sensuous, glorious violet creams, how i love you

first (yes, first!), a digression : i have the most unsettling suspicion that i have undeniably american tastes in food. i unabashedly love chicken pot pie, cakes from mixes, fast food, and easymac. ok, maybe not easymac. and maybe the chicken pot pie is best when you expressly roast a chicken for it (while not particularly economically efficient, it is the best way to have pot pie). but cakes and brownies from mixes are unequivocally good. there's no comparison between the from-mix and scratch versions in my mind, because they're just totally different things - apples and bananas. or maybe apples and chinese pears. at any rate, i make up for it with my insane purist ways for other foods. cheesecake, for example, is only good plain, and preferably with a gingersnap crust. i will make one exception - for a key lime cheesecake - but it better be good.

anyway, this post was really to discuss the joy of violet creams. i was at cardullo's with nina - having waffled back and forth previously on whether or not to go at all before definitively deciding to go - and i was first attracted to the lovely, gorgeous, perfectly-proportioned bars of New Tree chocolate (see a picture here). their bars are non-gmo, 73% dark chocolate with additives like lemon zest and orange zest, and each of their 5 bars has a name - 'vigor' for coffee, 'forgiveness' for the lemon, 'pleasure' for the plain... i'm not sure if they're any good - i decided to shell out my five bucks for the violet creams instead - but they sure are gorgeous. i suppose it's the architect's bar of chocolate (with the 'vigor' bar as the most appropriate flavor).

and still you haven't heard about the violet creams. well, i was about to escape with my can of cassoulet (canned cassoulet, you ask? how could i even dare? read on.), threading my way through the fire-hazard-narrow aisles in search of nina, when i spotted them on a shelf. lonely, tossed asunder, i saw a pink box : rose creams. alack, no canary creams, and i'm not a huge fan of rose, despite the fact that it is really fun to sugar rose petals. but suddenly i saw the purple box - violet creams! i decided right then and there to blow my five bucks on these luscious-looking "dark chocolate with violet flavour fondant cream centres." undeniably british - by Beech's Fine Chocolates. essentially they're high-quality violet-flavored thin mints.

while we're on the subject of british food, i'd like the world to know that i love british food. yet another weird quirk in the strange world that is my food likes and dislikes. i love yorkshire puddings, figgy puddings, full english breakfasts...oh, i need to go back to england.

and finally, the canned cassoulet. as i had leftover chicken pot pie for dinner (by the way, the only correct topping for pot pie is a biscuit topping; then you eat it out of a bowl with a spoon), i had no need to open the can of cassoulet. but i've been eyeing that can of cassoulet for about a year now - thankfully not the same exact can - and i finally bought it. i've always wanted to make a real cassoulet, but i've never had the chance; neither have i had the chance to go sample the cassoulet at pigalle. i also have a moderately-consuming passion to see if canned foods are actually good. currently the canned foods i do like include: peas, corn, creamed corn, beans, wolfgang puck chicken tortilla soup (a surprisingly good canned soup) and tuna. canned foods i do not like: spaghetti-o's and all related canned foods (canned pasta has that gross pale tan color). when i've had the cassoulet i'll update you all on whether or not it's actually good. in jeffrey steingarten's article about when he made boudin noir, he canned it, so canned things must taste good occasionally. i've also wanted to try Caledonian Kitchen's canned haggis, ever since there was a blurb about it in Saveur, but that will have to wait until i get my next paycheck.