Xocholatl

I had a really wonderful cup of chocolate today. I brought dinner to my husband when I got back from Boulder, and after we finished that I was craving something sweet so we went for a walk. He was thinking baklava but the 24-hour Palestinian dive on the corner was packed, so we walked another block over to the neighborhood coffee shop for some hot cho. I hadn't been in there in a while, because I'm not a coffee drinker and because until recently they didn't have WiFi (I discovered today that they've joined the 21st century). The big board over the counter offered not the standard "hot chocolate", but "xocholatl", which had me instantly intrigued. I inquired what merited the Nahuatl throwback spelling, and the barrista informed me that the barely-sweet concoction bragged not only canela but chile. The real thing. I ordered it at once and was so happy that we'd passed up the baklava. Poor Europe. What was their food like before tomatoes, before potatoes, before chocolate, chile, avocados, corn, and all those other wonderful things that make the prospect of another day of caloric ingestion worth getting out of bed? Don't get me wrong, I'm a sucker for good baklava, but dark, spicy chocolate satisfies like no other. Throw in the chance to sit and chat with my sweetheart for a spell and this little Lola had a perfect, phonetics-free evening. We flipped through a local rag together, read movie reviews while we held hands and banished the slight chill the late autumn evening with hot liquid and chile in our bellies.

I think we might be building a straw-bale house. Anyone out there have some info on that? Personal experience, I mean. Huff and puff, come blow it on down. I think that they're pretty, but also solid-looking, romantic in that scruffy, dirt-under-the-fingernails kind of way. The energy efficiency is also sexy.