Jim, I've been starin' at three big Hot Cherries for days now...I wish they'd start to turn red! I think I'll probably be growin' these again next year, too. Thanks again, man! Redshirt, I got most of my hot seeds from the good folks here. Bill hooked me up with three kinds of hot, Jim hooked me up with the Hot Cherries for the Cherry Bombs, and another fellow, Zander, traded me some Trinidad Scorpion seeds. One of my buddies shared his Chocolate Hab seeds with me last year, and so I'm growing from my own seed stock now. He also gave me a Black Pearl this year, as well as the seed for a Naga Morich from Neil at the Hippy Seed Company. Stick around, and I'm sure you'll score some seeds ;-) Josh

Hi Silvia, so glad you found your way back :-) My mouth always gets watery and could devour most all of your posted pics! Looks like you captured the Sun's Gold for a real Sweet Treat in a celestial blue pleated plate! ;-) I'll have to raid my Santas so the grape can make it's last stand for a respectable picture to keep up with you for the moment ;-). The only nice thing about this cold here is that if the tomatoes are kept above freezing, they can last so long on the plants ... they don't have top be picked every day as long as they are protected from birds and squirrels (!!!) I bet your transplants are quite big by now, and that's a nice cherry tomato trick to have some munching maters to fill in the gap. I'd like to do that but everything is tied up and intertwined, and since I'm also working with seedlings each day. I'm afraid to clean up little by little with the mold spores that will go flying in my hair and clothes if I try to separate the plants. Suddenly I'm hungry! Cheer! PC

>>A "snobbing up" mistake may be using 70% or 100% cacao if the recipe was developed using 55%-60%. The flavor could be all "wrong">> Actually, it's not the flavor profile you need to worry about. It's the issue that using a high-number chocolate means there's more cacao solids in the chocolate, so it may react differently, especially in baking. Try making a Hershey's (or similar) recipe from 40 yrs ago with an 85% chocolate, and a cake could end up with a dry texture and insufficient rise. The SF Bay Area has become a hotbed of fine artisanal chocolates. Many do use soy lecithin and we have no problems with this. Tcho, Chocolatier Blue, La Foret (whose chocolates are used at The French Laundry in the Napa Valley, one of the four Northern CA restaurants with 3 Michelin stars), Recchiuti (our personal favorite), all use lecithin in some of their chocolate bars. If you want "pure" chocolate, one of the finest in the world is by Claudio Corallo. Alegio Chocolate sells his, and their own namesake line created by Enric Rovira, in a limited number of retail outlets worldwide. Corallo is widely known within the industry as one of the most difficult and brilliant chocolatiers. He is an OCD purist who not only grows heirloom cacao beans, but has the tiny inner "sprout" inside the cacao bean removed BY HAND - he feels it makes the chocolate bitter, the same way a green sprout will make a garlic clove bitter. Most of his own beans he rejects, which are then immediately purchased by high-end producers for their own artisanal chocolates. Corallo's chocolates have real "terroir", the same way fine wines do. For those who love bittersweet and high-cacao chocolates - which not all do, nothing wrong with that - Corallo's chocolates must be tasted to be believed. Alegio, in their Berkeley, CA location, does an hour-long chocolate tasting of Corallo chocolates (you can view part of his video at the link below, on their website, which illustrates Corallo's insistence upon quality and purity). They take you, step by step, from the lower cacao % to the higher %, with a taste half-way of a high-end bittersweet from a high-volume mfg (I'm guessing it was Lindt) so you can compare how both vanilla and salt alter the taste of chocolate even more than sugar does. My DH and I have been eating artisanal/high-end chocolates for forty years, but there is nothing quite like Corallo. A truly unique product - once you do this tasting, you will never look at chocolate the same way again. It doesn't "ruin" you for other chocolates, but it makes you aware of how 99.9% of chocolate flavors are manipulated to produce specific flavor profiles. However, this is not cooking chocolate. You cannot just pop Corallo chocolate into a recipe and expect everyone will love it. I wouldn't be certain most recipes would come out properly. Even the texture of his chocolate is different. One of the difficulties in knowing what chocolate to use in today's vs yesterday's recipes is that there are no standards for bittersweet. It didn't exist at the time the chocolate classifications were established at the FDA, so almost anything can be called bittersweet. Bittersweet is an American invention; the Europeans make dark sweet chocolate. A few European chocolatiers have gotten on the "bittersweet" bandwagon but it is still much less popular than in the U.S. Although "generally" bittersweet has a third or less sugar by weight, realistically we have sometimes encountered bittersweet that is almost indistinguishable from European dark sweet, simply because there is no legal classification for it. We have traveled quite a bit around the West since retiring, and almost without exception, we have found that the bittersweet chocolates we love in the Bay Area, really are not popular elsewhere. A notable exception was Kakawa Chocolate House, 1050 East Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM - not their chocolates, which were awful, but their cacao drinks, which are Mayan/Incan in style: served hot, non-sugared, mostly non-dairy. It's as far from Hershey's and Nestle's as one can get. Remarkable stuff; makes you realize why for hundreds of years this type of chocolate drink was a substitute for coffee. Bitter, shockingly intense, it's like drinking espresso. Here is a link that might be useful: BBC video on Claudio Corallo (10 min)

I don't get a box that says "location" with a right click. I tried properties and got a URL, but only got the above. I have Windows 8, of course, the invention of the devil. If I click Image, I get this... [URL=http://s18.photobucket.com/user/annie1992/media/Food/IMG_1755.jpg.html][IMG]http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b110/annie1992/Food/IMG_1755.jpg[/IMG][/URL] So, as usual, I learned nothing except that my backspace key sticks, LOL. Annie