Listen to the Rain

A long while ago, after I had finished Fifty Weeks, Fifty Curries and was thinking about what to do next when I found an article on the internet entitled How the Mast Brothers fooled the world into paying $10 a bar for crappy hipster chocolate. It's pretty much as the article states, and when searching for the Mast Brothers, it's still near the top of the Google search results. Chocolate, I thought. That led to me to Raaka and to the idea of doing Darker than Black as a series to replace Fifty Weeks, Fifty Curries, and I always had in mind that I would finish with a Mast Brothers bar. And now, the time has come.
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​This is the second chocolate we bought after our trip to Seattle--you can read about the first one here, as well as the trip. It took us a while to get around to it for various reasons, but to all things there is a season.
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Normally I don't like doing Raaka twice in a row, but I've been sitting on this green-tea-flavored bar for a while and this weekend was the perfect time to eat it. Yesterday, I went along to schoolpsychnerd's school to help her with the Sports Day even that she was helping to organize. schoolpsychnerd is the sponsor of the Anime Club, and she got together with the sponsor of the Japanese Club to put together a competition between the two groups including some traditional Sports Day events--the relay race, the clothing relay (where each relay-racer has to add an additional item of clothing before running), the three-legged race, the ōdama race (rolling a giant ball), the samurai battle (several students pick up another student, and each riding student tries to snatch a headband from the head of the other team's samurai), a tug-of-war, and so on. They couldn't do the tire retrieval game (pile of tires, the team that gets the most wins), or the centipede race (a group of students holding onto each other that can only advance by the student at the back crawling over the backs of the others to the front) due to safety concerns and Americans being much more likely to sue than Japanese people.
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This has been sitting in our fridge for a while after we bought it when melishus_b was in town. There's a candy store where people can make their own "candy bento," by which they mean taking several pre-packaged boxes of candy and putting them in a box together. Without rice, of course. They didn't even try to make some kind of sweetened coconut rice.

I was wearing my usual clothing, which is to say that I looked like a refugee from some kind of post-apocalyptic enclave that has finally fallen to the raiders and whose inhabitants had been forced to flee into the wastes, and standing near a display while schoolpsychnerd bought these caramels. A woman walked up to the table and picked up a box, and then said to me that the candy looked lemon-flavored. I smiled, and then she asked, "Are these lemon-flavored?" I informed her that I did not work there and she apologized and went to find someone who did. This isn't the first time I've been confused for an employee, but usually it's at a particular kind of clothing store, not a brightly-lit candy store in the same building as Nordstrom.
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​Originally I was going to skip this week, because it's been a long day and I didn't think we had any chocolate in the queue other than Raaka, which I try not to do too much of in a row. But then I remembered that we'll be gone the next two weekends and found one extra chocolate bar buried under the others, so I changed my mind and here we are!

Nothing else to say this week. Let's talk about chocolate
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Originally I was tempted to end Darker than Black on week 50, since since was when we ended Fifty Weeks, Fifty Curries, and since I have another food project planned waiting in the wings. Then I decided that we'd keep going for a while longer, as long as I could find more chocolate and these reviews didn't become too much of the same. Having decided to continue, I was originally planning to do the Taza Wicked Dark 95% Dark Stone-Ground Chocolate that my parents gave me for my birthday when they came into the city to celebrate with me last weekend, but as that link shows, we've already written about it! We get a lot of Raaka chocolate since we're signed up to a subscription service and most of it we just eat, but we don't really have any other chocolate I could write about in the house.

Fortunately, this chocolate was worth writing about.
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I mentioned the trip that schoolpsychnerd and I went to visit my parents on the last Darker than Black post, but I didn't mention that part of the trip was celebrating her birthday a week early. They sent us home with presents, a card, and a parting word that she could wait to open them or open them right away, as she preferred. And as is tradition, they sent us away with chocolate. Since schoolpsychnerd waited to open her presents, I waited until after her birthday to eat this.
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I've occasionally seen fancy food being marketed as made with genmaicha, or "Genmaicha Brown Rice Tea" (see also Panko Bread Crumbs or ATM Machine--玄米茶 is literally "brown rice tea"), and it always makes me laugh. Genmaicha is upper-end working class food, a way for people to stretch out their supplies of tea in the post-war period when shortages were common. But just like with sushi rice, it turned out that he additives were pretty tasty and improved the whole product, and so it's still sold to this day. Including at the Persian grocery store in Andersonville, which is why we currently have half a bag of genmaicha in our tea cupboard.
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​I will warn you now, dear reader, that this is my most biased review yet. How could it not be? I've been eating See's marzipan dark chocolates for almost as long as I can remember. My grandparents always gave boxes to me and my father at birthdays and holidays, and then my father continued the tradition whenever he went west to visit them, and I'm sure that should I have children they will also be receiving boxes of See's from me on appropriate events.

I mostly hate #brands and I follow See's on Facebook, such is the depth of my love.
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Apparently I'm starting some kind of sea salt-themed section in Darker than Black. We got a Raaka Pink Sea Salt in our latest chocolate shipment, but we already did that a year ago. There's another sea salt-themed bar waiting as well, but as I was looking through the pile of dark chocolate to see what there was to do, I decided on this one since it was a present. Thanks to topher.elderkin for providing it!
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Originally, I was just going to skip this week. Then I was going to use some candy that we had gotten in our Japanese candy shipment that didn't have any chametz in it, but did have mochi and strawberry and looked like it would be a pink explosion. And then, as we were walking by a display of Passover goods in Whole Foods, I saw these. Chocolate? Yes. Seasonably appropriate? Yes. Worth spending an entry on?

C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER.
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This is going to be a shorter post because we've both had a lot to do today, but I didn't want to go another week without trying more chocolate! The chocolate is piling up faster than we can eat through it. Pretty soon, schoolpsychnerd's spring break is coming up and I took several days off to coincide with it, so we might do some Darker than Black supplementals during that week to make our way through the excess. Or we might just decide to start eating some of the chocolate. Either way, we'll definitely use our days off to eat dark chocolate. Just like we use our workdays.
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