Recipes for Cooking With Chocolate

Don't you just love the sweet wonderful taste of chocolate? Don't you just love how it melts in your mouth? Don't you just love it in desserts, candies, cookies, brownies, cakes and all those other tempting treats? But did you know that chocolate can be use in cooking? Yes, real cooking.

Actually, it seems that famous chefs and those fancy Europeans all ready knew that chocolate could be used in real foods, too. I, on the other hand, just recently foundout about this. Being a chocolate lover from birth, my mother craved chocolate her entire life and taught me how wonderful it is, this was something I wanted to further investigate.

What I found was that chocolate was being use in dishes such as salads, sauces and pastas. I also found out that when using chocolate in these types of recipes you should try to buy the best kind of chocolate you can find. The highest the chocolate quality the better the outcome.

Here are some examples of some dishes where chocolate can be added as an ingredient:

Salads

Yes, the leafy green kind. Some chefs love to grind up bitter sweet chocolate and then sprinkle it on top of specialty salads. One favorite is to add chocolate to salads that has beets in them. The beets and the chocolate are suppose to go great together.

Entrees:

You can use chocolate with a number of different meats for your entree dish. I found recipes that used beef, pork, and poultry along with chocolate.

Pasta

Of course, in pastas we are speaking of adding chocolate to the sauces. You still use the regular noodles.

In Italy they like to braze the chocolate in a pasta that uses Wild Boar as the meat ingredient. Seems the chocolate helps to fight the gamy taste of the meat.

In Mexico they like to use chocolate in a dish they call Mole. Mole translated means mixture. They add unsweetened chocolate as their magical ingredient. In this dish the mixture is a rich sauce and is also enhanced with cinnamon. If you don't like the unsweetened version of this you can try bittersweet chocolate instead.

And speaking of pastas, they even use chocolate in some lasagna recipes.

Side dishes:

How about a chocolate rice and grain dish. And, if that doesn't gross you out any, how about this? I found a recipe that was called chocolate baked beans. I don't think I will be a hurry to try that one.

Soups and stews

Now one recipe called itself a chocolate soup. But after reading it, to me it sounded a lot like a hot type of pudding. It is considered an European type of soup and is sometimes served with cream cheese strawberry sandwiches. Now that sounds like something I could eat.

Then there is chocolate chili and we must not forget the chocolate sandwiches which is made of bitter sweet chocolate.

It seems that with a lot of these recipes you can't taste the chocolate at all. To me, then I wonder what the point of it is. I like tasting my chocolate. But I have to admit I really don't get into those fancy recipes anyway. I like basic food.

But for you people who like to try new things and love fancy stuff, then I recommend trying some of these unique recipes that calls for chocolate. One great place to start learning about these types of recipes is to check out this site: www.cdkitchen.com. They have a lot of unique recipes.

As for me, I will just curl up with a plate full of mom's delicious brownies.