Fork + Fauna

I’ve been plotting a blog post to kick off this adventure that combines two things I love—cool natural phenomena (meteor showers, weather, monarch migration, grunion runs…) and food. But then yesterday I saw this photo, taken by the Cassini probe as it circles around Saturn. Those points of light in the distance, above Saturn’s rings, are the Alpha Centauri system—the nearest neighbor to our own fair sun.
 

Courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
 
The photo reminds me of the Earthrise photo taken by the Apollo 8 crew—a real image that sparks such a shift in perspective that it’s miraculous (like looking at the ultrasound photo of your kid, or watching the final 17 seconds of the 1982 Cal-Stanford Big Game.
 
(Read more about these photos—and get astronomy news and views from an expert—at Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog.)
 
I have to confess I have the same otherworldly feeling about chocolate. Take a good mood, and chocolate enhances it. A bad one, and chocolate can grab you by the ankles and flip you upside down until you return to equilibrium. (That is, if you like chocolate. Maybe you feel this way about good barbecue or beer or water or avocados. Chocolate works for me. Well, almost all of those other things do, too.)
 
Our kitchen’s quickest response when chocolate is needed comes in the form of soft-centered chocolate puddings. We use chocolate chips (no need for chopping) and lower the cooking time to 10 minutes or less to keep the middle really molten.
 

From Fork and Fauna

 
It used to be our dinner guest dessert, but now sometimes we just make it when it’s been a rough day. Or a not-so-rough one. Like a new view of Alpha Centauri, this chocolate star gives us not just a sweet moment, but a better outlook on where we are, too.