Ah, truffles. Chocolate balls of tasty goodness. A couple months back, one of my Flickr contacts introduced me to a recipe for making them myself. And I did. And then I did some more. Mmm, truffles. Want some? You should make your own!

To do it exactly the way I do, you'll need:

1/2 cup heavy cream
1 cup (by volume) Ghirardelli 60% chocolate chips (less than 1 package)
Whatever you're adding to it, for example:
Vanilla to taste (I probably use about a tablespoon or so, I think the original recipe called for like a teaspoon... I do love me some 'nilla)
Zest of 1 orange

Find the smallest thing you can that'll work on the stove and hold a liquid well. We've got a couple of tiny sauce pots I use. Pour in your cream and zest the orange into the cream. Bring the mixture to a simmer, using a spatula (or whatever) to stir every few minutes. Make sure you scrape the sides and bottom. It's really easy to burn the cream if you ignore it. And that's not good.

But, anyway, once you've got it at a simmer, pull it off the heat and let it sit for an hour. This gives the orange a chance to really infuse the cream. Find something to do for 50 minutes. TV's good, as is laundry, or maybe even cooking and eating something else.

Alright, take your cup of chocolate chips and finely chop them in a food processor, blade coffee grinder, or whatever else works. The finer, the better, but you don't have to go crazy. Put the chocolate in a mixing bowl. I use a pyrex bowl, because I'm sure I'm screwing something up somewhere and end up needing to add more heat to the system to get it all to melt. More on this later.

Alright... now it should have been about an hour. Strain the orange zest from the cream and put the cream back on the heat. You'll want to bring it up to a simmer again.

Go ahead and add the vanilla to the chocolate at this point. You don't need to mix it in, just pour it in so you don't forget it like I always do. Alright... cream's simmering? Great! Pour it slowly over the chocolate. You'll want good coverage over the chocolate. Let it sit for about 5 minutes like that. No mixing. Just let it sit. Eat a cookie or something.

Alright, it's been five minutes? Great. Take that spatula you've been using to stir the cream (you were doing that, right?) and start stirring your mixture. Once you get it as smooth and combined as you can (because like I said, I can't get it completely smooth and melted as is), go ahead and put your bowl right on the stove so you can stir over heat. This way, you can finish melting the chocolate.

In the end, you should have a smooth chocolate cream goodness there in the bowl. This stuff is called "ganache." You can use it as a thin chocolate frosting on cakes or whatever. Works well as a cookie topping, too. I think I'm going to try it on the kolaches at some point here, just to see how that works. Alright enough about the ganache.

Take your bowl and put it on the counter. Come back after a while, when it's cooled to room temperature. Probably a good half an hour. Stick it in the fridge for an hour.

Time for more laundry. Those socks nice and fluffy? Not too stuck to the shirts? Great. I've got some more on the floor in the corner, if you want. At this point, you'll probably need to feed the cats, too. They're lonely, and you keep shunning them because they're bothering you and you're wearing entirely too nice of clothes for cooking.

I did say you're doing it like me, right?

Alright, pull your bowl back out of the fridge, grab a dish you can put the finished truffles in and a plate you can put your topping on (if you want one, like finely chopped nuts, cocoa, or something else if you're creative enough). Oh, and clean your hands. You can do everything else so far in this recipe without touching the food, but that stops now (I clean my hands anyway, but with all that laundry and cat-attention, I need to do it again).

Use a teaspoon, scoop out a small amount of chocolate goodness, and roll it into a ball in your hands. Now, roll it in the toppping. Finally, put it on the dish. I use glass for the dish (more pyrex goodness), but the original recipe calls for parchment. I don't have parchment. Repeat about 30 times. And you're done! Mmm... that's good truffles...

Wait, what? There's more?

Great! Okay, finally, cover your dish and stick it in the fridge overnight. This is the hardest part. Because you do ALL THAT WORK for NO payout. You have to wait until the next day. This is why I kept saying to do things like "cook a meal" and "eat a cookie." So I suppose at this point, you should go ahead and consume the whiskey. That's from Woot's "Happy Snacking," but I suppose I do have whiskey and can try adding this step. Heck, you could probably do whiskey truffles... just use whiskey instead of vanilla and no orange. Shortens the whole thing by about an hour and a half, or about one full load of laundry.

Alright, good night. It's time for bed.

Good morning! Wasn't that a refreshing night's sleep? No? Stayed up all night dreaming of truffles, huh? Yeah, happens to the best of us. Your truffles should be good now, though. So go ahead and try one. Mmm, that's good truffle.

So, I'm in Denver.  It all started about a month back, when one of my friends from Flickr decided to crash the local meet-up.  During that, she made the suggestion that I go crash one of her local meet-ups.  So, we coordinated, I requested some time off work, and now I'm in Denver.

I'm not from Denver, I don't know Denver.  The whole of my experience with Denver before this weekend was a layover in the airport.  And that's as far as I got, too -- the airport.  I asked a co-worker who used to live here what the cool places to be were, he basically said "The 16th Street Mall.  Everything's there."  Okay, fair enough.  I fully expect to spend entirely too long walking up and down the mall the next couple days.

But, he didn't suggest any good breakfast joints, so I turned to the Internet. I found a list of a score of places, most of which seemed to focus on brunch or were too far to walk to.  But there were a couple on there that sounded interesting and close.  One of them was my breakfast stop this morning: The Delectable Egg.

It's definitely a local joint, located in some older building.  It's surrounded by other food joints and a tattoo parlor, and it's only a couple blocks from 16th Street.  Walking in, I notice it's very quiet for 8:00 on a Saturday morning.  A couple here, a man there, not really too many people.  Maybe that's just the kind of place Denver is -- everybody's a night owl.  Photographs and other art line the brick walls, making it a gallery in addition to an eatery.

I was seated, then the waiter greeted me with a carafe of water.  Considering I'd been walking for a good 20 minutes to get there (I wandered a bit), this was welcomed.  I then took to the menu.  Many standard things: french toast, omelettes, waffles; you know, all the standard breakfast fare.  There were some lunch items, too (I think there was a burgers section, but I wanted breakfast, so I didn't pay too much attention to it).

I ended up choosing the California Benedict.  It's like standard eggs Benedict, except that the ham is replaced with tomato and spinach, and they add some avocado slices to it.  It also came with potatoes, just the standard cut-up-and-pan-fry kind.  So I set in to wait for my food.  Drank some more water, played around with a self-portrait, admired the art on the walls, and just kind of waited.  Eventually, the waiter comes to tell me that they had a mix-up in the kitchen and that it would be just a little while longer.  That's fine, everyone gets to make mistakes some times.

A few minutes later, I'm presented with a plate.

The food was good.  The potatoes could have used a little more seasoning, but other than that everything was great.  The tomatoes were fresh, the hollandaise pulled all the flavors together.  After I was mostly done with the eggs side, I moved the potatoes in with the sauce and such to give them a little more flavor.

It was a decent meal for a decent price.  I'd probably go back, but I'm not scheduling a return tomorrow.