Not Just Chocolate; Chocolate-Chocolate Chip with Nuts, and a Mini-Rant

I keep meaning to get on board the Love Thursday love train, because I think the idea is absolutely stunning, but Thursday rolls around and, oh look, I have something I have to write about besides love, or I'm still in too much pain over little lost loves to even think about thinking about it.  Today is slightly different.

Today my true love is in New York on some horrendous overnight business errand, and it just happens to be right when the residue of the full moon is playing with my hormones like a kitten on hallucinogens.  I suspect I'm not alone.  The only thing to do is apply chocolate.  So here, have a cookie.  No, I tell you what:  meet me on the couch with a plate of these.  I've got mine.

Chocolate-Chocolate Chip Cookies with Pecans

(yield:  approx. 50 approx. 2" dia. cookies)

¼ t baking soda
¼ C unsweetened cocoa
½ C soft, salted butter
1 C sugar
1 jumbo egg
1½ C flour
1 T vanilla extract -OR- the scraped-out guts of one whole vanilla bean
¼ t baking powder
½ C plain, unsweetened, nonfat yogurt (real yogurt, not the kind with gelatin or other additives)
2 oz..unsweetened chocolate, melted
1 C pecan halves
1 C tiny bittersweet or semisweet chocolate morsels

1.  Preheat oven to 375°F.

2.  Cream together butter, sugar, egg.  Beat in yogurt and melted chocolate.

3.  In a separate bowl, whisk together flour, cocoa, baking powder, and baking soda.  When thoroughly blended, dump them into the wet mix and beat them in until thoroughly blended into that, but not one second longer than necessary.

4.  Beat in chocolate morsels and pecans.  (The beaters will break up the pecans.)  Beat in vanilla last.  Mix everything together gently but thoroughly.

5.  Drop onto a nonstick cookie sheet by the teaspoonful.  Bake 10 minutes.  Cool and eat, and only share with people who are nice to you when you are feeling particularly vulnerable.

(This, of course, is yet another recipe I inherited from my mother but tweaked.  All the ingredients when I make it are organic, fair trade, etc, though I grew up loving it and strongly feeling my mom's love through the agency of not-always-entirely-vegetable margarine and other cheap, conventional, highly processed, generic ingredients.  My way's better, of course, better for you and better for the planet, not to mention better tasting, but I'm sure you're sick of hearing about that.  If you want to know what I recommend, just ask.  Meanwhile I have other rants to fry.  Or something.)

I've spent a lot of time on the couch today eating chocolate cookies, napping, crying over reruns of bad TV shows, and kind of puking over the ads.  Chranukaa time is here again, and nothing gets me in the mood for hatin' -- not lovin', no matter what day of the week it is -- like an ad for a mass-produced piece of diamond jewelry with a heartlessly manipulative brand name and its attendant implied, mass-produced "romantic" story being marketed directly to men as the perfect thing to give every single one of their wives and/or girlfriends in lieu of actually thinking about them as individual people who might be worth a little more trouble than the occasional societally ordained purchase of some overpriced, prefab token of notice.  The only thing I hate nearly as much as an ad for this year's must-buy-or-you-don't-love-her diamond is an ad for an inferior food product purporting to be both chocolate and the height of tasteful glamour, yet almost certainly made using ingredients grown by child slave labor.  Yes, that would be all the ones you see on TV.  Yes, all of them (except Cadbury, which appears to have cleaned up its act slavery-wise, even though it's still a big polluter and exploiter).  See the end of this post for a list of reading material to back up this assertion.

But over and above the striking similarity between diamonds and cheap chocolate, both in terms of the marketing and hype surrounding each and the horrific living conditions of the people who pull each from the earth, you know what's especially weird about chocolate candy advertising?  Except for products marketed specifically to children, almost all the chocolate commercials you ever see feature women demonstrating near-orgasmic enjoyment of the product being sold, and no men, and even when there are men they're just acting normal, happy but normal, definitely not gasping with transportation.  (Men also don't usually look like they're starving no matter what they're advertising, but we won't go there.)  It's crazy, because men love chocolate every bit as much as women.  I've met just as many men who don't like it at all as women, and just as many men who were insane, rabid addicts (and I mean that in the nicest possible way, addict to addict).  In my life, I personally have given just as many men chocolate orgasms as women.  Because I used to work at Whole Foods, I have had countless occasions to talk to countless people -- every age, every race, every gender (as far as I know), and even a surprising number of socioeconomic strata -- about this very sort of thing, and to offer samples which caused immediate observable results, so although my opinion and experience are hardly the results of disciplined scientific research, they're also not air-based notions I just pulled out of my ear.  So what gives with all the chocorgasmic chicks on TV?

I am hardly the first person to notice this.  I'm just at my limit looking at it.  It's oppressive.  Thank goodness (and my mom) I know how to bake and don't have to buy any of the terrible stuff being advertised this way.  And thank goodness I have books to read and don't have to sit in front of the TV now that I'm feeling a little peppier.

I love books.  And I love chocolate.  And if you're reading this, there's a good chance I love you, too.  So have a cookie.  Aw, heck, just take the recipe and have as many as you like.

Happy Love Thursday!

__________

Read up on chocolate farmed using child slavery in Côte d'Ivoire:

From Valentine's Day 2003 in Salon:  "Bittersweet Chocolate"

from Valentine's Day 2005 in NPR's Talk of the Nation:  "Disconnecting Chocolate from Slavery"

Reprint at the Organic Consumers' Association of an Article by Deborah Cox published in Forbes on April 24, 2006:   "Slave Chocolate?"

Coop America's "Responsible Shopper" corporate profiles on Nestlé, Hershey, and Cadbury

Wikipedia on the subject, with a discussion board about the objectivity of this piece and lots of external links

Comments

[Cathy]

Very sweet :0)

[Ron Sullivan]

FWIW, ScharffenBerger gets its cacao from small farmers, presumably little or no slave labor involved. I hope Hershey's doesn't mess with all this, since they bought SB last year.

I'm so old I remember when Hershey was a do-gooder company, what with the boys' orphanage school and the clean pretty limestone-block factory right in town and the amusement park and all. AND when we toured the factory, we toured the actual factory. Lord, lord.

[Sara]

Oh, I KNOW! I was SHOCKED to see Hershey on the poop list for this particular offense. SHOCKED. I'm not being at all sarcastic.

Honestly, I've never been that impressed with Sharffenberger, which I feel is overpriced for the quality. If you don't care about organics, Callebaut and Valrhona have superior products which also are not derived from slave labor. If you're going to spend that much, though, you might as well go with Green & Black (now owned by Cadbury, which scares me almost as much as Hershey buying Sharffenberger) or Rapunzel, which are each both organic and fair trade, and which in my opinion rival or and often even surpass non-organic gourmet brands.

While we're opting out of the 43% of the nation's chocolate that is estimated to have been produced by child slave labor, why not also buy organic? Why not have it all?