W&P: Chapter 1 - Recipe 1 - Chocolate Vodka

Book:  War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Music:  The Counting Crows - This Desert Life
Recipe:  Chocolate Vodka

Chocolate Vodka

Ingredients:

1 Bottle Vodka

2 Bars Dark Chocolate - Shaved (I dumped my bars into a food processor - worked like a charm)

Heat a pan of water almost to boiling.  Place the vodka bottle in the water and add shaved chocolate until the vodka cannot absorb any more.

Easy?  Here's some good advice if you want to avoid my mistakes:

First - Don't buy cheap vodka.  Smirnoff burns.  I know what you're thinking, why waste expensive vodka by putting some shit in it?  Answer:  this is a sipping drink.   Nobody sips Smirnoff.  Well, nobody should.

Second - Use a funnel, but don't put it into the bottle while the bottle is heating.  This will heat your funnel, make your chocolate melt and clump,  and clog up the whole works.  Toothpicks are useless in solving this dilemma.

Third - Don't leave your food processor cup closer than 7 inches (any closer is reasonably safe for the cup, but not for the chocolate) to the warm pan.

Fourth - Don't attempt to make this drink when you have just had a one-sided argument with the voice mail left by your health insurance company, when the groceries for your Sci-Fi movie night have not been delivered on time, or when your guests are arriving, you have nothing to feed them, and you're up to your elbows in clumpy, half-melted chocolate trying to force it down the neck of a Smirnoff bottle with your bare hands.

My kitchen looked a bit like the dwelling place of monkeys with poo flung on the walls.  

Hindsight is 20/20 - Next time - I will pour the vodka into a double boiler (or rig one with a glass bowl - I don't have a real double boiler), upend the food processor bowl simply and efficiently over the vodka, stir it, cool it, then use the funnel to get the vodka back into the bottle. 

The sci-fi night crowd politely sipped ("I'm going to have to shoot this," said Jay [whose proposed pseudonym "Biscuit" I had to overrule]) their chocolate vodka, grimaced on the sly, and this (completely unconfirmed) advice was passed along to me, which I will now share with you:

On using Smirnoff in an emergency - running it twice through a Britta filter (so "they" say) will remove the offensive afterburn.

So much for the recipe; on to the book... I haven't started it yet.  I will be reading the first lines of it before bed tonight.  Preliminary thoughts?  It's long.  My students would say, "that looks thick, Miss!"

So much for the book;  now on to the music.  I have been promised, when I make my first real recipe, that there will be Russian music to accompany it.  I believe Tchaikovsky was mentioned.  For now, don't you just love the Counting Crows?