Saeng-shik Raw Greens

My best friend put me on to this product, he had received a demo of the whole range of the raw greens products from this company in this health store he visited. Intrigued, and finding it on sale, I decided to give it a try. I had read about the benefits of raw foods, and had previously incorporated "greens" into my daily diet. Raw food is food that is cooked below a certain temperature, to preserve the enzymes that help in digestion of the food that we consume, most food is cooked far above this temperature, which destroys or deactivates the enzymes. One could eat raw vegetables or fruits, but another choice is to buy a product that gives you these from various green foods. I chose the 14 day pouch offering from Raw Greens Inc., you consume one to two pouches per day, either as an additional part of a meal, or, if eaten with a banana or orange juice, as a replacement. Each pouch contains 40 g of such interesting ingredients as kale, white and black sesame, shiitake mushroom, sea tangle, Japanese chlorella, spirulina, millet, Job's tears, barley grass, wild parsley, pine needles, radish leaves, lotus root, burdock, cordyceps, ganoderma mushrooms, carrot leaves and mugwort. It's better to mix this with some sort of fruit juice, with water I didn't care for the taste. Did it do anything for me? I can't quite say, though it did improve my digestion somewhat. I'll see, too, whether my digestion reverts to its normal state after completing the 14 days.

Polish Imperial Chocolate with Hazelnuts

This large chocolate bar from Poland, filled with my favourite hazelnuts, I finally got to taste. The bar was milk chocolate with hazelnut pieces, the usual combination of these two ingredients, with an ingredient listing similar to many milk chocolate bars, sugar, cocoa butter, hazelnuts (this should be before cocoa butter), cocoa mass (which also should be before cocoa butter in the listing), whey powder, cream powder, milk powder, lecithin and ethylvanilla (or fake vanilla). The chocolate tasted pleasant enough, the hazelnuts were fairly large, enough to have a crunch at least. Not my favourite, and not likely to go on my list of repeatable bars.

Bella Italia Organic Chocolate

The idea of organic chocolate appealed to me, no artificial flavours or preservatives, good ingredients, but would its taste compare to other quality chocolate bars? This offering by the Italian company Icam S.p.a., I found for sale at Christmas, and only recently had a chance to sample it. The ingredient listing looked good, organic raw cane sugar, organic chocolate liquor, organic cocoa butter, organic dry whole milk, soy lecithin and organic vanilla. The chocolate within comes in two varieties, a milk chocolate wafer, made with 37% cocoa solids, and a dark chocolate wafer, made with 60% cocoa solids. And how did they taste? Fairly good, though the cane sugar taste came out fairly strong, a little too strong perhaps, it was an underlying flavour that threw me off initially, until I got used to it. The dark chocolate was more to my taste. The lesson here is, is that organic is not necessarily better, it takes more than quality ingredients, organic or not, to make a good chocolate bar - if the organic cacao beans are bad, if the process is flawed, bad chocolate results. Check these out regardless, you might like them.

Restaurant Review - Chinese Lamb and Beef House

My sister clipped out this review of a new Northern Chinese restaurant, which happened to be very close to where I work, and also happened to look interesting, so last week, I went to check them out. The Chinese Beef and Lamb House restaurant is on the south side of Sheppard Ave. in Toronto, a couple of lights east of Warden, in a nondescript strip mall. According to the review, the restaurant is more known for its lamb, a meat not normally found on many menus, and a meat that I have grown to really like. When the waiter noticed my clipping, which I had brought with me, he knew that I wanted to try their signature lamb dish, BBQ Lamb Chops, which I had determined to try, so I did not even get to peruse the menu for its other offerings. I would have to wait to determine whether the food lived up to its billing, and whether I would want to go again. I ordered a side dish of steamed rice to go with the lamb chops; oddly enough, this dish, probably the most expensive dish on the menu, is the only dish that does not include steamed rice. I determined, if I were to come again, to try some of the other dishes talked about in the review, the Fried Cumin Lamb sounded good, as did the Pan-Fried Lamb Buns, and Xian Style Lamb Soup with Pancakes. The BBQ Lamb Chops finally arrived, and I eagerly began to eat the tasty looking lamb chops. And tasty they were, it tasted too like they used cumin and salt to flavour the lamb, but the meat was very tender, and the fatty portions were quite good as well. The dish was good enough to forgive the slightly slow service, I waited a while before getting my bill to go. And now, I will have to go back to try one or two more of their offerings.

Speciale Italia Cuba

The third of the three chocolate bars I tried from the Italian company Speciale Italia srl contains cacao beans from Cuba. The cacao content of this chocolate bar is 75%. The ingredients look good, as the other two, cocoa paste, sugar, cocoa butter, lecithin as an emulsifier and natural aromas. This one I did not like as much as the other two, the flavour was good, though it seemed a little too dry, a little chalky, rather than smooth melting. I would eat this bar again, though I preferred the one from Ecuador, and next the one from Santo Domingo. One odd thing about these chocolate bars that I had not mentioned, is that these are the only chocolate products that come in plastic bags rather than foil. It doesn't seem to affect the flavour. Now, let's hope I can find any of these bars somewhere again.

Tim Hortons Green Baked Goods

Another thing that my Dad looks for on St. Patrick's Day, is baked goods from Tim Hortons, that have some sort of green icing on them. He's disappointed if they don't have something, some years they don't. This gingerbread cookie he found for sale is some weird amalgam of a man with a frog's head, I don't know quite what to do with it.

Shamrock for St. Patrick's Day

A tradition my Dad has been keeping lately, is to buy shamrocks on St. Patrick's Day. A little bit of green before Spring starts.

Chorizo Chantarelle Garlic Pasta

What to make with the dried Chantarelle mushrooms that I had? At the same time that I bought the chantarelles, I had bought some chorizo sausage, spicy pork sausage. I cut up the sausage into small pieces, and added it and several whole garlic cloves to about a tablespoon of melted butter in a frying pan, and fried the two together for about five minutes, stirring constantly. I then added the reconstituted chantarelle mushrooms (placed in water and rice milk for 20 minutes) and fried for an additional two to three minutes. Lastly, I added the Singapore-style noodles and tossed to combine. Quite tasty.

Dried Yellow Chantarelle Mushrooms

I had read about these mushrooms in various blogs, they are supposed to be quite tasty and aromatic, and quite popular and common in Europe, found in Autumn in the damp conifer woods of many countries, not so much in North America. Of course, the best mushrooms would be ones freshly picked, but given that I don't have a ready source of them, then dried is likely second best, and I found these ones from Italy in the specialty store I frequent. With a little water or milk, and 20 minutes later, they are almost as good as fresh. Like most mushrooms, they are good in rice or pasta dishes, omelettes, and soups or stews. According to the package, they are also naturally rich in iron.

Book Review - The Chocolate Connoisseur

Having read about her in Mort Rosenblum's book Chocolate, and having seen her in the documentary Chocolate Confidential on TV, I was intrigued by the person described as having the finest palate for chocolate, Chloe Doutre-Roussel, and whether her wide experience could be translated well into book form. Unlike Rosenblum's book, which deals with the history and stories behind chocolate, this book deals with the way to become more knowledgeable about chocolate, thus raising your ability to distinguish between good and bad chocolate, and thus be able to enjoy chocolate more. To become, as the title suggests, a Connoisseur of Chocolate.

The book opens with a chapter on Chloe's passion for chocolate, acquired and cultivated from a young age, and what she does to maintain that passion. This is followed by a chapter on the history of chocolate, past and present, where we learn such interesting facts, that the top 10 chocolate bars sold, do not contain more than 20% chocolate, in a thin layer (Mars and Twix and Snickers the top 3); what good chocolate is - high quality ingredients, good production methods, and good level of cocoa content, and who you possibly could obtain it from (Amedei, Bonnat, Chocovic, Michel Cluizel, El Rey, Felchlin, Guittard, Pralus, Scharffen Berger or Valrhona are just some of the names to look for); and what kind of chocolate is favoured in each country. The next chapter gives detailed instructions on how to build your Chocolate Profile, by examining the kinds of chocolate you eat now (so that you can find other better chocolate similar to it); determining how much and when you eat chocolate, what it does for you; and how to eat chocolate and make notes about each new chocolate to build your own chocolate database, where to find it or clubs to join. This is followed by a detailed journey of cacao, from the trees where it grows to the harvested beans, to the fermented, dried and roasted cocoa, to making it into cocoa liquor, conching (which makes it smooth), tempering (heating and cooling rapidly, to crystallize the cocoa butter into a stable form), and finally to moulding. The next chapter details how one can taste chocolate, similar to how one tastes wine, how to use all of your senses to experience chocolate (look at it; touch it to see how it feels; hear how it breaks; smell it; and finally taste it), how to recognize the various and sometimes subtle flavours in different cacao beans, not only sour, sweet, bitter, acid or salty, but flavours in categories like spicy or fruity or flowery, and how you can change your own tastes, to develop your own chocolate palate. This is followed by a short chapter on sharing chocolate, through parties and games, and by cooking or baking with chocolate. Next is a chapter on how to distinguish the best of chocolate, what to look for, how to read the ingredient listings to determine how good a bar it is, and whether organic is worth it or even tasty. The seventh chapter deals with types of chocolates, bars and bonbons, what goes into these and what is good, and not so good. If you ever wondered whether chocolate is good for you, what effect it might have on your health, the next chapter deals on this subject, where we find out about chocolate and the heart, chocolate and obesity, chocolate and acne, chocolate as an aphrodisiac, chocolate and caffeine, and the myths and truths behind these. The second to last chapter deals with becoming a connoisseur, what it entails, what Chloe does in order to fulfill her passion. The last chapter deals with the future of chocolate, how good quality chocolate is finding its way to the consumer because they are beginning to demand it.

Did this help me become a Chocolate Connoisseur? I can say that I had already begun travelling down that particular path already, this just coalesced some of the ideas that I had been forming from information I had read here and there, and chocolate I had found and tasted and liked, or disliked. The journey continues.