check your ingredients list

I was VERY offended to find that some pudding mix that I bought had aspartame in it! This was after I had specifically chosen the "regular" one that was sitting right next to the "sugar-free". WHY would you use artificial sweeteners in the one that's already sweetened with sugar?? (It's probably cheaper, one would assume.)

Anyway, aspartame is one of the items that pregnant ladies are specifically not supposed to eat. Good thing I read pretty much everything that's in front of me, and my eyes wandered over the ingredient list while I was mixing up the pudding!

food today

I had some extra time today so I did some cooking.

YUM, as it turns out. :)

I started with potato soup, since Starbucks had some whole milk that was expiring, so I took it home to cook with. Don't worry, I made sure it hadn't actually spoiled before I threw it in the soup.

Alex and I ate the whole pot of soup in maybe half an hour. :) AND I am thinking about making a whole extra batch tomorrow. I made it from a recipe that was pretty bad, so I wrote in my changes for next time (more potatos, add cayenne pepper, things like that...).

I am really happy because in Oregon you could pull cans of potato soup off ANY grocery shelf, and in New England you just can't find potato soup without YUCK CLAMS. AKA clam chowder, which people around here are crazy about despite the presence of, well.... clams.

And then, I was having such a good time cooking that I made a chocolate cake. But chocolate cake is so much better with fruit sauce! So I made some sauce out of a bunch of mixed berries, and the cake soaked up a bunch of it really nicely. It was deeeelicious.

Just when I was running out of steam and couldn't face cooking for myself, Alex made TWO grilled cheese sandwiches for me in the knick of time. :)

Discovery!

Cool Whip makes the best mousse. You have to not mind the fact that nobody (at least not me) knows what Cool Whip is. But it makes a delicious, fluffy, delicious mousse that lacks some of the bitter chocolatey-ness that my earlier attempt had.

Ultimately I guess it depends on one's mood on the particular day. But I am now resolved that I need to figure out how to get that light flavor out of regular whipping cream and chocolate.

new project

I am on a mission to find something chocolatey, delicious AND healthy for my mommie. More on this later. :)

kitchen scale

Chris and I traded digital kitchen scales for Christmas. It was a very awesome present for her to have gotten for me! Today I weighed another awesome present (the giant bricks of chocolate that Alison got for me) and discovered that I have nearly a kilogram! Put another way, I have a pound and a half of chocolate --and that's with some already having been eaten.

*happy happy happy*

:D

chocolate melting

I melt my chocolate in the microwave. It saves about a century of time and a pile of annoyance! The trick is to microwave it until it's ALMOST melted and then just stir it around until it melts the rest of the way.

chocolate mousse

I made chocolate mousse the other day and it was damn tasty. Six squares of Baker's Chocolate and 1 1/2 cups of whipping cream is all you need! The recipe is straight out of the Baker's Chocolate cookbook that my sister Alison got me for Christmas. Well, sort of. They said six squares of white Baker's Chocolate and I did three squares of bittersweet milk chocolate and three squares of sweet dark.

So, you melt the six squares in 1/4 cup of whipping cream. Then you whip 1 1/4 cups whipping cream and stir it into the chocolate mixture. And then you're DONE! I'm sure there are other, much harder recipes to make mousse, but I decided to start with the easy way first. It was darned tasty, too, so THERE. Who needs separated egg whites and confectioner's sugar?

The only thing I would change is that it said to refrigerate the mousse for at least two hours and it was actually WAY tastier before it ever got chilled.