Great Site To Help You Have A Healthy Daily Diet

I found this site and loved the way it was set up. It has a link that you click on that give you a grocery list divided into the 5 colored categories of fruits and vegetables. You know ...

"Eat 5 A Day" the Color Way
Here is the link.

www.realage.com/NutritionCenter/Articles.aspx?aid=10381

I think it would be great fun to make a big salad that has 2 of each of the 5 colors in it. Just think,...you would get all your required colors in one bowl...double. How healthy is that? And if they are all raw, such as most ingredients in a salad are...well, you've succeeded at nourishing your body well. Repeat the next day. And so one! I think I will go make a salad right now!

Favorite Salad Dressing

Briannnas
Chipotle
Cheddar
Dressing
12 Fl. Oz. 355 mL

This is so good!

I like to make salad and put it into my nice glass dish with cover...and keep it in the fridge...our instant salad bar.

I make salad now like my mom..using half iceberg lettuce and half Romaine. I always use radishes, red onion, cucumbers in my salad. And chopped fresh tomatoes if I have them. I love to put sunflower seeds and raisins in my salad, too.

Best Chocolate Book

I have found a wonderful book about chocolate...from the Victorville Library...Bittersweet by Alice Medrich 2003

Here are some sentences from page 3 of the book...

"For me it had all begun in 1973, in Paris, with a singe bite of a homemade chocolate truffle.
The truffle was an unexpected jolt of pure bittersweet pleasure that left me momentarily speechless. I knew that I had tasted chocolate for the very first time. The truffle was intense, complex and earthy, dense and smooth. It was not candy but a very tiny divine dessert. And it was fresh, as a true chocolate truffle must be, homemade by my elderly landlady on the rue Copernic, during a postgraduate year in Paris."

....
"Back in Berkely, I seduced my friends with Madame's truffles. Hardly allowing graduate school studies to get in the way, and with a business card proclaiming "Alice's Chocolates (truffles, cakes, patisserie diverse)", I made French cakes and truffles at home and sold them at the Pig by the Tail Charcuterie, across the street from a new little restaurant called Chez Panisse. By 1976, my miniature chocolaterie had overflowed my home kitchen and, instead of starting my master's thesis in marketing, I opened a small chocolate dessert shop I called Cocolat. (I never did write the thesis; I lived it instead.)

The book has colored photographs of incredible looking desserts...includes recipes for salads with cocoa nibs...a cocoa nib cream...lots of sauces and lots and lots of very different and artistic desserts. 375 pages! I have seen and browsed through a lot of chocolate themed books...this one is the best I have seen!!!!!

I know, I know...this blog was supposed to be sugar free...but I am making exceptions for anything with dark chocolate, which has a small measure of sugar.

Scarffenberger

Larissa got me some Scharffenberger Cocoa again for Christmas! Thank you, Larissa!

Several years ago, I discovered Schaffenberger chocolate bars at a Sur La table Store. They were much more delicious than Godiva. Then a few years later I read about how the Sharffenberger company got started. I always remembered how one of the guys (There were 2 men who started the company in Berkely, CA. One was a doctor.) was a doctor until he was diagnosed with a type of leukemia. He quit his doctor job and just simply decided to do what he enjoyed doing..which involved cooking. He went to Europe on a trip and fell in love with chocolate. Here is a published story about the company, and I have given the source. It would be a fun thing to visit their factory in Berkely! By the way, Schaffenberger just expanded their market to include Target stores.

Changing your life can be rewarding, but it's never easy, even if your new life is making chocolates.

John Scharffenberger and Robert Steinberg are now enjoying the sweet smell of success. Their chocolate factory in Berkeley, Calif., has customers swooning: "This chocolate is especially wonderful," says one buyer.

And the cash registers humming: "$93 even. Thank you," a cashier tells a customer.

But before they became modern day Willy Wonkas, Steinberg was a successful doctor and Scharffenberger ran his own winery.

"I had a wonderful time," Scharffenberger says about his successful business. "But after awhile, I got to the point where I really didn't want to do that all of my life."

He loved wine but not the wine business.

As a doctor, Steinberg was happy practicing medicine, until one day 16 years ago. "I was diagnosed with lymphoma."

And the physician became the patient.

"There's a kind of emptiness inside," Steinberg says. "There's a kind of tightness in my stomach."

San Francisco café owner Roger Hillyard recalls visiting Steinberg, his doctor, and close friend: "He said, 'Well, I've got some bad news. I'm retiring. I have cancer, and I'm not gonna practice medicine anymore.' "

The news hit Hillyard "lLike a ton of bricks!" he exclaims.

Steinberg notes, "When I was diagnosed with this, I was told that I had a 10-year median life expectancy. So I had this very immediate sense of, of mortality."

Steinberg could have just accepted his fate. Instead, he says, "I was not going to make the illness the center of my life.

"I started doing a number of different things. Cooking had always been an interest of mine. I met more and more people in the food world, and one of them happened to start talking to me about chocolate in 1994."

John Scharffenberger had also been a patient of Dr. Steinberg. Together, they said: Let's build ourselves a chocolate factory!

Scharffenberger notes, "Our goals were light enough, pure enough, that if we had just made small amounts of yummy chocolate, I think Robert and I would be really happy."

Laughing, Scharffenberger agrees friends who watched them go through this thought they were going crazy.

"All my friends thought I should have stayed in the champagne business," he says.

But Steinberg notes, "You know, I never did think that people thought I was crazy."

Oh really? Perhaps Hillyard can refresh his memory.

"No way! No way," Hillyard says, "I mean, this is a pipe dream, right? This is a fantasy, a nice one." Was he being supportive? "Oh, go!" Hillyard says, "Right. I'll sell your candy!"

Laughing, Steinberg says he chooses to ignore that his friend thought he was crazy.

There's a lesson to this story, and it's a simple one.

Steinberg says, "I think the one thing is, you can't be afraid to fail."

Scharffenberger adds, "Failure was never an option. We've just tried to look at life and make one little aspect of life as good as it could possibly be - and that's chocolate."

Steinberg, however, is not cancer free. He still undergoes periodic chemo, but he's already survived over 15 years since the diagnosis. And what an incredible love for life he has -- both of them, really. Scharffen Berger chocolates are sold nationwide. There are two retail stores, including one right here in Manhattan.

©MMV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/03/31/earlyshow/series/main684328.shtml

100 % !!!!!!

Since John is avoiding white sugar, he purchased a bar of Ghirardelli's 100% Cacao Unsweetened Chocolate. He did not like it. "It is too much just straight," he said. "It needs to be added to something." I agree. It leaves a very astringent taste in your mouth. I had to cut that taste with some raisins. Now we know.

Chocolate for Christmas

Some of my Christmas presents were chocolate: Dennis sent me, among other things, a package of Ghirardelli Chocolate Squares - Dark Chocolate 60% Cocoa. I forgot how very good they were! They are now among my favorites! David and Amber sent me a cute gift box -Chicken Soup for the Chocolate Soul and a bar of 72 per cent Dark Chocolate.
The darker the chocolate, the more satisfying it is, I believe.
MMMmmm..thank you!!!!

Make New Friends

I do have my favorite chocolates, but the canon is not closed. During an after Xmas sale at Target, I found these Harry and David truffles at 75 per cent off. They are the best store bought truffles I ever had! They far surpass the Trader Joe's truffles which have hydrogenated vegetable oil in them. These had butter oil in them. They are, to me, as good as or better than homemade. Smooth...velvet on the tongue..rich dark chocolate. There is a nice outer shell of dark chocolate, and then the smooth creaminess inside. I love the red foil wrapper and the big size of each truffle. They are so festive! I wonder if they sell them year round?