Some Like It Hot Chocolate

The first time it got cold in Boise, I went into hot chocolate mode. Not having lived here before, I didn’t know where to go for a decent cup. Most would just make it themselves, from a pouch, but I’m not that kind of person. I like to leave professional things to professionals, and hot chocolate is one of those things. The problem with my approach is that there is no good hot chocolate in Boise. It’s all lowest common denominator stuff.

The following spring, when it was too warm to drink hot chocolate, my wife left for a job in LA, leaving me alone with my chest x-ray. There was a spot on the x-ray that could’ve either been my heart or my lungs. Nothing wrong with my heart, as far as I could tell, so I assumed it must be lung cancer. I made a farewell video and posted it to YouTube without telling my wife. I didn’t want her to worry.

The spot turned out not to be lung cancer, which was kind of disappointing. I like the idea of going out with a bang, and most bangs don’t get any bigger than lung cancer. What it was was allergies or some sort of low grade asthma. My brother-in-law, Ruben, suggested I drink black coffee.

I don’t like black coffee, or coffee of any sort, though years of habit make me experience coffee FOMO if I go too long without it. In this case, it had been over five years since I’d quit coffee before. Lucky for me, the allergy meds meant I could drink coffee without feeling like I’d ripped a hole in my stomach. Especially if I added sweetened condensed milk. My own version of Vietnamese coffee. So that’s what I did, and I’ll be honest. It didn’t help my allergies. The Montelukast did, but by then it was too late to quit coffee again (I finally did quit again, just a couple of months ago, because coffee made me jump through the ceiling every time somebody sent a canister through the drive through at the credit union).

Coffee and hot chocolate are generally incompatible, but I needed something to tide me over the coffee withdrawals. The thought of the overly sweet, watery coffeehouse variety didn’t appeal to me. Besides, too expensive. But I’d been experimenting with chocolate bars and sweetened condensed milk at home. This could be exactly what I needed to keep me from going through the drive through ceiling.

Chocolate bars led to cocoa powder (the dutched kind). I experimented with other sweeteners, like maple syrup and white sugar. Vanilla extract, of course. Orange extract. Butter. Got to have butter, unless you’re using sweetened condensed milk. Heavy cream, except the carton says to use it up within seven days after opening. Too much pressure.

Maybe you’re feeling terminal. Try using both cocoa powder and chocolate bars. At least 70% dark. If you’re worried that’s too dark, don’t worry. The milk and sugar will take that edge off. Adding the chocolate bar will make your hot chocolate thick, like a chocolate bar. For me, this is a no more than once a week treat. I’m not terminal.

Now that I’ve been fired from the credit union, I could go back to drinking coffee, but I don’t want to. Quitting took a lot of effort, right timing, and my Advil/Coke combination that’s derived from what little I know about methadone. Just because it works doesn’t mean you should try it.

I’m excited about where hot chocolate can lead me. I packaged my new-found knowledge into a workshop called SOME LIKE IT HOT CHOCOLATE. Pitched it around town, including to Williams Sonoma. They’ve got hot chocolate gadgets that make me a win-win for them. But you don’t need fancy gadgets. Here’s what you do. First, the equipment:

Mixing bowl. Multiple sets of measuring spoons (so you don’t have to keep washing them between ingredients). A whisk. A chocolatera, which is a saucepan with a handle you can order on Amazon. I use a stainless steel one.

Here are the ingredients:

Whole milk. Cocoa powder. Corn starch. Sweetened condensed milk. Vanilla extract. Orange extract. Pinch of salt. An at least 70% dark chocolate bar is optional for you terminal cases.

In the mixing bowl, dump 2-1/2 tablespoons of cocoa powder, 2 tablespoons of sweetened condensed milk, and one teaspoon of corn starch. Add some milk for ease of mixing. Mix it together with your whisk. Add 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract and 1/8 teaspoon of orange extract. A little goes a long way. Add your pinch of salt.

You should probably invest in a probe thermometer.

In the chocolatera, while you were mixing the other ingredients, you should have started 500ml of whole milk on a low-medium fire. I like to use the griddle portion of the stove so that flames don’t go up the sides of the chocolatera. Your chocolatera isn’t meant for flames to be going up the sides. Once your milk reaches somewhere between 130-140F, add the chocolate sauce you made in the mixing bowl.

Oh, one small thing. You should probably sift the cocoa before you add it to the mixing bowl. I forget to do that sometimes. If you forget, that’s how come there might be lumps in your finished product.

Continue to heat till the temperature reaches between 170-180F. That way it’s hot without burning your chocolatera. If you do burn your chocolatera, it’s not a huge deal, but it’s easier to clean if you manage the temperature. I like to pour the hot chocolate into a Yeti mug so that it stays hot for hours. 500ml is a lot of hot chocolate for one person.

This may or may not be important, but I’ve been calling my drink hot chocolate, whether I use a chocolate bar or not. Some people call it hot cocoa. That’s probably more technically correct. When you add the chocolate bar, some people call it drinking chocolate. There’s a lot of confusion with the naming conventions. For the purpose of our conversation, I’ll call it hot chocolate, because hot cocoa sounds like something a five year old would say because that’s what grandma calls it. We’re more sophisticated than that.

For the right amount of money, I would be happy to come to your demonstration kitchen and perform my SOME LIKE IT HOT CHOCOLATE workshop. I’ll give you an even better deal if you bring a film crew and provide me with usable footage.

If you’re pre-diabetic, like me, you probably shouldn’t drink hot chocolate every day or at all. But I think the benefits far outweigh the risks of becoming a food scold. Don’t be a food scold. Drink hot chocolate.

rituals, habits, and dependencies

you’ve got your hooks in me

I don’t do drugs. I’d be bad for them. They’d be, like, whoa, will this trip ever end? I take drugs. That’s different. The day starts with two squirts of Flonase up each nostril. A shot of the disc inhaler. A levothyroxine tablet. If I miss any of those things, I get anxious. Not because I need them every time. Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. But I don’t want to take a chance. Late afternoon is rotuvastatin. That one, for whatever reason, I don’t stress if I run out. Montelukast. God forbid I miss that one. Zyrtec. And now Flomax, because my urologist scared the hell out of me with tales of spending my last decade hooked up to a catheter. Yeah. Fuck that. If I ever reach that point, I’m heading straight for the garage to gas myself. Unless I’m driving a Tesla. This is why electric cars suck.

Sometimes I think I don’t need all these drugs. But I’m used to them. I’m comfortable with them. If I miss my night shot of the disc inhaler, I’m afraid I’ll wake up and not be able to go back to sleep. So I get out of bed and take it. Before all the allergy meds, I’d wake up and not be able to fall asleep again. Now I don’t. That’s a good reason to keep on taking them, don’t you think? But what if all these drugs blow out my liver or ruin my kidneys? Thanks to the meds, I don’t really care. I figure, life’s better without that anxious edge. Even if I don’t make it to 65.

I convinced myself that hot chocolate is good for me. Not the kind in a pouch. The kind you have to get up half an hour early to make, because it involves measuring and mixing ingredients. Cocoa powder and chocolate bars have iron in them. Now I feel like Iron Man. I’ve gotten so good at hot chocolate, I’m pitching a workshop to Williams Sonoma called SOME LIKE IT HOT CHOCOLATE. I’ll have to use their gadgets, which spoils the purity of the concept. I’m not happy about that, but I can live with some compromise, as long as I’m being paid.

Something happened when I started drinking hot chocolate. A better mood. Less ideation. Which, by the way, there’s nothing wrong with ideation. I’ve been practicing ideation since my 20s, and not once have I acted on it, even when I owned a gun and a motorcycle. Or maybe it’s a coincidence. Better not take a chance. Better stick with the hot chocolate habit, just in case.

This is how my weird rituals get started. Do things a certain way for a short period of time, freak out with any variation. Like butter in the hot chocolate. Or direct heat on the Weber. Most people set up two-zone cooking, a hot zone and a cool zone. But then I watched SJ COOKS on YouTube and learned about direct heat. Now I can’t stop.

One of the reasons I resisted going back to hats is because once I started wearing one, I couldn’t get myself ever to not wear one. But then after the doctors told me I had to wear one while recovering from the pre-cancer removals, I got myself a Dylan-inspired black gambler’s hat. Now I can’t take off my fucking hat.

We all die eventually. I’m not scared of that. I should be, but I’m not. God might have something to say about my posting a link to my Christmas show, PUT YOUR CLOTHES ON, YOU’RE IN MIDDLETON NOW, to the credit union’s intranet. He might say, “what were you thinking, Louis,” just like my boss, Cassidy, did.

I should probably try indirect heat at least once more before I die, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. I haven’t mastered direct heat yet. I’m going to eat chicken and tritip in daily rotation till I get it right. And a pint of ice cream every night, while watching a movie with my wife.

I don’t know how I’ve managed to make it this long.

MAMAS, DON’T LET YOUR BABIES GROW UP TO READ ‘SYBIL.’

A 1966 Toyota Corona four door is no kind of car for a road trip. But that’s all we had when daddy decided to downsize after that glorious white Chrysler Newport (I think it was a ‘63). When you’re a kid you don’t get why things happen like that, but later on I learned he’d lost his well paying civil engineering job with a private company, and after that he went to work for the city for a lot less money. The car had to go. We had two of those 66 Coronas, one for my dad and one for my mom. My dad assumed she’d pass the driving test, but she didn’t, so he’d switch between the two depending on mood or if he’d been driving one for longer than necessary. I think it ended up a race to see which one would hit 100k first.

We had the blue car and the brown car (later repainted silver, but we still called it the brown car. The brown car, reupholstered in black naugahyde down in Tijuana, eventually became my sister’s car till some punk on the football team totaled it with his Chevelle. Annie was okay but shaken). I preferred the blue car.

My dad was deaf, but he wore a hearing aid and insisted on listening to the news on the hour and the half. The rest of the time, I could listen to rock n roll. If Annie was in the car, she got to pick the station because she was older. Not fair, but neither is life.

I don’t know who thought it was a good idea taking brats on a long summer road trip. Six weeks in a 66 Corona. All the way up to Canada, with no reservations. Back then, we’d drive to a motel, and daddy would check it out before deciding it wasn’t suitable.

There was a peach festival happening in Penticton. No vacancy anywhere, not even the jail, so we slept in the car, which was too small for four people, but we did it.

Mummy made me eat a sandwich I insisted was spoiled. I got sick and thought maybe it was the strawberries, so I avoided those for years till one day I thought, no, it probably was the sandwich. I think that was the same trip I tried and didn’t like coffee.

Lake Ross sticks in my mind, not just because of how deep it was, but also because of how my mom warned me not to clean my glasses so close to the water like I was doing. She turned out to be right, and that’s how I ended up spending the rest of vacation without them. My glasses. It wasn’t like now, where you can just go to any optometrist and get new ones. In those days, we belonged to Kaiser, and there were no Kaisers anywhere. I told my mom, “I don’t care,” because I was a brat.

Annie left her retainers in a gas station restroom, and we had to drive back a hundred miles to go get ‘em. She cared more than I did.

One time in Canada, the people in the car in front of us stopped to feed the bears, which you’re not supposed to do. Nothing bad happened to them, unfortunately.

Between being cramped in that 66 Toyota, the spoiled sandwich, and reading Sybil (a book about a girl with a horrible stepmother and sixteen different personalities, none of whom was friends with each other. The book was assumed to be true at the time, but turned out not to be. Talk about a disappointment. All those years wasted fearing I was next!), I’m pretty sure that’s when I realized just how badly life can suck. Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to read Sybil. Especially when they’re young and impressionable.

We visited Tillamook, which is where they make cheese. I hate cheese, a lot. Lactose intolerant. Or phobic. I’ll eat it on pizza, but that’s it. We also visited Pendleton and didn’t buy any wool shirts, even though I wanted one. To this day, whenever we visit Pendleton, I don’t buy a wool shirt, and it’s because of that first trip and how expensive they are.

One time, we came back early, and then my parents hit the road again. They visited Zion and Bryce, two places I still haven’t seen. That’s what happens when you’re a brat. We were okay at home alone, because our Bobbe and Zeide lived with us. That means grandma and grandpa. Penny and I passed Zion or Bryce on our way from Vegas to Beaver, but we didn’t stop. We ate ice cream in Beaver, instead. And rode on the back of an ATV with a Mormon elder. Who says 90-year-olds can’t drive?

My dad should have never gotten rid of the Chrysler. You could lie down on the floor, and not only did we drive up to the snow, we also cruised out to Desert Hot Springs, where it smells real good, and those pools! The two hours to Desert Hot Springs also meant dinner at Griswold’s, which was a smorgasbord. Nobody has those any more.

As horrible as those road trips were, there’s a part of me that wants to try one without reservations. Just get in the car and go, and wish for the best. Even if all the motels are booked, we’ve got one thing the Coronas never had: reclining seats.