Category: Uncategorized

Soo….while in Japan, I missed California produce and vowed to cook more upon my return.

Today felt rather springy, and as is te pattern tyese days, I had some veggies to use up!

This meant that I made green garlic + potato soup (seasoned with parsley-like carrot tops and cumin), and a giant salad. Like, there are salads, and then there are salads. This dude had pickled watermelon radish, unflavored bread cubes (dry, but not toasted), butter lettuce, purple (not red, purple) cabbage, grape tomatoes, and avocado. Drizzled on some olive oil, ground some pepper, sprinkled some salt, and that was that.

What’s that? Oh. The things that look like bacon bits in the picture. Yes, to offset the healthy quotient I nuked me some bacon and bitted it, also, ripped up some crumbles of Brie. (Hi Mom.)

:) tasty.

Okay well maybe flying is…but waiting definitely isn’t.

I suppose its not reaally that bad. I did get a notification well before the flight that it was delayed, allowing me to waste time with friends, in Manhattan, instead of alone, at JFK.

What’s gonna be less fun though, is getting home at four am, and debating whether it’s worth sleeping before my 8:30 meeting or not. Hmmm…

(I would like to note that the listed reason for delay is “aircraft delayed.” Very helpful, thanks United.)

Since getting back, I’ve actually done a reasonable job of cooking more. I suppose, since it’s now been about 5 months, I should stop saying “since getting back.”

Anyhow. The CSA that delivers veggies + fruit to me at work also has non-produce items for sale, so this past week, I ordered some granola because it had cacao nibs in it.  I’ve had cacao nibs embedded in chocolate bars before, and rather like the crunch-crumbly rich bitterness of them.

So.  When the chef at a cookie class mentioned a cacao nib variation to his sugar cookie recipe, I was inspired.

Atypically, I actually started my search in a real store – Palo Alto’s Andronico’s.  No luck.  Didn’t feel like asking.

Falling back to the internet, it would seem that one can purchase roasted or raw nibs, but going raw is preferred.  Also…I realized that searching for information really does have a ways to go.  Amazon has a range from $28 for 2 pounds (a bit more volume than I wanted), to  $10 for 6 ounce bag.  Looking at the reviews is largely…useless.  Allow me to summarize them in aggregate.

“These are cacao nibs.  I like cacao nibs.  Cacao nibs are not chocolate, and if you want chocolate you should buy something else.  I am a refined food snob, and I like cacao nibs, but you, foolish plebian reader, may not be able to appreciate them.

These reviews were universally useless.  They told me NOTHING about the actual product at hand, and how it compares to other products.  An attempt to search other food type sites just turns up a couple of recipes, and isolated purchase anecdotes – no consistent pattern or actual accounting for quality.

Conventional search + reviews failed me.  Next up: social search.

I posted “What should one look for when buying cacao nibs?” to Aardvark and got back some useful comments within 5 minutes.  – one on inspecting the beans themselves, and the other in researching suppliers.  But I realized that the question I really wanted answered was “Which brand of cacao nibs should I buy?” … which for some reason, I don’t want to ask other humans, and feels like cheating on homework.

Instead, I got a cacao expert who knew about the different kinds of beans (there are three) and which one was more bitter, and which one was cheaper, and had a supplier he’d heard good reviews about (but not used firsthand).   So I learned something, more than the question I asked, and even though I don’t exactly have my end-goal question answered, I feel a lot better about what I did ask…what to look for when hunting down those mysterious beans.

**Edit** On follow-up inspection, it seems the info I got was quoted verbatim from this page: http://hubpages.com/hub/Raw-Cacao-Nibs.  Feels like I got cheated, but…on the other hand, I didn’t find it myself.  Questionable win. :)

This all took place over IM, and was kinda fun.  It’s like a real-life command line game.  “Open book.”  “Learn about cacao beans.”  And just like those old games, you have to choose your words carefully.  Because, sure, you can type “Win game,” but that takes all the fun out of it, and defeats the purpose of playing a game in the first place.  Since real life’s the game in this place, best to enjoy a little chase rather than cutting straightaway, perhaps?