Food, cooking, eating, and me

First of all, as far as I’m concerned, hot chocolate and chocolate milk are made with chocolate and drinking quality milk or “milk”, not with cocoa, and definitely not with some kind of mix that looks like you got dirt in your skim milk.

I’m just a firm believer in the real thing.

So what you have to do is melt the chocolate in the almond milk and blend it to mix it in. Almond milk should not be heated to boiling by itself, but you can safely heat it after mixing in the chocolate.

I have found that some commercial milks can taste thin. If I want the finished product to be “milkier”, I add some coconut milk powder, which I buy at an Asian food store.

For chocolate milk, it’s the same thing, but you may need to add some extra sugar, as chilled things taste less sweet.
Gosh, better make plenty, too. I bought some chocolate rice milk once that was so horrible I took one taste and threw the carton away. Not this. This is the real deal.

Ah, and the piece de resistance: European-style hot chocolate. When blending the chocolate and milk, add some cornstarch to thicken it up so you will use a spoon while drinking it. Thicker is definitely better.

Sorry it’s been so long. How time flies when you’re working two jobs while trying to maintain multiple websites and write multiple blogs… Sometimes it seems like there’s hardly time to cook anything at all.

I haven’t been baking as much, but I know that my baked good recipes are the most popular ones that I do post. So basically I need to get better at posting the ones I do make, even if maybe they are still a little rough around the edges.

Today I’ve got a killer recipe – if you’re into biscuits and gravy. It’s got neither milk nor flour in it, but you’d never know it. The gravy is thickened with blanched almonds, which give it milkiness and a bit of sweet rice flour and potato starch, which give it silkiness. This is a base I’ll be working on to create more dairy-free gluten-free sauces, which I miss. Heck, I was even trying to make a sausage gravy with water. Talk about desperation!

Keep in mind that the best black pepper is freshly ground, which will make a huge difference in the recipe.

For those of you who are unaware of the concept of ‘biscuits and gravy’ – either because you are foreign or unfamiliar with US regional cooking, biscuits (similar to scones in some places) are puffy and white, rich with butter or shortening, usually made with milk, and baked in the oven until golden brown. They are often split and buttered, but in the case of biscuits and gravy, the split biscuits have poured over them a creamy sauce made with breakfast sausage drippings.

There’s another definition for you who are not Americans. Breakfast sausage is a fresh pork sausage seasoned with black pepper and sage. It is often sold loose, rather than in casings, and may be fried up in patties. In this recipe I crumble loose sausage meat before cooking it, then include it in the gravy. If you fried patties or sausages, you could remove them from the pan and serve them on the same plate as the biscuits and gravy.

I’ll be making this again for breakfast tomorrow. It’s been way too long.