Can We All Find our Soulmate Somewhere In Between Dodging Zombies at Halloween and Fruitcake at Christmas?

Seoulsearch LOL Your so funny!!! I remember a girl calling me around Christmas she said " come on over there is nobody home" I went to her house there was nobody home!!! I was not a happy camper!! LOL

Cocoa beans are actually seeds from the cocoa gourd/pod that grows on trees.



The beans/seeds are first dried, fermented and then smashed to extract the butter from them. The pulp is finely ground (the finer the better) and used to flavor the cocoa butter with the unique chocolate flavor. The more cocoa "powder" the stronger (and bitter) the flavor. I use a chocolate that is 54% cocoa solids and the rest is cocoa butter and sugar meaning that the one I use is bittersweet but considered "dark" chocolate.
The color is unique to the beans after fermentation....some are darker than others. The beans are subject to various processes to remove remaining butter and moisture including alkaline solutions making them "Dutch"....and some are "extra Dutch " which is what colors your Oreo cookies.

Is that pronounced "calibutt"?

I've wondered why dutch chocolate ice cream and powder has a better flavor than the the other chocolate powders and ice cream I've eaten. Do you have any idea?

hmm... speaking of chocolate, here is a NYC treat that also represents inter-flavor harmony:

When exactly was he not a nut? .


Respect for the man...

Hmm I don't know I don't ever eat oreo cookies. Interesting. Where is the cocoa grown the one you buy?
The only cocoa tree I've ever seen was in the Wintergarden glasshouse, and when I went there last season they had renovated it and it was GONE! I'd like to grow one but it will never be warm enough here. I have grown coffee plants though, (indoors) but not seen them fruit.

The amounts of various ingredients differ with each brand. And taste is highly subjective.

However....
There are those among us that have exceedingly sensitive taste and smell...they are referred to as super tasters. And because of genetics they are usually women.
Men usually are not as good at it as female tasters. Men dominate the culinary world. But every good chef has female staff who can do the job for him.

But some people have no ability to marry contrasting and coordinating tastes. Things like tarimisu (italian dessert) require a much more practiced sense of taste than most people own so most of what is out there focuses on texture rather than taste. It's a concert of the cocoa playing off the rum and coffee with the Marscapone filling playing the rich background chords for the melody lines. Same with the ladyfingers and filling playing off each other with textures.

Good stuff when done right but like chocolate mousse...there's a lot of crimes committed in its name.

Callebaut uses only fair trade cocoa from Africa. (On the label) meaning that it ensures the farmers get paid for the cocoa beans.
Hersheys uses South American cocoa beans...no clue whether it's fair trade or not and there's a LOT of "mischief " with South America coffee, cocoa, vanilla, rosewood, and just about every commodity they produce regularly. Cocoa tastes different from various trees and regions.

It's to the point that I'm surprised anything comes out of South America anymore.

I know what you mean about that. In the college of Agriculture we did advanced flavor/texture/appearance testing. I was at the top of the class in the academic but was not chosen for the competitions because my taste buds weren't quite as good as some.

It hurts that I can't eat tiramisu any more from this gluten sensitivity. That I can tell the difference in qualities . It's a tough job, but someone has to do it. 😄
Anyhow, food is certainly an art and a science.

Bananas and prawns

its easier to ship cocoa from Africa than south america? People just dont want to be responsible for deforesting the Amazon right?

Except Amazon which clearly does.

Callebaut factory is in Belgium and the Hershey factory is in the USA.
Chocolate trees are native to South America and have been imported to Africa. Chocolate trees are on farms. No different than a peach or apple orchard is a farm.

Chocolate farming is not deforestation anything....it's a tree that grows in tropical climates. Sure lots of weed cutting gets done...but it's a jungle out there.

The gold/mineral mining does more to destroy the forest than anything else. They often use open pit strip mining to extract the minerals. Then abandon the site instead of restoring the topsoil in place. France, Germany, UK and currently China has been responsible for most of the deforestation in Africa.

hmm

in the media its always said beef for the american market is responisble. I dont know if thats true because doesnt the US have its own cattle on feedlots on Texas. Why and how would they be buying up or appropriating amazon rainforest to slash and burn it down?

At one point it was hardwood timber, and then over in South east asia it was plantations of palm oil and rubber.

in nz it was deforestation for timber initially and then sheep and dairy farms, (exporting wool and butter to the UK) There was gold mining but after the goldrush ended it was decided no more to protect the forests up north. We even have endangered frogs and snails that people are trying to save.
Rivers have been harnessed for hydro but many cant support fish because dairy and industry are big polluters..discharging waste directly into rivers. Plus fertiliser runoff.

Some greedy big wigs sitting on a pile of money is responsible for carving up lands and destorying and extracting everything from it, never mind what ecosystems rely on that soil. You look at the royal family in their palaces and their appetite for luxury and think how one thing they like, like tuatua shellfish, becomes a crazy market and then next thing you know its all gone.

or say a monarch likes eating sugar, so next thing you know sugar is in everything to feed the demand. And slave labour is needed to grow and process the sugarcane. Or they like putting feathers in their hats and that ends up making native birds extinct.

I had a refuge from Congo area say she fled because of the war over mineral mining between mutinational corporations used to make cellphones.

Im one of those people who dont update an iphone all the time just for the sake of it. Because whatever we consume is made from something that someone has fought over to get.

Sugar from sugar cane is fermented and distilled to make ethanol that is blended with petrol for cars. Brazil has the largest ethanol plant. (They have the most sugar too)

Most industrialists are rather narrow focused on the end production and not the environment or any repercussions from the production....which is why there are the many conflicts around producing anything....and then with EVERYONE'S opinion getting blasted around on the internet with equal weight as those who truly know things we have an even bigger mess.

That's how your snail darter became more important than people.

well it wasnt only their opinion it was just someone cared about the native snails, so they tried a rescue operation and moved the snails out the way before the dam got put in.

I dont think they were saying snails were MORE important that people. just that they were important too.

God actually cares for the sparrows (tiny birds that are quite common) and God cares for us too apparently. What is good for Gods creation is also good for us right?

SNAIL LIVES MATTER!

Did you find your solemate @seoulsearch

Im sorry dont mean to derail your thread. I forget that your name kinda means you ARE looking for someone.

My cousin who lives in canada they a couple who cant have children/give birth as my cousins wife is adopted too and has some health complication that means she cant. Anyway the last I heard they were looking to adopt a child in Thailand. I dont know if they found one yet.

How about you is this something you want to do? Would you be ok or able do adopt a child as a sole parent, because some people do that. Or foster.

Do you have any brothers or sisters and are they adopted too? I have not really thought about it for myself but its interesting to meet people who are adopted and hear their life stories. Then again, as christians we are all adopted by God anyway.

I chose the name Seoulsearch because Seoul was my origin city (where I was adopted from,) and I've always felt I was on a lifelong search for who I am. I am always in between -- for example, being Asian raised among Caucasians. I'm never seen as a full member of either side of course, so I started out asking God, "Who am I?" from the time I could form words. And I feel that one of my callings is to help other people I meet along the way to help them find who they are as well.

So no, the name isn't implying that I'm necessarily looking for someone, though I'd be open to it if that's what God wants, and I could see how it could be interpreted as that.

Like any other area of life, adoption seems to be a very unique experience and outlook. I've met a lot of adoptees whose lives and opinions are very different than mine.

When I was married, I thought I might have 2 children by birth and 2 by adoption, but that didn't work out. I heard my ex didn't marry the girl he left me for, he married someone else, and apparently they had kids. I used to ask God why he was able to have a family but not me, but I've become more accepting of how life has turned out.

I've written several times on this forum about a relationship I once had in which I was basically a single parent to the children of an alcoholic, and that seems to be the parental role God once had for me. After all was said and done, his alcoholism took over and he lost his kids to another relative (the mother had passed away.)

I'm thankful for the things I learned during that time but also realized I wasn't cut out to be a single parent by choice (via adoption.) I had lots of single parent friends who tried to convince me to adopt but that's not what happened. I also could not have financially afforded an adoption by myself.

I used to think I might marry someone who had kids, but that's not what happened, and I feel I'm in a different stage of life now. My way of giving back is sponsoring kids through my former adoption agency. Some might say that's not enough but I feel it's what God leads me to do.

I have met some people who are very against adoption, which I know is a very personal subject. I understand that they might very well have similar feelings about adopting as I have about being a mother at this stage in life -- I just don't feel I'm cut out for it, and some of my friends are becoming young Grandma's. Now I like going and helping other people with their families when I can rather than thinking about having my own.

But you are right in that we are all adopted into God's family, and we would all be in a lot of trouble if God didn't believe in adoption either.