Snow-Day Hot Chocolate( with a Kick!)

After a wonderful morning of playing in the snow, coming inside drenched, but happy, it was time for some hot chocolate. I asked Liz "Do you want fast hot chocolate, or good hot chocolate?" She decided she wanted good hot chocolate, so I made some from a recipe I'd found...with some small alterations. Oh, it was WONDERFUL! There's a little kick to it, but not so much that the kids really noticed. (They noticed the flavor, and didn't mind the spice.)

You will need:

1/3 cup unsweetened baking chocolate powder
1/2 cup white sugar
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 cup boiling water

3 3/4 cups milk (I used nonfat)
1/4 cup heavy or whipped cream
(or, use 3 1/2 cups milk and 1/2 cup half-and-half)
2 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 cup dark chocolate chips (or semi-sweet, if it's what you have)

Whipped cream (optional)

In a medium saucepan over medium heat, combine baking chocolate, sugar, cayenne, cinnamon, salt, and boiling water. Simmer, stirring constantly (to keep it from scorching) for about 3 minutes.

Add milk, cream, vanilla, and chocolate chips. Turn the heat up to medium-high or high, still stirring constantly, until milk is warm and chocolate chips are melted. Remove from heat, ladle into cups, and top with whipped cream.

Theoretically, this makes 4 servings, but this is good and rich enough to have smaller servings, and you can get 5 smaller cups out of it.

Updates - taking stock

I realized that I'd posted multiple things that were going wrong, or had gone wrong, but didn't ever say whether or not they'd been fixed. So...here's a consolidated update on multiple issues that have been going on.

Home Economy - DIY Laundry detergent

While we lived in England, a friend made laundry detergent and would give me batches of it. Now that she's in New Mexico and I'm in New Hampshire, I have to make my own.

I got her recipe from her, but also looked up recipes online, and have combined multiple sources into the kind I now make.

Bacon Roses - tutorial

I saw a link on how to do these a few months ago, and finally had the reason and the will to try them - Valentine's Day!

Really, they weren't that hard, once I had the components.

Roses and a box of Chocolate

These were Phil's Valentine's Day surprise this year. Unfortunately, he lost a filling the night before, and can't have anything crunchy for a couple weeks until his dental appointment to fix it. We're trying to store the roses in the fridge to see if they last, but at least he can enjoy the chocolate beer.

You can find the tutorial on how to make the roses here.

Valentine's Day

Yesterday afternoon I went out to the front hall to get matches to re-start the wood stove that I had let burn completely out. (I let it go on purpose, because it was warm in the house, and I could clean out all the ashes that way.) Anyway, I got most of the way over to where the matches were, and saw a UPS truck in the driveway and the delivery man and Daisy at a standstill at the line of her invisible fence.

Small Victories

Even while on medication, sometimes the effects of depression can ambush me and I feel overwhelmed by things that I know aren't that big a deal. Today was one of those days. I went to do our taxes, but couldn't find most of the paperwork I needed. When I went to leave the tax office, I saw that it was snowing again...big, beautiful, fluffy flakes...but although I could see the beauty, I also felt like it was just one more thing to deal with.

When I got home, after stopping at the grocery store on the way, I realized I still didn't have all the ingredients I needed for the dinner I had planned to cook. I wasn't going back out. All I wanted to do was pull a blanket over my head and hide from the world.

So I did.

For an hour or so.

Then, I got up, started bread, swapped laundry into the dryer, brought wood inside to defrost, took a shower, and started another load of laundry.

I didn't get to the dump today, and it won't be open again until Friday. That's ok. It can wait.

I didn't get to cook the supper I had planned. That's ok, too. Instead of mushroom pork chops and apples in the slow cooker, I'll try using the George Foreman grill I got for Christmas, and some seasoning we picked up in Scotland.

I didn't get our taxes done. That's ok. I know, now, where some of the paperwork I needed is, and when I find everything, I can make another appointment.

Even if I didn't accomplish everything I planned to do today, that's ok. I got small things done. Small victories are still victories. Tomorrow will be better.

Herbed Dumplings - recipe

One of my favorite meals for as long as I can remember has been chicken (or turkey) and dumplings, always from scratch. After having roasted chicken or a Thanksgiving turkey, we'd boil the carcass for a nice stock, which later was made into soup with dumplings.

The soup part is fairly easy, and tends to change a bit each time. (I'll probably do a post on that later.) The dumplings, though, are a different story. For a while, I used Bisquick for my dumplings, but recently I've been making them from scratch.

Apple Oatmeal Raisin Cookies - Recipe

I'm working on making the sweets that my girls take to school in their lunches, largely because they are more healthy than buying junk. Here's the recipe for the first batch of cookies I made. I made substitutions and adjustments to the original recipe to make them lower-fat and sugar.

More Kitchen Economy - pizza

After being amazed at how much I saved at the grocery store earlier this week, I'm still looking for ways to cut costs in the kitchen. I'm doing this in several ways, from buying in bulk to making more things from scratch.

Now, making things from scratch has a couple advantages. 1) It's often less expensive, and 2) the quality is often higher. Yes, it takes more time, but it's generally worth it. Often, homemade items can be frozen to use later, so you can do a cooking blitz for a day or two, and have items available for weeks.

Chili Starter - recipe

I seem to be on a roll right now, so I'll keep going while I have the momentum.

Beginning of the month is a good time to take stock of the freezer and prep food for later in the month. I found out around Christmas this year that chili starter is a good, and easy, thing to have on hand.

Homemade Spaghetti Sauce - Recipe

In some ways, my kids are spoiled. One of the biggest ways is with the fact that for most of their lives, they have had homemade spaghetti sauce 90% of the time. For years they refused to eat store-bought sauce, and even now they grumble at it. Phil grew up eating homemade sauce, too, and got his mom's recipe, which has morphed by now, but generally turns out pretty good.

Kitchen Economy

When we were in England, I spent around $700 per month on groceries. Last month in New England, I spent closer to $1000, at at the end of the month we were still scraping by on what I had in the freezer and cupboards...which wasn't nearly as balanced as I would have liked. Food costs are higher here, partially because I'm not shopping at the Commissary...but the food quality can be higher, too.

Newfound Respect for the Pilgrims

I had an odd thought this morning. When the Pilgrims (yes, the ones we study at Thanksgiving as kids) came to America from England, they came to New England. Yes, I know, that's obvious, so what's the big deal?