or they’ve grown old enough to appreciate a nutritional hazard when they see one, or else we’ve actually had so many snow days that they’ve reached the previously unimaginable point of being tired of bacon.
But we needed some kind of gustatory observance of the day, some ritual to mark the special ambience of a snow day even if snow days feel more like the rule than the exception this winter. “How about chocolate mousse?” Tim suggested.
That gave me an even better idea. “I’ll make something for you that I used to love when I was your age,” I told them, and pulled out my mom’s recipe for Pots de Crème. I instructed Holly to fetch from the china hutch the tiny covered porcelain pots that are specifically dedicated to this particular dessert. They are the same dishes we used for Pots de Crème when I was growing up, and because back then it was my favorite dessert, my mother gave me the set of dishes once I was an adult. Holly uses them occasionally for tea parties, but I couldn’t remember ever making Pots de Crème in them for my kids.
It’s an easy recipe, and as I whirred the chocolate in the blender and heated milk to a simmer, I reflected on how much delight I had gotten from this dish when I was little. Ineffably rich and concentrated in its dark chocolate taste, it’s one of the few desserts that works perfectly as single servings in these miniature white and purple-sprigged dishes; it’s so rich that no one asks for seconds. And there’s just something so special about a dessert served in its own dish, topped with a little lid as if what’s inside is a secret until you’re ready to taste it.
Like everything my mother made when I was growing up, I assumed this recipe was standard special-occasion fare in every household – until, when I was in second grade, my class put together a cookbook with each child’s favorite recipe. Within days after we all brought our photocopied (actually mimeographed) cookbooks home, other parents were stopping me on the school plaza to tell me how much they liked my contribution. It was the first time I’d discovered the social currency of a really great recipe.
We ate our Pots de Crème after dinner last night. When I was growing up, my mother even had tiny spoons to serve with it; I don’t, so we used regular teaspoons and savored every bite. My guess is we’ll make this specialty again on future snow days. It doesn’t fill the house with an aroma the way bacon does, but it definitely makes the day feel like a special occasion.
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