Guilty pleasures?

At the FT, Jenny Linford on the "new milk chocolate" movement (FT site registration required - NB I am very happy with the old milk chocolate too):

Danish chocolate maker Mikkel Friis-Holm of Friis-Holm produces two “dark milk” bars, one at 55 per cent cocoa solids, the other at 65 per cent. Having experimented with different beans and fermentation periods, Friis-Holm settled on a “full-bodied and tasty” cocoa from Nicaragua. What he wants from his dark milk bars, he says, is to move through creamy and caramel notes but “importantly to end up with cacao flavours”. This way, milk chocolate is no longer the “stepchild” of plain. “At first people bought it as if they had bought a naughty magazine,” laughs Friis-Holm. “They would hide it under the dark bars!”

Butter nomenclature

Elgin vs. "Western Stubbies"! (Via GeekPress.)

Life v. literature

The weeks where I am most copious here are weeks I am spending a lot of time at home on my computer. What is good for life is not necessarily good for blogging! I've been busy with all sorts of enjoyable things, including a fantastic party Tuesday night at the Algonquin Hotel for Amazon's little A fiction imprint.

I'm writing this Friday evening on my Kindle Fire (links a bit of a pain to paste in, so I may be selective) in a Vermont bed and breakfast; tomorrow Liz and I will race the Kingdom Even-Up Triathlon, and last night we stayed here on her aunt and uncle's absolutely lovely farm. Both of those links are highly worthwhile, and we had an amazing morning visiting calves in the barn (one of them sucked on the heel of my palm in a most endearing fashion), walking the hyper-energetic and muscular black lab blend down and up a very steep dirt road, looking at chickens and pigs and generally enjoying a magical agricultural interlude. There is also a cat, and another dog (a golden retriever that's considerably less active than the lab)! We will go back there tomorrow night for post-race feeding and recovery, and then drive home to New York on Sunday.

(Liz was telling me recently about this, and the family syrup site has just gone live - order some here! I am definitely intending to take a quart home with me: it is perhaps dubious, but I am thinking that it might make good endurance sport fuel....)

The Elgin packet and the Western stubby

Butter is king!

Also: Phillip Dyess-Nugent is not impressed with Lepage's Ring and Bruno Maddox is not impressed with the Higgs Boson.

Things organized neatly

The milk bottle grosses me out (don't mind milk in things, but can't stomach it straight), but the cookie arrangement is exquisite!

Had a needlessly emotionally tumultuous day, but did get dug back in on my long-overdue theater and the novel essay and spent some very nice hours in the evening with old friends, also beneficial. Lungs seem sufficiently stabilized that I think I may be able to make a stab at actual exercise tomorrow, which would also be good for the morale.

Light reading: William Ryan, The Holy Thief (interesting milieu and appealing main character, surprisingly vague plotting); Adrian McGinty, Fifty Grand (some underlying and fairly entrenched implausibilities about character and voice, but really wonderfully gripping in every important respect - this would make a great movie!).

"I do like a little bit of butter to my bread!"

I can't now reconstruct where I first saw the link, but I was on the verge of blogging the recent bog butter find - the Thames butter piece is the clincher, though!

(Bonus link: my favorite poem about butter!)