The Munchies Blog

A while ago, I had sent off a food parcel. When I returned from two weeks in Sweden last Thursday, I was quite surprised to see that it had somehow found its way back — in a new wrapping and filled with lots of goodies from England :) Thanks a lot, Katrin!

I managed to forget my camera’s battery and the compact flash card in Sweden, so this blog entry has to survive without any pictures. Sorry, folks!

The parcel contained

• A small bag of Hearty’s salted soy nuts.
• A cranberry and macadamia bar made by Eat Natural.
  
• Three small bars of Green&Black’s organic chocolate: Milk, White and Maya Gold.
• A bag of Organic Bombay Mix.
• A package of Desert Cajun Rub “proudly hand-made in Australia” by Screaming Seeds Spice Co.
• 2 vanilla pods in a very nice silver tube.
• A book with chocolate recipes, apparently from a series called “cook specials” by Oil&Vinegar (which is a shop in Bath, if I remember correctly).
• An organic almond biscotti (or whatever the proper singular form is) “made for Caffè Nero”, a café in Bath that I’ve heard mentioned once or twice or maybe a few more times…
• And, last but not least, a pencil sharpener with a wind-up flower (the head can rotate) which has removable eraser leaves. Or something. I guess I’ll have to take a picture of this as soon as I’ve got a working camera…

So far, I’ve tried the soy nuts (nice but a bit weird) and the cranberry and macadamia bar (ok for a granola bar, but somehow not quite my taste). But the biscotti thingy is definitely in danger now ;)

Yay for food parcels, especially those that also come with toys!

I’d seen a biscotti recipe on Cooking for Engineers a while ago, but I didn’t feel like trying it out. One problem is that it’s difficult to get hold of untreated oranges here, and in addition to that I’m not too fond of aniseed. When I stumbled over a recipe for Chocolate Biscotti a few days ago, I decided to give it a try. “Everything’s good if it’s made of chocolate”, after all ;)

I followed the recipe, with one exception: I didn’t have much time when I made them, so I baked the slices standing upright, thus saving the “flip slices over and bake for another 20 minutes” step. The biscotti were fairly nice, but I think I made the slices too thick (about 1.5 cm, should be 1 cm). As I used the food processor to mix the dough, I might have overmixed it a bit (I hadn’t seen the warning about that on Cooking for Engineers until it was too late). I’m definitely going to make them again, but then I’ll add almonds or walnuts to the dough. Chocolate is nice, but the biscotti would be even better with a bit of texture variation, I think.