Last month I made Diane Duane’s Braunekuchen and Joanne Chang’s split-pea soup. The Braunekuchen recipe says they get better if kept in a sealed container for a few weeks; I ate the last two earlier this week, but honestly did not notice any change in flavor or texture. I also took two servings of leftover split-pea soup out of the freezer, and found that it held up quite well (although the peas themselves lost whatever remaining structure they may have had); adding a squirt of fresh lemon juice to the soup pepped up the flavor quite nicely.

On to the chocolate. A few weeks ago, I noticed a new brand of chocolate bar in the cheese department of my local Whole Foods. It’s from the Barcelona-based Cacao Sampaka, and it’s labeled “Tableta de chocolate y flor de sal de Ibiza” in Spanish and “Tablet of chocolate and flower salt of Ibiza” in almost-English. (Someone should tell them that in English we usually use the French term fleur de sel for this particular sort of sea salt, but for most people it’s unlikely to be meaningful no matter how they write it.) It comes in a brown rectangular box, net weight 100 g, which contains two chocolate “tablets” of 50 g each. The serving size is listed as “four unities 25 g”, which is clearly erroneous, and I think under even the current FDA rules it should be listed as 50 g. In any event, it has a very lovely taste reminiscent of salt caramel (unless you’re my colleague Sue, who thinks it would have a very lovely taste were it not for the salt). A bit pricey at 9 cents a gram, but still less than half as expensive as my all-time favorite, Rogue Chocolatier’s “Silvestre 75%”.