I went nuts last night: made spaghetti and meatballs (man, the meatball recipe from How To Cook Everything rocks mightily) with homemade spaghetti sauce (which the kids don’t eat, natch).
Then I went nuts and made candied orange peel. That didn’t turn out so well. Possibly I used the wrong kind of orange peel or didn’t scrap enough of the pith off. (Tried to get it all, didn’t always succeed.) But the result had a terrible orange taste. Tossed the whole thing. Will try again another time.
Then, denied candied orange peel, I made Stephanie Zonis’s recipe for hot chocolate. Oh baby. Oh yes, here it is, come to Mama. Nice, thick extremely chocolatey. I used a bar of Valrhona and half a bar of Green and Black’s Maya Gold (slightly orangey/spicey chocolate). Now, the recipe says it makes 2-3; don’t you believe it. This makes 4 easy, and I say this as someone who really, really likes chocolate. This isn’t so much “hot chocolate” as it is “drinkable pudding,” so be forewarned.
I didn’t use the food processor—I whipped out my chef’s knife and chopped the chocolate up. Seemed to work fine. I also didn’t use any sugar, because I like a darker, less sweet chocolate. I did add the vanilla though.
I took roughly half of this last night, pouring the other half into another cup (which I cooled down in a water bath, than stuck in the fridge with plastic wrap right against the surface of the chocolate, to avoid getting a skin). Half of this recipe was way too much; I would have been much better off taking a third or a fourth. Or, as I say to Darin at moments like this, “Get the syringe of adrenaline ready!”