Three Chocolatey Health Bars I Love

I'm making a swift post-surgery recovery, aided in part by...you guessed it...chocolate!

Cooking wasn't much of an option with my hand out of commission, and handling money for the Chinese food delivery boy wasn't much easier. But I was able to scissor open some delicious and nutritious chocolately snack bars. Here are my new favorites:

tastes way too delicious to be healthy, but it is

contains quinoa, chia, and millet

my favorite...exquisite combo of salty & sweet, with just a few ingredients. 7g fiber, 6g protein, and only 5g sugar.

Enjoy! :-)

Fruits in Season

What do apples, figs, grapes, mango, watermelon, rhubarb, and tomatoes have in common?

They're all summer fruits, according to chasingdelicious.com.  And passionfruit, bananas, and citrus fruits are in season year-round, so I'll be stocking up on these, too!  (Heaven forbid I go a day without eating a banana.)

In other news, my boyfriend moved into his summer sublet yesterday, and the healthy chocolate-chip cookies I brought to warm up his new digs were a hit!  (Thanks, Chocolate-Covered Katie!)  The jug of chocolate milk didn't hurt, either ;-).

It felt great to bake something after a months-long hiatus.  Even the oven seemed pleased!

Chocolate Find!

I am down to one itty-bitty little square of sweetriot's organic, fair-trade, vegan, 85% cacao dark chocolate!

Nooo! Where's the nearest Whole Foods?

image from http://kidwinks-blog.blogspot.com

Unfortunately no one is paying me to tell you it's delicious, but I'll tell you anyway! It's smooth and silky, and there's a certain something - the very slightest hint of - dare I say, salt? - but salt is not listed as an ingredient so I'm not sure what wondrous yumminess I'm tasting. Try it and see what I mean!

Sweetriot is dedicated to global justice; its mission statement is "to create a more just and celebrated multicultural world for our next generation." Not that I need another reason to gobble it up!

Homemade Chocolate Bars

I made chocolate bars.

?!!

Me?

Yes. And you can, too. There are only three ingredients and you never have to turn on the oven!


Cocoa powder: 1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon
Unrefined coconut oil (melted): 4 tablespoons
Agave nectar: 1/4 cup

I followed a recipe from Chocolate-Covered Katie, with the exception of melting the coconut oil. (For some reason I thought that "unrefined" meant the coconut oil was already "melted." Whoops!)

"Combine coconut oil with agave or stevia drops. Stir, then add cocoa powder (and add 3-4 T water or nondairy milk if using stevia.). Stir stir stir! Stir until it gets thick. Pour into any flat container (or candy molds or smush between layers of wax paper or in ziploc bags). Fridge or freeze until solid."

Since I didn't have any chocolate bar molds, I "smushed" the chocolate between layers of wax paper, and it never got quite as hard as I would have liked (that's what she said), but I think that's probably because I never melted the coconut oil. I will be sure to next time.

Still, the chocolate was/is some of the best I've ever tasted, honestly. This is a rock-solid recipe, and the chocolate is sugar-free, dairy-free, and gluten-free.  Bon appetit!

A Belated Birthday Treat

YUM!

Last night my friend Betsy steered me into her new favorite place, 16 Handles. We wolfed down a couple cake batter and cookies-and-cream frozen yogurts with peanut butter and chocolate sauce galore. If I was going to abandon my blood type diet for a night, this was definitely the way to go!

I'm still trying to decide if the blood type diet is worth keeping up. I haven't felt any more energetic or healthy than I'm accustomed to feeling, though it's only been two weeks. The toughest part is staying gluten-free, but I'll try to to power through for another two weeks and then re-evaluate. For me it may be better simply to aim to eat as much real, unprocessed food as possible - especially veggies and lean protein - and to minimize everything else without cutting out wheat entirely, which seems pretty drastic and has proved difficult.

Chocolate News

Image from http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/the-chocolate-diet/

I was so in the mood to blog today that it's the first thing I'm doing! (Minus breakfast, showering, getting to work, brewing green tea, eating chocolate...)

Chocolate!

The New York Times has re-affirmed something that all of us chocolate lovers have already known for a long time: chocolate is good for you!  Specifically, they cite a new study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine which suggests that regular consumption of chocolate is correlated with weight loss. In other words, not only do the positive benefits of chocolate on metabolic processes offset the calories, they actually facilitate weight loss: "The people who ate chocolate the most frequently, despite eating more calories and exercising no differently from those who ate the least chocolate, tended to have lower B.M.I.’s. There was a difference of roughly five to seven pounds between subjects who ate five servings of chocolate a week and those who ate none."

YES!

I've been nibbling on Lindt (85% cocoa), but I'd love to find something more compliant with my new blood type diet. Keeping an eye out for something sweetened with agave rather than sugar...

And I will soon be experimenting with Chocolate-Covered Katie's homemade Nutella! As soon as I (or one of my cooking-inclined roommates) buy(s) a Cuisinart, I'll be ready to try this low-calorie, low-sugar, gluten-free recipe that she swears is absolutely delicious!  I can't wait.

And I'll be trying her three-ingredient chocolate bars too, so stay tuned!

Blue Frog Chocolates bar

My new favorite chocolate bar is this Blue Frog Chocolates bar, 71% cacao. My dad somehow procured three of these and immediately thought of me. He made a note to his secretary to send them separately so that I would receive three, not one, delectable surprises in the mail, preferably spaced apart by a week. This proposition must have struck her as pure idiocy because I received them all in one box and was, of course, quite thrilled.

Sorry the photo is rather truncated; not sure why Instagram insists on cropping!

Orgain: Healthiest Drink Ever?

Along with water and liquefied egg whites, Orgain is in the running for Healthiest Drink Ever. And the crazy thing? It's delicious. This morning I sampled "Creamy Chocolate Fudge," and I loved it. With a mere 13 grams of sugar, it's pretty tasty and chocolaty.

A doctor recommended this to me as a fantastic post-run drink. The makers of Orgain don't specify anywhere on the box or website that the drink contains electrolytes, which I usually need after a workout, but that appears to be the only thing it lacks. The drink is entirely organic, not too sugary or sweet, and low in fat; it's jam-packed with protein (16 grams) and abundant in nutrients, including a vitamin blend, an organic veggie blend (trust me, you don't taste it), an organic fruit blend, and an antioxidant blend. One "Orgain" allegedly contains the equivalent of ten fruit and vegetable servings, but I have to wonder whether that's even possible. Wouldn't the drink then contain far more calories, and wouldn't it provide 100% of the vitamins you need in a day? (Most of the vitamins in "Nutrition Facts" are listed at a mere 25%, which of course isn't bad.)

Would appreciate any insights or thoughts. In the mean time, I'll keep enjoying these!