Stick to baseball, 10/17/20.

Just one piece this week for subscribers to the Athletic as I work on the top 40 free agents ranking, which will run a few days after the World Series ends: Nick Groke, our Rockies beat writer, asked me a bunch of questions about Colorado’s farm system, and I dutifully answered them. Klawchat, board game reviews, and dish posts should return next week.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was my old partner-in-crime Eric Karabell, although Bias Cat did not make an appearance. My podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

I’m due to send out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter this weekend as well. We’ll see how that works out for me.

As the holiday season approaches, I’ll remind you every week that my books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts for the baseball fan or avid reader in your life.

And now, the links…

  • Now some longreads: ProPublica details the fall of the CDC, undermined from above by the anti-science Trump Administration and from within by craven, spineless leadership.
  • Sara Benincasa’s essay “Fred and Me” is just wonderful and I won’t spoil it in the least.
  • Why has Germany handled COVID-19 better than its neighbors? By following the science, including implementing widescale, frequent testing.
  • QAnon, the batshit-crazy hoax embraced by multiple alt-right figures and now our sitting President, is tearing families apart as people become sucked into this utterly false conspiracy theory and alienate family members with their nonsense.
  • Lauren Witzke, the Delaware GOP candidate for the Senate seat currently held by Democrat Chris Coons, appeared on white-nationalist, anti-immigrant hate site VDare last month, not long before saying the Proud Boys provide security at her events. She has no chance to win, but still, Delaware Republicans should revoke their endorsement of her.
  • Draining the swamp update: A former patent litigator became a federal judge and is openly advising patent trolls to come to his court. This lets those trolls abuse the patent system (which has its own problems, but still) for their own profit, and ultimately American consumers will end up paying the cost.
  • The role-playing game designer outfit Roll20 is holding a 3-day virtual gaming con with proceeds to benefit a charity focused on racial justice.

Stick to baseball, 11/2/19.

This isn’t quite new, but I put out a formal announcement this week that my second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be out on April 21, 2020. You can pre-order it now on HarperCollins’ site.

On the board gaming front, I ranked the top 25 board games of the 2010s for Paste this week, and also wrote about some recent programming games, where players issue instructions as if they were writing code, over at Ars Technica. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

You can get more of me by signing up for my free email newsletter, which I send out irregularly but definitely not often enough to bother you.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 10/5/19.

Nothing new from me this week other than a Klawchat and a Periscope video as I try to finish off the first draft of my upcoming book The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, now available for pre-order. My next ESPN+ column will be a dispatch from the Arizona Fall League.

And now, the links – fewer than usual, for the same reasons, but these should get back to normal by the end of the month:

Stick to baseball, 6/8/19.

Of course, most of my content this week was around this year’s MLB draft, but my biggest piece is actually free for everyone to read – my oral history of the drafting of Mike Trout, as told by the people who were there. For ESPN+ subscribers, you can read my draft recaps for all 15 AL teams and all 15 NL teams. I also held a Klawchat during day two of the draft and a live Periscope chat on Friday.

I really am trying to take time off this weekend, but I still plan to send out a new email newsletter to subscribers (it’s free, you just have to sign up) by Monday.

And now, the links…

Texas eats, 2019 edition.

Both places I hit in Houston were on Eater’s list of the 38 ‘most essential’ restaurants in the U.S. this year, which tends to be a pretty reliable list for good if occasionally overpriced restaurants. Xochi, a high-end Mexican place downtown, did not disappoint at all: I had just two dishes but it will stick with me for a very, very long time. For dinner I had the crispy duck (pato crujiente) with tomatillo avocado sauce, black beans, and chicharrones. It’s the second-best duck dish I’ve ever eaten, behind only the duck carnitas at NYC’s Cosme, and my only quibble is that there was so much duck and not quite enough of the sauces to go with it. It comes with fresh corn tortillas, and the duck really doesn’t need any additional flavor – it would be fine with just a little lime juice – but the slow cooking process did just start to rob the meat of a little moisture. But the star here was the dessert; Xochi’s dessert menu has a dessert side and a chocolate side, and you’re a damn fool if you think I even looked at the side without chocolate on it. I got the Piedras y Oro, rocks and gold, described as “chocolate tart with crocant of mixed nuts, praline and chocolate “river rocks,” gold from the Isthmus,” which doesn’t quite do it justice. The chocolate tart’s center was warm and has very little flour in it, just enough to hold it together, with a hard, dense cookie-like crust, topped with those frozen pebbles of chocolate, as well as the praline, various candied nuts, and a dark chocolate sauce. It was chocolate indulgence right into your veins. I’m not sure I have ever had a more satisfying sense of oneness with chocolate.

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Himalaya, which serves Indian and Pakistani dishes and has a few flourishes that combine those cuisines with Mexican twists (like a ‘quesadilla’ on paratha bread) also made the list, and I would say I had a mixed experience, partly because I ended up ordering the wrong thing, partly because I don’t know south Asian cuisine all that well. I liked much of what I ate, but it was enough food for more than two of me, and some of what arrived on the lunch special, which the waiter seemed very eager for me to order (probably assuming the white guy wouldn’t know most of the items on the menu, which would not be too far off the mark for me), included meats I no longer eat. The platter came with samples of three curries/similar dishes, one with chickpeas (I think aloo chana masala, with potatoes), one with chicken, and one with lamb, which I don’t eat; as well as a large naan that was leaner than any naad I’ve had before, more than a serving of rice, and a triangle of the same flatbread folded over meat and vegetables. I think it was good, but I also know what I don’t know – I rarely eat Indian or Pakistani food – and probably should have ordered something a la carte.

I tried Siphon Coffee before I headed to lunch, and the preparation of the namesake coffee is quite a show – there’s fire, and it looks like a chemistry experiment – with the resulting cup certainly balanced and smooth without losing any of the nuances of the bean. I just can’t see spending $9 for a cup of coffee other than to do it once to try it.

Moving on to Austin: Better Half Coffee & Cocktails is an all-day café in a cool space that serves coffee from Portland’s heart roasters and has traditional and unusual breakfast items, including the thing I could not possibly pass up, waffled hash browns with coffee-cream gravy and poached eggs. It was decadent, although despite being on the heavy side, it wasn’t greasy, more heavy just because all of those items are calorie-dense, and those hashbrowns were spectacularly crunchy. They were using a single-origin heart coffee even for espressos, which I especially appreciate because it shows someone took some care in selecting the coffee (some single origins are great for pour-overs and awful as espressos).

The Backspace was on that old Food and Wine list of the best pizzerias in the U.S. that I’ve been working my way through over the last five years (I’ve been to 31 of the original 48 places, although at least three have closed), and because I hit it on the early side I was there for their happy hour pricing, where their starters are half off. The roasted beets were great, the roasted cauliflower was bland. The margherita pizza used very high-quality mozzarella, although the dough was ordinary, and overall I’d say it’s on the high side of average (grade 50).

Micklethwait Craft Meats showed up on Daniel Vaughn’s invaluable guide to the ten best BBQ joints in Texas, coming in at #8, with the venerable Franklin up at #2. Since I don’t eat beef, Texas BBQ is largely lost on me, but Micklethwait’s pork ribs were excellent, sweet/salty with a strong smoke flavor and bright pink ring. Both the potato salad, which has mayo but tastes more of mustard, and the tart cole slaw were also excellent. If you do eat cow, they’re known for brisket and beef ribs too.

I also had dinner with my cousin at Cane Rosso, an outpost of the Dallas restaurant, and went with a non-traditional pizza, the “farmer’s only dot com” pie with arugula, mushrooms, and zucchini, topped with pesto but without tomato sauce. The dough here is really the standout, although everything on top was also bright and fresh (it was weird to get good zucchini in mid-February).

My Dallas eats were a bit limited by where I needed to go and the sheer sprawl of the Metroplex. I tried Ascension Coffee but found their pour-over really lacking in flavor or body; I probably should have known when I saw they talked up the ‘blueberry’ note in their Ethiopian Ardi, a note that is often considered a defect in Ethiopian beans. (If you’ve had it, you’d know why – it isn’t a pleasant blueberry flavor and it dominates the cup.) Ascension seems so focused on food that the coffee takes a back seat, which is a shame because it’s possible to do both.

The one other meal of note I had was at the Spiral Diner in Fort Worth, not far from TCU. There are three locations of the all-vegan restaurant, which looks like a ’50s diner gone hipster, and the menu comprises mostly familiar comfort-food dishes that have been veganized. I am not vegan, but like hitting good vegan/vegetarian restaurants on the road to try to keep my diet diverse; that said, Spiral’s menu was too focused on recreating certain non-vegetarian or vegan foods, without the ingenuity of places like Modern Love or Vedge/V Street. I ended up getting a Beyond Burger, which I’ve had before and do find pretty satisfying as a meat alternative (better than any veggie burger I’ve ever tried), and the vegan chipotle mayo that came with it was as good as the real thing. It was just kind of unremarkable, salvaged somewhat by the blueberry pie that also allowed me to taunt Mike Schur on Twitter.

Stick to baseball, 6/30/18.

I’m back from a European vacation that took us to Dublin, southern France, Monaco (my daughter really wanted to see it), Genoa (to visit my cousins there), and Milan. I ate a lot of gelato, which is the most important part, isn’t it? Before I left I did file one Insider piece, the annual top 25 players under 25 list, and please read the intro because as usual many people didn’t.

Over at Paste, my review of Merlin, the really awful new game from Stefan Feld, also went up while I was gone. Feld has designed several games I love, including The Castles of Burgundy, so this point-salad mess was a huge disappointment.

Book signings! I’ll be at Politics & Prose in Washington DC, with my friend Jay Jaffe, to talk baseball and both of our books on July 14th at 6 pm, and will be at Paul Swydan’s new bookstore The Silver Unicorn in Acton, Massachusetts, on July 28th at 1 pm (waiting for the link but it is confirmed). I will also be at the Futures Game in DC on the 15th.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 2/11/17.

No Insider content this week – you’ve had plenty, so don’t get greedy. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed the asymmetrical two-player game The Blood of an Englishman, which is based on Jack and the Beanstalk. I also returned to Vulture with a post on eight great boardgames for couples, in honor of Valentine’s Day.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

  • Detroit Tigers owner and Little Caesars founder Mike Ilitch passed away yesterday. Here’s a 2016 piece on the hidden cost of cheap pizza, where reducing prices often means taking it out of workers’ pockets.
  • One of the best longreads of the week covered how a Huntington, West Virginia, school official improved school lunches contrary to the meddling efforts of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver.
  • Another great longread: how a young Wikipedia editor/admin is fighting back against misogynist trolls on the site.
  • Eater has a longread, more a collection of shorter pieces than a single story, on the things people will do to hunt and pick rare mushrooms.
  • As much as I crush the NCAA for some of its policies, they’re leading the fight against anti-LGBT discrimination right now, including a threatened six-year boycott of North Carolina that would cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in lost business over that state’s hate bill HB2, which prevents local governments from passing laws or ordinances protecting LGBT citizens from discrimination.
  • There’s a potential famine brewing in sub-Saharan Africa thanks to the spread of the fall armyworm, which is devastating crops in Zimbabwe already and may be present in six other African countries. We can talk about organic agriculture all we want, but if a synthetic pesticide stops this worm, it’ll save millions of lives.
  • Speaking of which, Dr. Paul Offit wrote about how Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring cost millions of lives too, because DDT, while clearly bad for the environment as a broad-use pesticide, is extremely effective at stopping the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria.
  • Betsy DeVos was confirmed this week as Secretary of Education, but let’s recall the damage she did in Michigan with her charter-school endeavors. I’ve said on here before that I favor at least some school choice, but school choice is not a panacea for underperforming public schools, and her appointment is a potential disaster for public education in this country.
  • TIME became (I think) the first major publication to run an editorial arguing that it’s time to impeach President Trump. Meanwhile, good journalism keeps coming from unexpected outlets, like Vogue highlighting five things Trump is doing now but for which he attacked Hillary Clinton during the campaign.
  • Buy stock in telecom giants? The new FCC is going to kill off net neutrality, opening those quasi-monopolies up for greater power to squeeze money from content providers and consumers.
  • Meanwhile, Republicans across the country are fighting to restrict voting rights, moves that are likely to help their candidates in 2018 and beyond. If you live in such a state, make your voice heard now, before it’s silenced.
  • Why did House Republicans block a vote on a resolution stating that the Holocaust targeted Jews? Are they so beholden to party that they wouldn’t even vote on a fact?
  • John Yoo, who was Justice Department official under President George W. Bush and advocated heavy use of executive orders, wrote that President Trump has taken executive power too far. This is like Tony Larussa saying a manager uses too many relievers. And a former National Security Council member also wrote for the New York Times that Steve Bannon shouldn’t be on the NSC.
  • Are Trump’s opponents falling into his ‘trap’ with their outrage? I don’t know that I agree with this National Review piece’s conclusions, but it’s worth considering that there are still many voters who will nod their heads at his populist moves without considering their consequences.
  • Is Trump’s fight against the judiciary his Watergate? I doubt it, although there are some parallels.
  • Marco Rubio has moments where he appears to be one of the few GOP leaders willing to oppose the President or stake out a position near the center, including a little-heard speech he gave this week on the demise of civil disagreements. That’s great, Marco; now vote against your party’s President on something that matters.
  • Meanwhile, the GOP continues to use the term “fake news” to keep up its attacks on respected, objective journalism outlets, such as Alabama representative Mo Brooks calling the Washington Post fact-checkers “fake news” for pointing out that his voter fraud claims were, well, fraudulent.
  • Ah, North Dakota, where two Republican legislators said in session that women should spend Sundays taking care of their husbands. Will they face any electoral consequences for this? I doubt it.
  • Vaccines! There are over 400 mumps cases in Washington State’s outbreak. That’s why Peter Hotez, Ddirector of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, can say that the anti-vaxxers are “winning” in another NYT editorial. (I subscribed to the Times online in the fall, mostly to keep these posts going, because they are producing some tremendous content across the board right now.)
  • If you saw the Daily Mail piece claiming that politicians had been hoodwinked by falsified climate-change data, well, don’t read the Daily Mail, as it’s become an unreliable source on any economic, political, or scientific topic. And the story was utter nonsense.
  • Former Top Chef contestant Mark Simmons of NYC’s Kiwiana made his feelings on the Muslim ban quite clear with a pro-immigration message printed on his restaurant’s receipts.
  • Is artisanal chocolate the next big food trend along the lines of craft beer and coffee? I’m a little skeptical, and this piece glosses over chocolate’s big sourcing issue (there’s a lot of child labor and de facto slavery in the cacao supply chain), but I think there’s a market here for better chocolate that can make consumers feel better about what they’re eating.
  • An Intelligentsia Coffee staffer wrote this informative post on why we steep tea but brew coffee.
  • The British Academy of Film and Television Arts has published research on how to help women and people of color in the film industry, a sort of response to the #OscarsSoWhite criticisms we’ve heard the last few years. (The Oscar nominees are much more diverse this year, quelling such complaints for the moment.) It gets more at the root of the problem than the attacks on the Academy Awards do – you won’t see women nominated for Best Director if women are rarely hired as directors or if their films struggle to find funding or distribution. There were few acclaimed movies in 2016 directed by women; I think the best-reviewed was Certain Women, which received very little distribution at all.
  • Is mining asteroids an essential part of our future? I think it is, in some sense, although I’m surprised this piece doesn’t mention iridium, a critical element in manufacturing electronics; it’s believed most of the iridium on earth came from the meteor or comet that caused the K/T extinction event.
  • Vice’s Noisey asked a person with synaesthesia what several songs “taste” like to him. Synaesthesia is a rare brain function where senses ‘cross;’ Vladimir Nabokov had it. I don’t have this, but I do associate all twelve months with certain colors, because when I was maybe five my mom had a Peanuts calendar hanging in our laundry room where January, May, and September were colored in red; February, June, and October in blue; March, July, and November in green; and April, August, and December in yellow. Those months still have those colors to me today.
  • Humor: This New Yorker fake-dialogue post called “I Work from Home” hit a little close, especially as I’m writing this post at 10:30 am on Saturday while still in my pajamas.

Stick to baseball, 1/21/17.

My annual prospect ranking package started to appear on ESPN.com this week for Insiders, with the farm system rankings coming in three separate parts: teams ranked 1 to 10, teams ranked 11 to 20, and teams ranked (sad trombone) 21 to 30. I held a Klawchat here on Friday, after all three parts were posted.

The top 100 itself will roll out over five days this upcoming week, 100 to 81 on Monday and 20 to 1 on Friday. I will probably chat Friday afternoon again so that you have the whole list available to you before I take your questions.

Over at Paste I reviewed the really adorable boardgame Kodama: The Tree Spirits, a great family game with a new mechanic that almost feels a little artistic.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter, where, I kid you not, someone actually told me “you should stick to baseball” in response to the last edition, because apparently I can’t talk about whatever I want to talk about in my own fucking newsletter

Gah. The links:

Stick to baseball, 12/19/15.

For Insiders this week, I wrote about the Giants signing Johnny Cueto and the Todd Frazier three-team trade. I also held my usual weekly Klawchat.

Here on the dish, I compiled lists of my top 100 songs of 2015 and my top 15 albums of 2015.

Folks have been asking about my year-end gift guides, so here they are, once more:

Top 80 boardgames of all time
My 2015 gift guide for cooks
My updated cookbook recommendations
My all-time top 100 novels (from February 2013)

And now, the links…

  • That $10 Mast Brothers chocolate bar you bought along with your single-origin pour-over coffee at Blue Bottle? Well, it’s bad chocolate and might not even be what they claim it is.
  • Restaurant chain Fig & Olive, which had a salmonella outbreak in the fall, was caught using previously frozen food prepared at a central “commissary” and shipped to their individual locations.
  • What kind of person calls a mass shooting a hoax? Fortunately, Florida Atlantic has moved to terminate that nutjob professor, who has to be suffering from some kind of mental illness to so thoroughly believe these delusions he preaches.
  • Ah, the National Review‘s climate change graph was a big joke, and the Washington Post gives a concise explanation of why. I reviewed a book called Proofiness in June that talks about how organizations like NRO distort and manipulate stats to mislead the public.
  • Meanwhile, the New Yorker talks about how not to talk about nuclear power and climate change. Nuclear power can be a big part of the solution to both climate change and ocean acidification, but it’s already under a renewed attack from people who should probably know better.
  • Hate crimes against Muslims are surging over the past few weeks. It would be nice if we didn’t have an entire traveling circus competing to demonize this entire demographic group.
  • This Times review of the new book Lactivism by Courtney Jung details how unscientific and aggressive the anti-formula movement has become. There are even “ban the bag” movements to try to force hospitals to stop supplying bottles and other free equipment to new mothers – even though there’s little to no evidence to say breast-feeding is better for the baby.
  • A wonderful piece from the Times on the founder of the company behind the Hinge dating app going after the one who got away before it’s too late. (I’m also fairly sure I went to college with the author’s sisters.)
  • CTE isn’t just a problem affecting NFL players – Vice has the story of a D2 college player who died of it at age 26. This is the crux of my argument over Brandon McIlwain’s decision to enroll early at South Carolina: Not only did he pass up a guaranteed payday in June – actually, he passed up the mere chance to have someone offer it to him – but he’s entering an extremely dangerous profession for which he will not be paid for the next three years of his labor.
  • This isn’t new, but I just came across it this week: McSweeney’s imagined letter from Comic Sans.
  • My former residence of Arizona may be shifting from red to blue, thanks to the Latino vote – although I imagine the influx of engineers to work at Intel will contribute as well.

Hot chocolate.

Quick break from boardgame reviews – I think I have six or seven in the queue to write up – and from prospect writing (the top 100 goes up on Thursday) to talk about one of my favorite beverages: Hot chocolate.

Now you might be thinking about hot cocoa, which is often incorrectly labelled “hot chocolate” by … well, by morons, because hot cocoa doesn’t contain chocolate, and cocoa and and chocolate are not the same thing. If you’ve had good chocolate – I don’t mean Hershey’s, which is to chocolate as gas stations are to coffee – then you know what I mean.

And that’s not to say that hot cocoa has no place in the beverage pantheon – hot cocoa is more of a quick warm-you-up, while hot chocolate is dessert in a cup. Hot cocoa does have the advantage of being easier to make, even without resorting to packets of sugar, guar gum, and “natural flavor.” Here’s how I do it:

1 Tbsp Dutch-processed cocoa (or 2 tsp cocoa and 2 tsp shaved bittersweet chocolate)
1 tsp sugar, or to taste
8 oz milk

Put the dry goods in your mug. Heat the milk to a bare simmer – in a microwave, try a minute on high, stir to prevent a skin from forming, then another minute – and pour just enough into the mug to moisten the cocoa. Stir or whisk until you have a smooth paste, then gradually stir in the remainder of the milk. If you find yourself with lumps of cocoa powder in the finished product, try sifting it after measuring. Add a shot of espresso for a mocha where both the coffee and chocolate stand in front, with the sweetener playing rhythm as it should be.

Hot chocolate, in a general sense, is what it sounds like: Chocolate, heated until it’s pourable, mixed with milk or cream or a combination thereof, and perhaps with accent flavors layered on top of it. If you’ve seen Chocolat – which, by the way, was much better than the book – you know what this looks like. It’s the best chocolate delivery system known to man, viscous and smooth and full of antioxidants, but who the hell cares about that because it’s chocolate!

I’ve tried a number of recipes for hot chocolate (also called “drinking chocolate” in some sources), and all were good because, again, we’re talking about chocolate. If the chocolate you put in is good, the finished product will be good. Callebaut is my favorite major brand, but these days I use the Pound Plus 72% bar of Belgian chocolate from Trader Joes, which is a lot more affordable when you go through the stuff as quickly as we do. (Valhrona is fine, but what they charge is in no way justified by some superior quality or smoothness. Callebaut is usually 60% of the price and as good if not better in texture and flavor.)

For my birthday last year, my wife bought me a small book called, appropriately enough, Hot Chocolate, by restaurateur and food writer Michael Turback. I find most little food books to be more novelty item than useful resource, but Turback approached this like a researcher, talking to dozens of pastry chefs around the globe and reproducing 60 of their recipes for hot chocolate, some of which incorporate unusual ingredients like chili pepper, ginger, key lime, cardamom, chestnut paste, matcha, or sake. Most work on the same general principle, however: Begin with a ganache (roughly equal parts cream and bittersweet or semi-sweet chocolate), then use that as the base for a beverage by adding milk and other flavors.

My favorite recipe so far is from Top Chef judge Tom Colicchio’s ‘wichcraft chain, which Turback says is known for the hot chocolate served in 12-ounce paper cups, a quantity I find hard to fathom because it’s so filling. Its key ingredient is fresh bay leaf, although I have made it several times with dried crushed bay leaves and can report excellent results. The recipe in the book makes six servings, but here is my adaptation for one:

Sisha Ortuzar’s Bay Leaf-Infused Hot Chocolate

1.5 ounces (40-45 grams) bittersweet chocolate, 60-72% cacao, finely chopped
2.5 fluid ounces (5 Tbsp) heavy cream
1 cup milk
1 dried bay leaf, crumbled
Pinch salt (optional)

Bring the milk and bay leaf to a simmer and let steep for at least five minutes, until the leaf is fragrant. Keep it warm as you make the ganache, but don’t let it boil or reduce.

Place the chocolate in a heat-proof bowl or directly into a mug. Heat the cream to a bare boil – be careful, as cream boils over fast, and fat burns easily – and pour over the chocolate. Let stand for two minutes, then stir to make a smooth paste.

Strain the milk into the ganache and stir until the mixture is smooth and homogeneous. Add a tiny pinch of salt if desired and serve.

I find salt intensifies the chocolatey flavor of chocolate, but the drink is still rich, deep, and satisfying without it. You can also boost it with coffee or rum or a liqueur like Amaretto or Chambourd, but I prefer it au naturel because it’s like mainlining cacao. Much credit is due to Ortuzar, chef and co-founder of ‘wichcraft with Colicchio, for the bay leaf/chocolate pairing, a less-than-obvious combination that works even better than chocolate and chili pepper.

Turback’s book is about hot chocolate, not hot cocoa, so all of the drinks included are rich and probably high in calories, not that there’s anything wrong with that. He includes a section on alcoholic hot chocolates, as well as a few white chocolate beverages that are just a waste of space. (Really, Michael, a book with 57 or 58 recipes wouldn’t have been enough?) Towards the back of the book are pairings, recipes for a chocolate drink and for a pastry to go with it, like a cinnamon-almond hot chocolate and cinnamon-dusted churros from David Guas, a former pastry chef turned consultant and author of DamGoodSweet, a book of New Orleans-inspired desserts.

Hot Chocolate isn’t an essential cookbook but it’s the sort of cookbook to which I’m gravitating these days, books that can inspire me with new ideas for flavor combinations rather than instruct me on the mechanics of a recipe. However, making hot chocolate is about making ganache, and anyone with a stove and a whisk can do that, so a non-cook can get some value from the book as well.