Once upon a time, I was perfectly happy with a bag of M&M's.
Well, actually, I was perfectly depressed with a (family-sized) bag of M&M's, but it wasn't the candy's fault. I thought the candy was just great.
I'm not depressed anymore, though. And decades of self-indulgence have now reduced me to ... the gourmet aisle. There really is a difference between passable chocolate and excellent chocolate, and since all of it has a hell of a lot of calories, I save my chocolate calories, for the most part, for the premium stuff.
Occasionally I can be bamboozled into trying something that I suspect will be marginal. Usually when I am both physically hungry and mentally fed up. Recently, that was the new "all chocolate" Snickers bar. Now, an original Snickers bar is a fine thing. The saltiness of the peanuts undercuts the sweetness and gives you that feeling of virtue, like "peanuts! protein!" Right?
I've tried a couple of the variations they've attempted, and nothing has beat the original. This new thing didn't either. It had milk chocolate over "chocolate" caramel with "chocolate" nougat. Unfortunately the caramel and nougat just tasted like a whole lot of sugar. I ate it: but I won't eat it again.
A much more successful recent experiment was a dark-chocolate "Awesome Walnut Square Bar" from See's. http://www.sees.com/prod.cfm/Candy_Bars/Awesome_Walnut_Square_Bars
I'd definitely eat that again. In fact, I'm pretty sure I will eat that again.
The best mass-market chocolate I've found, and the one I generally turn to when I want a midafternoon snack of villainy, is the Milky Way Midnight. Milky Way has always been one of my favorites, but when they came out with the Midnight I was a happy woman. The dark chocolate coating actually tastes of dark chocolate. Not the waxy bark of Reese's dark peanut-butter cup, but real well-tempered chocolate.
It's a small bar and it has fewer calories than even the mini chocolate muffin at Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. If you have to stoop to villainy, this is good villainy to stoop to. And speaking of coffee ...
I work in an office and they provide us with coffee. I am grateful for this, as I do have an addiction; without a cup of coffee by 11:00 a.m., I have a withdrawal headache that is no joke. The bedbug in this blessing is that they have those coffee pod things. Which are incredibly wasteful, for one thing. And incredibly inconsistent.
I never know from one week to the next which "flavors" will turn up in the breakroom, and there are only a couple of them that I can tolerate without adding sugar, which is NOT something I want to routinely do.
These coffees are thin, acidic, and mean. I seriously enjoy Nescafé Clasico freeze-dried instant coffee more: it's got a surprisingly rich flavor (and a whole jar costs about the same as one packet of Starbucks Via).
I used to walk to work past an array of coffee shops, which naturally (HA!) meant that I got a fresh misto or latte almost every day. I now restrict myself to one latte per week, but I still have to do something about all those other days. As laughable as it seems, I plan to get a jar of Nescafé to stash in my desk drawer.
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