Showing posts with label beverages. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beverages. Show all posts

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Morning Mocha

There's a local breakfast restaurant that serves up a delicious coffee drink that they call a "Rose-a-Rita Mocha".  It's delicious!  It's has a unique chocolate, coffee, cinnamon flavor with a bit of a grainy texture.  It sounded really good this morning but we decided not to go out.  So, I got creative and tried to make some at home.  It was a success!

All I had to go on was the flavor that I remembered and the name.  We had ingredients that I thought might work....Mexican chocolate, coffee, "milk" (I used rice drink while hubby and daughter used coconut milk...we've gone non-dairy), cinnamon, and I cooked up a new batch of vanilla simple syrup.  I posted a recipe for the simple syrup a couple of years ago...just click HERE.


Hubby had bought the Mexican chocolate a few months ago to try and make hot chocolate that didn't have corn syrup in it.  He didn't have much luck with it though.  It's a box with packets like this...


Inside each packet is a round chunk of chocolate with pie shape lines to break it evenly.  It's hard to break and even harder to melt.  Even when he broke it into small bits it would only partially melt in the hot milk.  It turned the milk into a speckled, chunky mess.


I had an idea this morning that worked!  I used a cheese grater and ground half of a disk into a fine, sandy texture.  I heated half a cup of unsweetened rice drink, added the chocolate, and swirled it around over the heat.  It melted in nicely and turned into a rich, dark brown liquid.

Meanwhile, I brewed a dark batch of coffee in my French Press as hubby brewed decaf in his.  And, we heated up some coconut milk and rice milk.  When the coffee, chocolate, syrup and "milk" was ready we started making our cups of mocha.  We stirred together:  eight ounces of coffee and eight ounces of hot "milk", about two tablespoons of the liquid chocolate, about one tablespoon of vanilla syrup and a dash of cinnamon.  Wow!  It was so good!  It was at least as good as what we've had at the restaurant...maybe even better.  And, it didn't have the sandy texture it does at the restaurant.  The dash of cinnamon made it perfect.  We'll definitely be making this again!

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Good Food and Good Times

I've been taking pictures of things I want to blog about but haven't had time to create the posts.  Life has been super busy but I finally found some time today to load pictures onto my laptop.  So, now I can start catching up.

Our daughter officially moved to her apartment late this last week.  She was nervous about what is ahead and sad about leaving but, so far, it's all going really well.  We've been Skyping and that helps a lot.  She had several days of orientation events, meetings with professors, music theory testing, and other things to do.  She was very busy!  But, those few days were also a lot of fun for her.  She met some very nice people and starting making some great memories.  Yay!  Classes start next Monday.

The week before she left was filled with errands, gathering up things she'll need in her apartment, moving, setting up, working on her quilt and enjoying time together...as we always do...but it felt a little different.  One night, last weekend, we had an especially fun family evening.  We put together a healthy dinner of grilled Italian chicken sausage and mushrooms, roasted baby zucchini, steamed artichokes with Meyer lemons from our tree, and some tiny homegrown tomatoes.  It was simple but so delicious!


As a last minute addition to the meal, I pulled together some ingredients we had
on hand and made a pitcher of sangria.  It was soooo good!


I posted a recipe for it a few months ago.  You can find it HERE.  It's so simple and there really are
no rules.  It's fun to experiment with different ingredients.  While we enjoyed this pitcher full, 
we started dreaming up some new ideas...like a white wine with peaches.  Hmmmm?


We topped off our amazing meal and evening with a wonderful treat that we recently 
discovered at Trader Joe's.  It's a dark chocolate bar with caramel and black sea salt.  
It's out of this world delicious!  We ate the whole thing!


Somehow, special times with special people are even better with great food!