Choco-Therapy

This was my lunch.

It was a mad, mad day. Rushing from appointment to appointment… phonecalls… emails… faxes… heavy traffic… scarce parking lots… frayed nerves… diminished levels of patience…

And… low blood-sugar levels. There just hadn’t been time for breakfast… or lunch for that matter.

And so by 3pm, Ms Stomach refused to be cold-shouldered any further. She grumbled, rumbled and growled - - all petulant at having been ignored for the large part of the day. How dare she be deprived of sustenance! Enough was enough. She wanted compensation. She demanded a windfall of a sugar-rush to make up for the hours of deprivation.

I obliged with the first thing that crossed our path…

… a big chocolat noir fourre au praline (dark chocolate rocher praline).

We are talking about a seriously large praline. It is about 4 cm in diameter and height (or, if you prefer working in inches - that’s over 1½ inches). Certainly not your average-sized praline, that’s for sure.

It is a rich, decadent pairing of dark chocolate and hazelnuts.

A thin layer of smooth dark chocolate surrounds a soft, luscious hazelnut praline center.

It is luxuriously aromatic… richly smooth… decadently rich…

And… sugar-high-inducingly sweet.

I normally prefer a less sweet - ideally bittersweet - dark chocolate praline. But hunger does funny things to one’s sense of discernment. And guess what? I had not one, not even two… but three of these babies! Yes, I’m a glutton. I admit it. And especially so when it comes to all things chocolate.

These pralines from Carrefour are pretty good - - not stupendously great, but when starving and in desperate need of a rush of sugar, they sure hit the spot. And if you eat three at one go, they also cure all desire for chocolate (even in an unrepentant chocolate “addict” like yours truly) for, oh, probably at least 48 hours or so.

Still, there is nothing quite like chocolate to chase away all those stress demons.

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Maybe you've noticed : the blog updates have been rather non-existent the last couple of weeks. My apologies. But Life (yes, that thing called “real life” which intrudes rudely into my virtual world from time to time) has been crazily hectic, albeit also fascinatingly interesting and attention-absorbingly exciting (not that food-blogging isn’t all those things too, of course).

Diversions aside, there have been cooking and eating happening as well - - naturally. And so hopefully - - fingers crossed - - in between catching up on some sleep, I’ll get my act together, and have some of those posts up in the next couple of weeks.

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