Monday, January 11, 2010

Milking Coco in Wintertime Means Plenty of Hot Chocolate

Rose is still suffering some cold symptoms, so we kept the germs to our house and I kept her home from church yesterday.

We had the nicest day.

We prepared a lovely, simmer on the stove all day pork roast, with carrots and parsnips. We made a spelt pineapple upside down cake using a recipe written out in long hand in my grandmother's writing. We checked on Priscilla. We loaded the fireplace and woodstove repeatedly. We read our books and she knitted while I worked on paperwork. We made the very best hot chocolate ever consumed by womankind, with a slice of milk and honey whole wheat toast. We cuddled and snuggled. She read through a collection of my old blog posts while I finished Crime and Punishment. I even showed her the basics of counted cross stitch, which was a favorite hobby of mine back in college days, but alas, no more.

Here is the recipe for our favorite hot cocoa (Straight off the Hershey's cocoa box, even though we haven't bought Hershey's cocoa powder in years!):

1/2 c. succanat (unrefined sugar-I believe that the sucanat gives a much richer flaver)
1/4c. cocoa powder
pinch salt
1/3c. hot water
1qt milk (whole milk, fresh from the cow if you are truly lucky)
1tsp of vanilla

We mix the sucanat, cocoa powder, salt and water and bring to a rolling boil. Then we add the milk and vanilla and warm up til nice and steamy. If you want to be really extravagant, add some cinnamon and another swirl of heavy cream. If you have a nice loaf of homemade whole wheat bread, make yourself a slice of toast. It goes so nicely, you will know you are royalty, especially if you can enjoy this feast in front of the blazing fireplace.

3 comments:

Jeff said...

Oh, wow!! Sounds incredibly delicious, particularly with home made bread.

Greener Pastures--A City Girl Goes Country said...

I keep on planning days like that Ginger but somehow it never happens. When we were getting all that snow, I thought, oh, we'll read all day and lay around and knit and bake something. What am I doing wrong? It seems like all we do is rush and there's no peace and quality like you describe!

gingerhillery@mac.com said...

Thanks Jeff! Hope you try some!

Debi, I feel like most of the time I rush around and am amazed and thankful when the peace falls upon us. It basically required ignoring all the huge list of things I really needed to finish, like put away the rest of the Christmas decorations, finish folding the clothes, work on my messy desk, dust my room, etc. At the end of the day, I think we made the right choices! But it is a battle to make it happen.