Sentimental Hot Chocolate

As part of the extended short story "Native Foods," Diana lists a recipe for sentimental hot chocolate. Seemed like a good choice, especially considering whatever fresh hell awaited us for the next episode of Game of Thrones. I needed something sweet to end my weekend, and what better way to do that than whip up a pot of comforting hot chocolate?

Once upon a time I had melted a block of chocolate and learned the hard way that chocolate should be melted in a double boiler, so I knew what to do when I approached this hot chocolate recipe. In just a few minutes I had this rich, chocolatey sludge that I looked upon with pride. "Delicious," I thought, looking upon the chocolatey blob, "surely nothing can go wrong with the disproportionate chocolate-to-milk ratio I added to this recipe."

Throughout my brief cooking career I've found that sometimes you just gotta wing it. Back when I first started cooking seriously for myself, during my college years, I would carefully measure each ingredient. As I cooked the same recipes over and over, I realized that I didn't need to spend so much time measuring each and every single ingredient. A dash of this and a dash of that--cooking wasn't so hard, after all, even if everything wasn't perfect. So instead of fretting over, "well, how much IS two ounces of chocolate?" I just dumped half a bag in there. After all, to each  his own, right? What's too sweet for some isn't sweet enough for others.

True, I did end up sprinkling way more cinnamon on my hot chocolate than I thought I would:

Look at this pitiful excuse of a picture. Look at it. Someday I will master the art of taking beautiful hipster food pictures.

At the end of the day, though, everything usually ends up all right. After pouring too much raw chocolate into this concoction, I added more milk to even it out. I nervously smashed the cloud of  cinnamon into the hot chocolate, and you know what it added a nice touch.


Hot chocolate reminds me of many things. It reminds me of cold winters in Michigan as a child. It reminds me of a book I read once while living in Michigan, a historical fiction story about children living  on Mackinac Island whose father makes them hot chocolate (it could be Once on This Island by Gloria Whelan, I am uncertain), and it reminds me of winters at my relatives' cabins in the Rocky Mountains during the cold winter months. Although this recipe makes us sentimental for different reasons, there is no reason to believe that both are invalid. Thank you, Diana, for reminding me of the sentimental value of a good pot of real hot chocolate.