Chocopathology

First off: I know that E and I aren’t the only people who do this, but we’re huge fans of compound word creation. For example, today’s title: chocopathology is a combination of chocolate and psychopathology.  Drizza and Draking stands for drunk pizza and drunk baking. I think you get the point.

Anyway, so I’ve always known I was a chocoholic (it’s genetic), but the rest of my chocopathology has only recently been revealing itself (maybe it is just all the time I spend in a psych department that is making the symptoms more salient). In addition to my addiction, I appear to also be a cocoarder (cocoa-hoarder). I went to the movies this afternoon and stopped by sugar heaven (products–> heaven, their prices–> hell!) for um… chocolate. But the store requires a $10+ purchase to use credit, and I had no cash, so I bought more chocolate!
When I got home, I went to my our pantry to put the chocolate away, but couldn’t find space on my chocolate shelf. Being the good CBT therapist-to-be that I am, I immediately engaged in problem solving. Here are the solutions I generated:

1) Make more room for chocolate in the pantry (by throwing away useless things like tuna, peanut butter, pasta and E’s fruit snacks).

2) Eat lots of chocolate right now to make room for more

3) Stop buying chocolate.

Of all these steps #3 was the least appealing, so I ate some chocolate and forced some other things into corners to make space for my chocostash, but as I snacked and reorganized, it just became to obvious to me how much chocolate we really have. And by obvious I mean ridiculous.

Let me show you what I mean.

here is a sample of  what I found in our pantry

And then just the bars, without the extra candy

If you look closely, you can see that these bars of chocolate are hardly gathering dust.

I munch on them all the time! I just had no idea there were so many.

Organizing my chocolate lifted the veil of denial I had about living a healthy lifestyle.

So, I did some wii fit Yoga to get in shape!

(I told you I was going to start doing Yoga!)

In other news, I’ve baked a bunch more recipes from my little book including:

1)those A+ cookies for a crowd (the kiddies agreed)

2) A cinnamon-apple bundt cake that I adapted to become a banana cake (A/A+, best banana cake I have ever had, maybe I’ll post the recipe next time)

3) Overnight Pizza Dough from Bon Appetit. E and I usually just use a Betty Crocker mix for home made pizzas, and it comes out ok. But we had company so I made this dough and it was phenomenal! Like way better than most pizza dough from a restaurant. The best part is that the recipe makes 8 servings of dough, so we’ve frozen some away. When we use it, I’ll let you know how well it keeps (and try to take a picture of the pizza before I gobble it up too fast!)

Alright, Enuf boring updates already. Time for So You Think You Can Dance! (I think Randi and Evan will be sent home… we’ll find out soon!)

UPDATE to add: I was totally wrong about Randi and Evan, they weren’t even in the bottom 3 couples. Shows what I know. Still, I had not strong feelings for Max or Ashley, so that’s fine. But I’m predicting it right now: next week we’ll say goodbye to Vitolio and Asuka.

LURVEY!

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Keeping Busy

I know how lame this sounds, but the truth is that I get bored on weekends.

I’m sure I’ll miss this boredom come fall when I have to spend every moment not dedicated to research dedicated to studying Child Assessment and Psychopathology (I know, my life is awesome, right?). But anyway, until then… I get bored.

So today, I gave myself a project. I made a recipe book.

I don’t know how well you guys stalk me, but last week I did a guest post on a semi popular blog (thedailybalance.com) about ‘my’ world famous pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. When I make those cookies I used to use a paper print out of the recipe but it ultimately got destroyed by water and what not. So, when I was making them for the post, I tried to recreate the recipe by memory and um… failed.

Then, this morning, I read this post by Kath on her blog. This post depicts pictures of a recipe book she’s had for years, with little notes on each page about what she thought of each meal.

AHA!

I love craft projects (despite have less than zero artistic talent) so I went into this full force.

I am so excited about this book. It is full of cookie, cake and bread recipes that I have tried and that I want to try. Now, every night when i want to bake something, I just have to ask E to open the book and pick something new.

That's a blanket in the corner, not a small animal!

Tonight, he picked peanut butter chocolate chip cookies.

waiting to go in the oven

This recipe is from Cooking Light, but they aren’t so light. 1 cup white and 1 cup brown sugar?! 1/2 cup peanut butter? Granted, the recipe made 4 dozen cookies, but that’s still 1/24th cup sugar per cookie. I have no idea if that is a lot… But it tastes like a lot. The verdict: These cookies are too sweet and not peanut-buttery enough. Kind of bland really. Also, the recipe only calls for 2/3 cup chocolate chips, I was skeptical of this and upped it to a generous cup, but still not enough!

So what did the man think? In E’s Opinion: they’re not terribly peanut buttery, but good texture and creamy and yummy (I left him with 3 cookies and ran upstairs to grab something. They were all gone when I returned. Good Boy!). So maybe I spoke too soon. They’ll go in the book as a B/B+.

Next time, I think I’ll try a bundt cake. Any recommendations? There are still lots of empty pages in my book!