chocolate lust.

oh. my. god. i try not to say those three words in that way, but i have just eaten a piece of the chocolate bar i bought yesterday, and it was absolutely divine. life-changing, even. i went to cardullo’s yesterday in hopes of buying my favorite chocolate bar (le noir extra amer, by valrhona) and i was really kind of upset when they…didn’t have it. i spend two months in a foreign country where “chocolate” only costs 30 cents a bar, but tastes like cardboard, and this is what i come back to? a barren wasteland of not-chocolate? so i disappointedly scanned the shelves of chocolate bars (there are three) for a seriously dark chocolate bar with nothing else in it. i lingered briefly at the dolfin gingembre frais bar, which has stuff in it, but that’s ok because it’s my second-favorite bar that cardullo’s carries. i'm pretty much a purist about eating chocolate: if it’s really dark, it better not have anything in it, and if it’s regularly dark, then i don’t like to eat an entire bar (over time, people, over time!) of chocolate with weird stuff in it. but this gingembre frais? better even than eating both chocolate no. 3 and ginger ice creams from tosci’s, at the same time. and god, that’s good. anyway, back to barren wasteland. so i scanned and scanned in desperation, and that’s when i saw the “theo” brand. in general i find fair trade chocolate to be of lesser quality. somehow the chocolate companies have not been in business long enough to know the finer aspects of how to make a really good chocolate bar, and a spiffy wrapper isn’t edible so it isn’t going to save it. but this bar, it has the most gorgeous wrapper i've ever seen on a chocolate bar: it’s like a painting from a period of art i can’t remember the name of (it looks like kandinsky or miro on crack, by with bright reds, blacks, and yellows). besides, the company is based in seattle. so i bought it. (it’s the “ivory coast” bar, 75% cacao, which is a bit low, but it does very nicely.) in my rather weak defense, i also bought one to send to jessica in her care package. and now i'm eating it, and now i'm happy.