Chocolate: Easy Cooking, Great Eating (Cooksmart)

Rating:
Summary: Lip Smakin' Good
Review: Now if you ask me, and a lot of people interested in chocolate confections do now and again, this here chocolate recipe book is about the best you are ever going to find. If not the best, then certainly up there in the top 17 percent or there about. See, we Huckabees are fans of chocolate and depend on it for all the soothing comforts it has on offer. Especially Mama, who consumes at least a couple kilos of the stuff per week.

I give the figure in metric measurement because the Huckabees got weary of waiting on the United States to go ahead on and switch over to metrics back in the 70s. There was a little commotion and it looked like we was all going to eventually gear up and switch - but it never happened. The rest of the planet is on the same page and getting along just fine using a base-ten system, but we are still sending satellites up in to the wilds of outer space after building them with measurements such as "the width of three barley corns" and we send up a couple hundred thousand "furlongs." We got eleventy zillion dollar gizmos up there in outer space doing all sorts of things and they are built by technicians and rocket scientists and astrophysics' who use a measuring system that is long past its use by date.

How come we got to keep using such an outdated system when we are the vanguard of gizmo construction? Even the hapless Canadians made the switch and use metrics and if the Canadians can do it, anybody can do it. I don't mean no disrespect to Canada, but them folk ain't known for their scientific achievement (except for Bell's invention of the telephone, and Nesmith's invention of Basketball... and that robot arm thing on the space shuttle). Canadians are openly disinterested in hard sciences and spend their energies on different things - such as Hockey, socialized medicine, and the consumption of Kraft Dinner®. Every time we head on up there to see relations (hers, not mine!) we marvel at how comforting it is to drive our automobile to a metric speed limit rather than a limit established in archaic miles.

We usually drive along at a good clip and have us a good ole' time singing along to the CBC which we tune in on the car radio and when we get kind of restless we stop at a clean, well organized, and attractively festooned Canadian gasoline retail outlet and get us some bottles of belly wash and a few more kilograms of chocolate for Mama. Mama likes to snack on the stuff as we drive on Canadian roadways because it gives her comfort among the chaos of odd Canadian traffic regulations. I got to hand it to the Canadians, they took the plunge and did away with imperial measurement years ago and left the United States in the dust. We still buy and sell chunks of chocolate products measured in units based on units such as "a third of a score of river pebbles, finely rounded and smooth" or "a measure equal to the circumference of a willow sapling at three Springs and a Summer." Come on people, its time to go ahead on and stop using the old outdated imperial system so we can eat chunks of chocolate measured like folk in other nations do. This is getting kind of embarrassing.

Mama likes this cook book pretty good and likes to get it out and look at it and drool on herself thinking about eating all the stuff featured herein. She don't cook from it much because it is a lot easier to get in the pickup and head down the road to Chester's Bulk Larder out on Route 8 and get her a half dozen pounds (or around three kilograms) of chocolate and come back and feed her face here at the double wide trailer. She suggests you get this book, and I usually go along with what she has to say.