Especially when dieting in the winter, having a bit of something warm, sweet, and comforting as a treat can sometimes be the difference in sticking to your dietary guns and throwing in the towel. As a lover of chocolate, a mug of cocoa fills the bill for me and this recipe, based on unsweetened almond milk, is not only delicious, it’s low in calories and in carbohydrates. I’ve been a fan of unsweetened almond milk for years, using the vanilla version to enrich sugar free chai, as well.

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Couldn’t resist passing on the information in this blog post from Chef It Yourself about cooking a Mangalitsa pork neck roll. As readers of Mike’s blog know, he and I took a three-day seminar a few months back on the proper techniques for butchering and cooking Wooly Pigs, or Mangalitsa as they’re more properly called.

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An article appeared in our local bugle today that caught my eye.

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As many of you may know, Mike and I have been on a two-week jaunt through the Emerald Isle occasioned by his participation in a golf tournament in County Cork. A visit to Ireland means, for him, plenty of Jameson and Guinness (both of which he enjoyed in ample measure) and for me (really for us both, because he likes it, too) it means enjoying a pint of good Irish hard cider.

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Readers of this blog know that Mike and I have followed a low-carb way of eating and day-to-day living for about a quarter of a century now. We try to follow our own advice most of the time, with (admitted) dietary vacations thrown in for fun and psychosocial health. But even when we’re hewing pretty close to the straight and narrow, it’s nice now and again to treat ourselves to just a little indulgence, which at Casa Eades is often a small square or two of good dark chocolate. I try to keep a bit on hand, just for this purpose.

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Forgive my lengthy absence from the blog desk. As those of you who also read Mike’s blog know, I’ve been up to my eyeballs for the last month finishing a couple of major business projects and wearing my SB Choral Society President and soprano-in-the-chorus hats getting our Verdi Requiem behind us (which, as he’s already blogged about, was a smashing critical success, thank you very much) and as such all work on my blog got pushed to the back burner. Mea culpa!

Then before you could turn around and catch a breath, we were off on this trip to China.

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In the dining section of the NY Times last Wednesday, there was a somewhat alarming article by Kim Severson, titled: Showdown at the Coffee Shop (free but requires registration) detailing the entry of the new sweetener Truvia to the world of packet sweeteners.

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Our local newspaper carried an article a few days ago by the McClatchy News Service’s Steve Schmaedeke that caught my eye: A whiff of luxury: Take Le Whif of inhalable chocolate.

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Several of you have written or commented on the blogs asking how low carb our Thanksgiving dinner will be. The answer is…somewhat. While we try to hold the line where we can, from its inception, Thanksgiving has been a feasting holiday and day set aside to give thanks for the bounty we’ve been blessed to enjoy. So, enjoy we do, within reason.

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Friday’s Santa Barbara Newspress carried a front page article trumpeting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s signing of legislation that phases out the use of trans fats in commercially-prepared (but not pre-packaged) food–i.e., in restaurant and cafeteria foods. (I would love to link to the full article, but the SBNP makes its online service available only to paid subscribers, which I find very short sighted, but there it is.) I applaud the move to drive partially hydrogenated vegetable oils into gas tanks where they belong. In my opinion, these Franken Fats have no place in human nutrition.

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