Chocolate Custard for Dad

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Aside from my sorbet post, which was my way of easing back into the writing frame of mind, it’s been some time since I posted on Green and Growing with anything resembling regularity and I’m sorry for that. Writing about herbs, discussing alternatives for health, wellness, food, and felines, and sharing recipes has been one of the things that I truly enjoy and take pride in.

 

But the last year has been unforgivably rough and the last six months were almost unbearable. My dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a week or so before Christmas and passed away on the last Monday of the Spring semester after withering away in home-hospice.

 

Watching the towering figure of my father fade, watching him fight and ultimately succumb has been the most devastating thing my family and I have gone through. Lately I’ve been spending time with my mom, making sure she’s taking care of herself, while dealing with various dramas and gearing up to tackle some of my father’s things.

 

During these last few weeks, I’ve rediscovered so many things that I feel have been integral facets of my being came from my father. Even things that are important to me but time and circumstance caused me to neglect these same things that helped me through some troubled times in my youth. My love of books and writing, my awe of fountain pens and looping, curvaceous, sinuous handwriting, my joy in photography with actual cameras, film, and developing– and my adoration of dark chocolate.

 

It’s funny how spending time in my dad’s office, sitting at his desk amidst his papers and massive toy collection (yet another thing I inherited from my pop) all these things came crashing back. Finding his cameras, I remembered that one of my first toys was my dad’s old kodak Brownie, the Hawkeye in beautiful, awful bakelight. Seeing his writing on everything from checkbooks he wrote in weeks before he was diagnosed to letters he wrote home when he was a 19 year-old serving in Korea, I realized my love for a certain kind of penmanship came from seeing my dad’s handwriting. I used to think he wrote like Thomas Jefferson.  One of dad’s early ambitions was to be a writer and it was by way of my father’s bookcase that I stumbled across Middle Earth.

 

And dad was the first to expose me to dark chocolate. The treasures came home hiding in his pockets, wrapped in a white paper bag from at a candy shop he frequented after work.

 

Getting mom through this, I’m constantly reminded that neither of my parents had good food relationships. Dad was diabetic and mom floats in an unacknowledged pre-diabetic state. When shopping for mom recently she requested sugar-free chocolate pudding. Much to my regret mom hasn’t embraced Michael Pollan’s mantra to eat food — not food-like substances.

 

But the pudding put me in mind of those dark chocolates dad used to bring home. We were the only two who liked dark chocolate. But going through mom’s freezer, was shocked to find a few bars of extra dark chocolate. And my brain started to work….I’ve been trying to make use of what we find in mom’s fridge. Since she was never a cook to begin with, since dad passed, she’s totally stopped cooking. In the fridge were exactly 3 cups of whole milk and a mess of eggs. …and seeing the imitation chocolate pudding I had a bit of a craving for chocolate pudding…. but the real kind. The custard kind that I never really called custard until I realized my mistaken nomenclature. And so here’s a rich decadent chocolate custard that’s simple to make. I think dad would have liked it.

 

 

 

Dark Chocolate Custard

Note: cut back on the sugar if you use chocolate that isn’t as dark. I made a brilliant batch with 60% bittersweet chocolate and only half a cup of turbinado sugar.

Optional variations:

Makes about 4 cups