MY OWN CACAO INITIATION
I ♥️ CHOCOLATE
My passion for chocolate runs deep! As a culinary instructor who’s been teaching nutritionally-minded cooking classes for almost a decade and a half, I've clearly loved sharing and inspiring my students with my passion for food and creating magic in the kitchen. Having spent much of my culinary career focused on nutrient-rich, healing foods, herbalism, and superfoods, learning all about raw chocolate and to work with it as one of the most treasured ingredients in my kitchen was transformative. I truly believe in its power to heal and foster well-being in the body as well as joy in the heart.
It’s no secret that chocolate is one of the most beloved foods on the planet, and personally, I believe that being able to eat it is one reason that life is worth living! This book is meant to inform you of all you need to know to get the most out of your chocolate consumption, as you craft and create treats, snacks, elixirs, and more.
Right now, if you were to travel the globe, you'd find some sort of chocolate product for sale in nearly every little corner shop. Unfortunately, most of this chocolate isn’t very good quality and is usually laden with refined sugar and other sketchy, highly processed ingredients that don't support optimal health. Fortunately, there's a growing movement of people growing, processing, and utilizing this powerful plant medicine in a way that’s very different than what became the norm throughout the last century.
Chocolate no longer has to be just a candy, a dessert, or an indulgence. It can be used daily in its unadulterated form as a potent and nutritive superfood to support health. It can also be used as a sacred healing medicine for rituals and special ceremonies on a daily basis to help cultivate our inner joy, connection, and presence. This divine and delicious substance coming from the plant theobroma cacao, which means "food of the gods," can help.
MY INITIATION INTO THE WORLD OF CHOCANANDA
Grinding cacao beans on a stone metate, the traditional way, in Oaxaca, Mexico.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t know a single woman who doesn’t adore chocolate. I’m not any different, and for most of my adult life, I’ve had a drawer in my home designated as the “chocolate drawer” whose contents I indulged in almost daily. I always appreciated the different nuances of taste that I enjoyed from bars made from beans sourced from all around the world, and I especially loved dark chocolate. Having been focused on the culinary arts since a teenager, I definitely considered myself an aficionado of sorts, and over the years, I’d sampled dozens of different artisan chocolates from around the world. But nothing had prepared me for the first experience I had with unprocessed, “raw” chocolate.
One day, a new friend of mine pulled out an unlabeled gold-wrapped chocolate bar and offered me a few squares. He explained to me that they grew cacao on the farm that he’d been living on in Kauai and that he'd “made” this chocolate from those beans. I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant by that, but I was immediately compelled by what I tasted. It wasn’t just the taste sensation: as odd as it might sound to you, the energy I felt from this chocolate was entirely different from any chocolate that I'd eaten before. I wasn’t sure at that time what exactly was going on, all I knew was that I wanted more of this incredible, handmade chocolate!
Soon after, the same friend took me for my inaugural visit to Erewhon Grocery store in Los Angeles. If you’ve never been to this place before, consider making a point of visiting next time you are in LA! There is no doubt that under its roof lies a mind-blowing array of some of the highest-quality foods on this planet. I'd been introduced just recently to the magical creations of a company called Living Libations, so when I saw some of their festive-looking homemade bars for sale there, I couldn’t help but purchase one out of curiosity, even though it was more expensive than any bar of chocolate than I’d ever bought before.
One morning later that week, back at home in the Bay Area, I decided to open up the bar for a little mid-morning taste. I soon found myself eating the entire 100-gram bar at once! Now, eating a bar of chocolate all at once isn’t something that I’d never done before, but once I'd consumed this one in entirety, it became apparent pretty swiftly that something about this bar was a bit different. Having consumed various plant medicines before, I felt aware that there was a significant dose of a plant medicine of sorts at work on me now.
I laid down on a big sheepskin rug as the feelings intensified. I felt thankful that the intensity felt positive rather than simply overwhelming, and soon I felt a wave of something like bliss wash through me. I began laughing and rolling around on the floor in the sunshine, giggling. It felt exciting and thrilling. My heart was beating rapidly and felt like it was bursting open. I wasn’t sure what exactly what had come over me in this private giggle ceremony, but it certainly felt like my first official meeting with the Spirit of Cacao. I was enchanted by this joyful medicine that she apparently had to offer, what I now call “Chocananda.”
To say my life was changed that day isn’t exactly an understatement. It was. My friend from Hawaii began to teach me how to “make chocolate,” and I began to research and learn more about where my the ingredients for this chocolate came from. I had never considered these things before and really had no understanding of what chocolate bars contained beyond the abstract understanding I had of the ingredients listed on the back of the wrapper.
At the time, I was teaching nutritionally-minded cooking classes geared towards those who desired to use food as a tool to create radiant health. Healthy chocolate as a subject fit in perfectly, and we began to teach a class called Cosmic Raw Chocolate Making 101. This series of posts about chocolate has grown from my many experiences with cacao since then, the knowledge I’ve gained, and the recipes that I’ve made over and over. I love this magical bean more than ever and feel fortunate every day that I get to procure and consume the highest quality cacao products on this planet. I hope you do too!
❤ Want to try the magical and potent Bliss Like This Ecstatic and Vanilla Vibhutti raw chocolate bars from Living Libations and become utterly enchanted by cacao like I was? They're pricey, but are powerful formulations and have a unique texture because they're made by grinding the whole cacao beans by hand. When you have a look here, peruse the many other awe-inspiring offerings from this esteemed company. Their products are hands down some of my absolute favorite skin, body, and dental care on the planet! The entire site is full of poetry and the endlessly inspiring expertise of the incredibly wise and well-researched beauty goddess Nadine Artemis and her Prince Charming husband Ron.
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