Cacao Reserve

Hershey's is attempting to nudge its nose into the boutique chocolate market with their new Cacao Reserve [warning: big ugly flash-only interface page]. Being, as I am, always on the lookout for good stuff at bargain prices, I decided to give it a try since the local grocer was putting it up on sale and it was cheaper than the brand with the lions and monkeys on its covers.

This stuff is simply awful. The flavor is a step up from Hershey's usual fare, but the texture is hideous. It's like eating clay. It's almost as if Hershey's formulists left the couverture intact, which gives chocolate an excessively fatty texture. Chocolateirs process out some of the cocoa butter to give chocolate that crisp fragility. I happen to like both; I've bought both Schaffen Berger eating chocolate and their couveture and the distinction between the two is fascinating. But the Hershey's just tastes wrong; it feels as if the couverture was allowed to soften for a while, sour, and then recongeal.

I don't think Hershey's could make a decent chocolate if their company's future was on the line. Lucky for them they don't have to make a good chocolate: they have enough peripheral products that their chocolate only has to be so-so, and worth the ocassional nostalgia bite. Special Dark is actually better than Cacao Reserve. Hershey's Special Dark was for many of us the gateway drug to chocolate couverture like Bonnat, Dagoba and Scharffen Berger, but there's no reason to go back now, and there's definitely no reason to pay more for less pleasure. It will take more than a pricey wrapper and mistaking the Americal palette for fatty foods as an ideal to make me want to go back.

(no subject)

The weekend comes and goes. Omaha and I looked out the windows this morning and prayed for sunlight, since it was grey and misty. We had a heck of a schedule today: she had two meetings, and we had to run out for monthly groceries. But we got it all done, kids in tow. At 2:00, one of her meetings was here, so the kids were shuffled outside and I went into the bedroom and wrote for a solid hour without interruption. That was actually kinda nice.

It's a hit

After Omaha's meeting, I finished up the last of the responsibilities on the swingset that I could acheive with the tools at hand: I dug out a trench for the foot of the slide, staked and buried it, then provided the steps to get up to the platform. The neighborhood kids discovered it this afternoon and it's a total hit. They couldn't stop playing with it until their parents called them home, and it was very near dark by then.

Farmer Omaha

Omaha worked to get the tomatoes into new trellises (is that the right plural?); the old ones were just too small. The roma tomato plants are growing very tall, and we're definitely seeing tomatoes that are much bigger than the "roma" brand usually found at the supermarket. The stupice are also doing well, giving us great salad tomatoes now and then. The garden is wonderful; only the parsley is doing poorly now.

Yamaraashi-chan

Yamaraashi-chan continues to oscillate between childhood and teenagerdom. She loves the new swing set, but sometimes catches herself and worries she's doing too much "kid stuff." I keep telling her that she's 10 and should enjoy doing kid stuff for as long as it holds puberty and moodiness at bay. She doesn't believe me. But I think this photo caught her beautifully, a serious expression while she was trying out the swings so I could shorten the chains appropriately. I made one set the right height for Kouryou-chan, and one for her. It seems to have worked well all around.

I suddenly understand Marvel comics!

So, I was reading a manga today, something obscure and kinky called (best translation) "Small Tit Research!" when a story line hit me right between the eyes. It was funny, it was cute, it was silly, it might be the comic relief needed between episodes of a story line I told myself I was never, ever gonna write.

Didja ever have a character you'd written off, who insisted on coming back again and again, just because she had potential and wasn't ready to be shuffled offstage quite yet? I think this is why Marvel comics characters keep coming back to life: it's not that they have fans or marketability, but that their writers weren't ready to delete those bibliographies from their databases.