Chocaholics anonymous for me!

My colleague has just had to resort to a large bar of chocolate to get her through the stress that is the remainder of the working day.  Although she is a coeliac, she is able to buy large bars of milk chocolate from M&S that are gluten free and which she shares with the rest of us. Being  the person that sits next to her most days, I usually benefit quite nicely. I have had a large chunk today, as well as a bar of Twix. Just can’t resist.

Most of you know my love affair with the cocoa bean, which is responsible for quite a lot of my excess weight (although not all – the fermented grape and curry has quite an impact too). For me a dinner party isn’t a proper dinner party without a chocolate pudding of some sort (mousse, trifle, baked cheesecake etc) usually accompanied by extra thick double cream. Yum!

Chocolate is one of the major feel good foods of the world. Apparently it contains some enzyme or other which is similar to the one that is generated by the body during sex and which makes you feel fantastic. Can’t remember what it is, but it is mildly addictive and the more chocolate you have the more you crave it (presumably the same rule applies to sex!?)

I saw a programme on the telly the other day about how chocolate is actually produced in Ghana. The farmers there work for Fairtrade and use sustainable crops which they properly care for rather than treat them with growth hormones to get the maximum crop after which the plants die (as is the case elsewhere). The coca bean is the most unattractive thing, and whoever thought of extracting it and doing whatever they do to make Cadbury’s was a genius.

A few years ago I belonged to something called the Chocolate Tasting Club. For a payment of about £15 each month you got sent a box of the most gorgeous chocolates which were new fillings manufacturers worldwide were considering for their collections. You had to taste them all, and then give marks out of ten on a special website. Each month, one person won a box of posh chocolates worth £100. They have now been taken over by the retailer Hotel Chocolat, and have stopped giving away expensive boxes. And anyway I stopped being a member a couple of years ago – can’t afford it financially and weight wise – but it was fun while it lasted.

My next door neighbour has a pack of three bars of yummy chocolate next to her, so it must be a very stressful day indeed. I’ll have to go now and help her out!

Easter chocolate!

It’s the Easter break, and for many of us it’s a lovely four day weekend. Of course if you work in retail you only get one day off – Easter Sunday – due to the rampant commercialism that seems to exist in the UK these days, and if you work in the emergency services then you work your usual shifts so it makes no difference. But for those office workers amongst us, it makes a nice change.

Easter always seems to be a bit of a non event as regards how celebrations go, even though it is the biggest religious festival of the year. Yes, despite the lack of tinsel it is bigger than Christmas, because it is about affirmation of faith and rebirth. On continental Europe it is even bigger, with massive religious services taking place in the open air and lots of chanting and candles.

Every country has its own way of celebrating Easter. In the UK we celebrate with chocolate eggs and the Easter Bunny, and sit down to scoff roast lamb for lunch. In Greece, where we will also be present for Greek Orthodox Easter a couple of weeks later, they have their main Easter meal after the midnight church service on Saturday night and the traditional dish is a sort of lemony chicken soup. On the Sunday itself, they put whole lamb or goat carcasses on the spit and have a barbeque, picking lemons straight from the trees to squeeze all over the barbequing meat.

Where did chocolate eggs come from as a celebration? It seems somewhat bizarre, although as an opportunity to make money it has been grabbed with eager hands by the confectionery industry. Eggs feature in many countries’ celebrations (the Greeks hard boil them, dye them red and embed them into bread – weird) but why chocolate?

It’s not even nice chocolate unless you pay a fortune for Green & Blacks. Even a Cadbury’s Dairy Milk egg seems rather thin and insipid when compared to the original bar. Thornton’s is nauseatingly sweet, and the cheap stuff they sell in Poundland is only fit for the dog.

I’d much rather have nice boxes of choccies – preferably dark chocolate and with fruit cream fillings. My particular favourite is orange creams and I am very partial to a liqueur cherry! Oh, and old fashioned violet and rose creams with the little crystalline petal on top – yummy! But they are very hard to find. The shops are awash with toffee centres, pralines, nuts and marzipan, but try finding a decent set of fruit creams –almost impossible unless you go to those mega expensive shops where they let you chose your own chocolates to go in the box.

Of course we shouldn’t eat it at all, it’s very bad for us and very expensive. But we do – our children have so much chocolate at Easter (even though they are mostly now adults) that they store it all up for weeks afterwards nibbling away, then they get bored with it and far too much gets thrown away.

But woe betide us if we don’t provide it –we’d never hear the end of it.