Tonight we were all home, miracle of miracles in this season (it does seem to be busier than ever this year). Dinner was "home bistro"--steak au poivre: I sautéed round steak (local, grass-fed beef), deglazed with a little Cabernet Sauvingnon (electric reindeer?!) and finished off with some sour cream (Tofutti, since it's not a dairy day). A sprinkling of cracked pepper to garnish. French fries from the oven, perfect for pushing through the sauce on your plate. Steamed fresh organic green beans rounded things off. Salad was mâche, radiccio and frisé with avocado and tomato in a raspberry balsamic vinaigrette.
The boys devoured their chocolate St. Nicholauses, while we noshed on cookies from the giant tin, and we had an interesting discussion about why they're hollow, and what it would take to make them solid. My dear husband insisted that the traditional ones were hollow, and had me running around town to find them. I finally found inexpensive ones at the drug store--Russell Stover makes them. They had all kinds of fillings: marshmallow, caramel, but he wanted 30 for his team, and insisted they be hollow.
Anyhow, we talked about how it was much harder to make solid chocolate shapes, since molten chocolate shrinks and leaves dimples as it cools, just like wax when you create candles by pouring. It reminded me how I had been reading Bittersweet: Recipes and Tales from a Life in Chocolate by Alice Medrich, and she talked about how she had naïvely made her first truffles with untempered chocolate. She was doing it all wrong, but there were distinct advantages: they had to be eaten fresh, which meant they tasted better, and they melted at a lower temperature, which, if you ask me, makes for a more sensual experience. Not that little boys don't smear chocolate all over their faces anyway.
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