If you love serious chocolate but are not a chocolate snob...

Give me a recipe involving chocolate, and I'll automatically double the amount of cocoa powder, switch from milk or semisweet to dark chocolate, and throw in a broken-up extra-dark chocolate bar for good measure. When it comes to chocolate, I don't mess around.

Which is why I decided to go hunting for the best extra-dark chocolate bar that is readily available. I don't mean those wimpy 72% cacao creations--I wanted a bar that was at least 85% chocolate. Nor did I want a bar that cost more than 6 cents a gram or that had to be specially ordered online. I was looking for something I could buy whenever a chocolate craving hijacked my brain cells.

I do not claim to have found the paragon I sought. Why would I want to? The joy is in the journey, not the destination. But here are some observations about four extra-dark chocolate bars that may well be available at a grocery store in your neighborhood. And if they aren't, please check out the ones that are, and let me know what you find!

#4 Lindt-Sprüngli Excellence, 100g, 12.5% sugar, $3.85
I had high hopes for this bar. I had a profound relationship with Lindt-Sprüngli the year I was 16 years old and living in France, right across from the Swiss border. And I do love Lindor truffles, even if they aren't quite dark enough. Besides, the Excellence ingredient list is pure and simple: chocolate, cocoa powder, cocoa butter, demerara sugar, bourbon vanilla beans.

Hélas, the Excellence bar disappointed. My first impression was that I was chewing wax. After 10 or 15 seconds, the chocolate flavor finally appeared, and it wasn't bad: a bit spicy, a bit fruity. But as soon as I swallowed, it went back to wherever it hides when I'm eating my vegetables. I'm not going to give up on Lindt products just yet, however: they also make a 90% bar (same ingredients) and even a 99% bar (cocoa mass, cocoa powder, cocoa butter, brown sugar).

#3 Ghirardelli Midnight Reverie, 90g, 11.1% sugar, $4.55
Higher price, smaller size. More chocolate, less sugar. This one should be fantastic, right? Well, it wasn't bad. Unlike the Lindt-Sprüngli bar, Midnight Reverie was neither waxy nor brittle, though it also started out tasteless. The chocolate flavor, which hinted of berries, developed a few seconds later, but not as late as with the Excellence bar. Contrary to the label's claim, unfortunately, the flavor was not intense. In fact, this could be a good starter bar for people who prefer milk chocolate but are switching to dark for health reasons.

Dark-chocolate purists might find the ingredients list distressingly long, with unnecessary additions: Midnight Reverie contains chocolate, cocoa butter, sugar, milk fat, soy lecithin, vanilla, and natural flavor.

#2 Trader Joe's Dark Chocolate Lover's Chocolate Bar, 100g, 12.5% sugar, $1.49
At 1.5 cents a gram, this is without a doubt the best value for serious chocolate lovers! But then, what serious chocolate lover ranks ecstasy by cost?

The Dark Chocolate Lover's bar had a consistency similar to that of Midnight Reverie, probably because both bars contain soy lecithin (DCL's ingredients: cocoa mass, sugar, cocoa butter, soy lecithin, natural vanilla flavor). Its flavor--strong on berries--hit the mouth sooner and was a bit more intense than that of its Ghirardelli counterpart.

I'd cheerfully eat little bits of this bar every day except for one thing: like the Ghirardelli bar and the Lindt-Sprüngli bar, it is not certified fair trade. That means the farmers who produced the cocoa probably did not receive a fair price for their product. Worse, it means that children, some of them actually slaves, may have been involved in farming the cocoa.

#1 Theo Organic Fair Trade Ultimate Dark, 84g, 16.7% sugar, $4.00
Theo comes from the Greek word for god (θεός), and the genus to which the cocoa plant belongs is theobroma, "food of the gods." The gods should be happy with Theo's Ultimate Dark bar, since it is both organically grown and fair traded. All the humans I've offered it to are happy with it too.

Its flavor, which evokes ripe, dark cherries, shows up immediately, intensifies while you chew, and lingers even as you consider breaking off another bite. Its consistency is smooth but not waxy. Its ingredient list is short and perhaps a bit too sweet: cocoa beans, sugar, cocoa butter, and ground vanilla beans. No soy lecithin, no cocoa powder, no milk fat, no "natural flavor," whatever that is.

I hope I liked this chocolate bar best because of its excellent ingredients. I wonder, though, if I'm mostly attracted to the extra sugar. With 7 grams of sugar in each 42-gram serving, Theo Ultimate Dark is 16.7% sugar, which seems to belie its claim to be 85% cocoa. I may have to try these all over again, and no doubt add some other brands, just to be sure ...

If you want to conduct your own chocolate research, check out One Golden Ticket, a blog I discovered while preparing this post. I wish they'd add one of those subscribe-by-email apps--I'd sign up immediately if they did.

Food bullies

Back in the 70s, a little truck-stop restaurant in the wilds of Eastern Washington became locally famous because its French patronne did not mind insulting her clients. Order wrongly, and she would refuse to grant your request. Salt before tasting, and she would angrily remove the salt shaker from your table.

When Mr Neff and I finally worked up enough courage to go to her restaurant, which was reputed to have excellent food despite the neon Pepsi sign in its front window, I decided to hedge my bets by talking to the dragon lady en français, which I spoke rather well at the time. Predictably, she was thrilled - finally someone who might understand her cooking!

When it was time for dessert, we ordered the small cup of ice cream that came with our prix fixe meal. La patronne vehemently disagreed. "You must have the tarte aux framboises," she told us.

"Oh, but Madame," we protested, "the meal was so satisfying that we couldn't possibly. All we want is a small dessert."

"No," she insisted. "You must have the raspberry tart. The people in the booth behind you wanted it, and I told them they couldn't have it. There are only two pieces left, and they are yours."

We had no choice. She brought the tart.

I have never, before or since, eaten anything like it. Each slice was a perfect triangle of raspberries arranged like a dry-stone wall with no visible mortar. Each raspberry was small and bursting with flavor (I suspect the raspberries came out of her garden). The crust was light and sweet and perfect. The first bite was exquisite, and every subsequent mouthful was even better, pleasure layering on pleasure.

So I am somewhat sympathetic to the chefs I read about in Diane Cardwell's article, "Have It Your Way? Purist Chefs Won't Have It," in yesterday's New York Times:

New York has spawned a breed of hard-line restaurants and cafes that are saying no. No to pouring takeout espressos, or grinding more than a pound of coffee at a time. No to taming the intensity of a magma-spicy dish. And most of all, no to the 21st-century conviction that everything can be accessorized to the customer’s taste.

If you want excellent food, why mess with the recommendations of experts?

On the other hand, if you know what you like, why let experts bully you into eating or drinking what you don't want?

OK, there are several good reasons: (1) to learn to like something new (isn't this what we tell our children when we offer them, say, their first bite of avocado?), (2) to learn why we like what we like so we're more sure of getting it next time, (3) to discover that food we don't think we like, prepared brilliantly, is actually quite good ... well, all the reasons seem to come back to learning.

And learning is why I checked out Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl's Drink This: Wine Made Simple when I saw it on the new-books shelves at the public library - and why, after reading a couple of chapters, I actually bought my own copy. Grumdahl is hilarious. She knows wine. She explains things well. She has devised a clever system to help wine novices have fun while learning much more than they're likely to learn from more exhaustive books.

And yet, bless her, she doesn't suffer bullies gladly. From her "Wine Drinker's Bill of Rights":

Your whole life has been one cumulative process adding up to your own taste. No person, critic, wine shop clerk, or anyone else has a right to disparage or discount it. If you want to drink Bordeaux with your oysters, Port with your burger, or Chardonnay with your fried chicken, it is no one's business but your own. No one lives with your taste buds but you, so no one really knows what you are experiencing except you. It's your taste!

Right on, Ms. Grumdahl. Life is too short to drink wine you don't like because it's popular or snobby or expensive, or even because the server raised one eyebrow when you started to order a different wine. In fact, despite wine's popularity, why drink it at all if you don't like it? As Grumdahl advises,

If wine can't provide happiness, it should get out of the way and let something else do it, like chocolate.

Or like that heavenly raspberry tart - even though I allowed a stubborn restauratrice to bully me into eating it.

September delights

We just spent a week in Michigan, not far from where our favorite produce grows. We're home again, and this morning I made my regular Saturday-morning trek to Wheaton's outdoor market. Today's haul is made up entirely of what Michael Pollan calls "the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food."

This is what I brought home for $30: broccoli, red-leaf lettuce, eggplant, zucchini, roma tomatoes, a sweet onion, two bell peppers (red and yellow), a handful of red, yellow, and orange tiny sweet peppers, green beans, brussels sprouts, 4 ears of corn, blueberries, and raspberries from my favorite farmer from Berrien County (neighbors: check out the stand at the southeast corner of the market). And for another $5.25, a loaf of whole grain nutty bread from Great Harvest Bread Company.

In his recent book In Defense of Food, Pollan lays down three rules for healthy eating: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." This is easy to do if you live near southwestern Michigan or central Washington or other places where fruit and vegetables grow in profusion. It is somewhere between difficult and impossible to do if your food source has to be Target or Wal-Mart. As I noted in another post, Pollan believes that a reformed health-insurance system will lead to better food for everybody, since universal coverage will give insurers a huge incentive to keep people healthy.

I pray that he's right. But words like reform and rules and even health do not even begin to describe the food I brought home this morning. Think Abundance. Bounty. Plenty. Richness. Pleasure. Joy. Celebration. Gratitude.

Less planning, more merriment

For me, the scariest aspect of the Lenten Experiment is not the frugality but the planning. I like to make things up as I go along. I don't like keeping records and figuring out the price of everything.

I'm solving the bookkeeping problem by keeping track of grocery purchases but not trying to price each meal, which would be impossibly complex.

And I've decided to solve the meal planning problem by reverting to my usual method of cooking: looking at what I already have or what is favorably priced in the grocery store, and then imagining what goes well together. I often do this as I cook, after I write my daily blogpost, so I'm going to stop appending "daily bread" summaries announcing what we are going to have for dinner. Heck, it's only 11:00 a.m. How do I know?

But I do want to keep track--what's an experiment without data?--so instead I'll post yesterday's menu, beginning tomorrow. (This approach has the added advantage of not giving Mr Neff or dinner guests advance information about dinner. I don't want to alarm anybody.)

Meanwhile, here's a report from the front. Janet and Ken Tkachuck, excellent cooks both, describe their first couple of days of intentionally frugal eating:

[We] are experimenting with the frugal menu plan but are not giving up meat or wine. The first night we had chicken legs sautéed with onions, sweet peppers, and zucchini and cilantro, on a bed of couscous. The meal came to $6.00, and with a $4.99 bottle, we stayed under budget. Our breakfasts and lunches, like yours, cost pennies. Last night was stir fry with vegetarian scallops, even cheaper. How we're going to work tonight into the scheme I'm not sure. We're sallying forth with our friend Don to a new cheap eats BYOB in Andersonville (Antica Pizzeria, featuring a wood burning pizza oven). ... We'll ask Tetzel to grant us an indulgence for this one night. Or amortize the extra cost over the next week. Cheating already.

No doubt Tetzel will approve, but then so will his archenemy Martin Luther, who wrote to a friend:

Whenever the devil pesters you with these thoughts, at once seek out the company of men, drink more, joke and jest, or engage in some other form of merriment. Sometimes it is necessary to drink a little more, play, jest, or even commit some sin in defiance and contempt of the devil in order not to give him an opportunity to make us scrupulous about trifles.

Amen, Dr. Luther.

Happiness: A History

In my small collection of happiness books, two have long been personal favorites: The Pursuit of Happiness by David G. Myers (1993) for its lucid explanations, and Adventures in Contentment by David Grayson (1916) for its soothing evocations.

Now I am adding a third title to my pantheon: Happiness: A History by Darrin M. McMahon, "a professor of history at Florida State University and a frequent contributor to publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Daedalus."

Selected by the New York Times as one of the 100 notable books of 2006, Happiness is an engaging survey of Western philosophy from Herodotus to today's bioethicists. To learn more about the book, you can't do better than Jim Holt's excellent review. Sample its opening lines:

The history of the idea of happiness can be neatly summarized in a series of bumper sticker equations: Happiness= Luck (Homeric), Happiness=Virtue (classical), Happiness=Heaven (medieval), Happiness=Pleasure (Enlightenment) and Happiness=A Warm Puppy (contemporary). Does that look like progress? Darrin McMahon doesn't think so.

A better woman than I might sit down and read Happiness straight through. Instead, I'm enjoying it in small bites each morning, reading 10 pages or so from one subhead to the next. A couple of days ago I learned that the word fun is "a relative novelty, introduced in English only in the late seventeeth century as a variation of the Middle English fon, meaning jester or fool" (199).

In the eighteenth century a truly radical philosophy developed, one that Lively Dust finds charming:

To dance, to sing, to enjoy our food, to revel in our bodies and the company of others--in short, to delight in a world of our own making--was not to defy God's will but to live as nature had intended. This was our earthly purpose.

Warm puppies are also pleasant.

Vinita Hampton Wright on presents and presence

Vinita Hampton Wright is a dear friend, publishing colleague, and exceptionally wise woman. She is the author of many books, fiction and nonfiction, including the just-released Days of Deepening Friendship: For the Woman Who Wants Authentic Life With God.

This article by Vinita will be posted on Loyola Press's web site next week. It's a wonderful meditation on Christmas joy in a crumbling economy.

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Presence in the Midst of Crisis

Of all times for the financial health of the world to end up in Intensive Care—just as the holidays entice us to splurge, to buy a little beyond ourselves because gift-buying and gift-giving are expressions of care, appreciation, even remembrance. We bake richer foods at Christmastime. And wrap things in shinier paper. And we like to spend a little more, just because this time is special. It is a time for feasting and lingering. It is a time for extravagance.

There is some justification for extravagance at this time of year. We are celebrating the love of an extravagant God. The Christ Child is the ultimate gift. God’s love is lavish, overflowing. God did not hold back from us, in sending Jesus, the son of God. In that birth we were given God’s very self.

And so, this year in which money is especially the focus of stress and strategy, perhaps we should think in terms of giving the self instead of stuff. God gave God’s self in fairly plain wrapping—the infant of two pilgrims with limited resources. No fine blankets or silky bassinet for Jesus. No huge basket of Ghirardelli’s chocolate treats for his parents. But the presence of that child was so rich and fine that poor shepherds, great intellects from far countries, a pious widow, and an old prophet were all drawn to him with tears and joy.

What kind of presence am I to those I love? If I can’t give a hefty gift certificate or even a nice set of bathroom towels this year, how can I be more present to that person for whom I’ve been willing to pull out an overextended credit card in years past? If I can offer no great cash value, then what is left? My stories? My welcome? My precious time for a phone conversation? My visit that lasts longer than it takes to exchange wrapped boxes?

This has been a stressful autumn for my husband and me. Unemployment, then underemployment, then major house repairs, and family too far away to travel to easily. And what we are discovering is that, to come home in the evening and eat a simple meal together, to give a long hug and a word of encouragement, to spend a little more time with our dogs and cats doing nothing but petting and cooing—all of that is lavish enough for us. There will be no expensive dining out this year, no big party thrown for friends. There will be cooking together in the kitchen, looking for the best price on clementines. There will be one trip to a family wedding and brief stops at other relatives on the way back. On each stop we will enter the home and be there with smaller gifts but a bigger sense of us—us coming in the door, giving hugs, having a relaxed conversation, enjoying the presence of those we don’t get to see very often.

We tend to forget, don’t we, that God’s presence is enough. God’s grace is sufficient. We forget that and follow after the big pay-off, the nicer car, the gadget that will make life more convenient, the vacation that will be more romantic and exotic than all the others. We hanker after finer and pricier presents, when the only answer to our real desire is that awesome Presence.

This Christmas seems like a great time to spend more time in that Presence. And more time exploring the power and wonder of our own presence with others.

(c) 2008 Vinita Hampton Wright
Used by permission

Home cooking and love

Like other forms of human affection, cooking delivers its truest and most enduring gifts when it is savored in intimacy — prepared not by a chef but by a cook and with love.

--Marcella Hazan, New York Times, "No Chefs in My Kitchen"

Once upon a time, restaurants lured customers with promises of "home-cooked" meals, food just like Mother used to make. But nowadays we Americans spend nearly half of our food dollars in restaurants, and home cooks now want to imitate professional chefs.

• "No need to leave home, make reservations, and go out," says www.copykat.com. "You can make recipes that taste just like the restaurant without ever having to leave home."
• Buy lots of (expensive) equipment and you can cook "Just Like in a Restaurant Kitchen," suggests Sara Levine in the Washingtonian.
• Google "restaurant taste" + frozen and you'll find a plethora of prepared foods to make your meals (to quote my father-in-law) "just like downtown only not so crowded."
  

Apparently it's not just the high-end restaurants that home cooks are dying to emulate. In Top Secret Restaurant Recipes: Creating Kitchen Clones from America's Favorite Restaurant Chains Todd Wilbur tells you how to copy food from IHOP, Olive Garden, Pizza Hut, Dennys ...

O, that way madness lies; let me shun that;
No more of that.

--King Lear

Marcella Hazan to the rescue! Restaurant food, she writes, is entertainment. Home cooking is something else:

I am my family’s cook. It is the food prepared and shared at home that, for more than 50 years, has provided a solid center for our lives. In the context of the values that cement human relations, the clamor of restaurants and the facelessness of takeout are no match for what the well-laid family table has to offer. A restaurant will never strengthen familial bonds.

Enjoy your turkey leftovers at home, with someone you love.

Eat to enjoy

"Instead of Eating to Diet, They're Eating to Enjoy" is the headline of Tara Parker-Pope's article in this morning's New York Times. "The more time people spend on tasks like food shopping, cooking and kitchen cleanup," she notes, "the more likely they are to be of average weight. The Economic Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture found that people of normal weight spend more time on meal-related tasks than people who are overweight or underweight."

This observation goes well with Richard Watson's advice in The Philosopher's Diet: How to Lose Weight & Change the World: Remodel your kitchen! Knock out a few walls! Add a fireplace! Buy a lot of kitchen tools! Here's his reason:

An obsession with food is a love affair. I'd much rather work with lovers of food than haters of fat. If you love food, you'll respond to kitchen dreams. But if you hate fat--something you can grab hold of and feel it being grabbed--then you hate yourself. And kitchens.

(By the way, did you borrow my copy of The Philosopher's Diet? I can't find it anywhere. [Thank goodness Amazon has a search feature.] You can leave it on my front porch between the doors. No questions will be asked.)

The pleasures of the table

This morning's foray to the farmers' market reinforced the message of yesterday's cool, wet weather. Fewer berries than last week. Peaches cost more. But look--a lovely pile of butternut squash. Autumn is just around the corner.

Last year I bought a Community-Supported Agriculture subscription. Every Thursday morning from April through December I picked up a big box of produce. The price was right--under $25 a week--but the radish and cabbage crop seemed excessive. This year I decided to pick out my own produce from, whenever possible, local sources.

I may have paid a bit more at the farmer's market, and I tended to avoid unfamiliar veggies (what does one do with patty-pan squash?). On the other hand, we have really been enjoying our meals. This week's recipes will include fresh corn, zucchini, eggplant, green beans, red tomatoes, yellow tomatoes, red bell pepper, sweet onion, red onion, broccoli, and brussels sprouts. For dessert we will have nectarines, blackberries, and blueberries. Cost: $32.40.

I'm by no means a purist about local or organic food--sometimes the best fruits and vegetables are available at Jewel, and last weekend's treasure was an 89-cent mango from Supermercado La Chiquita. The cover of Michael Pollan's excellent In Defense of Food lays out one part of my food philosophy: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

If Pollan brilliantly describes what we should eat (have you read his Omnivore's Dilemma yet?), Julia Child tells us how: "The pleasures of the table — that lovely old-fashioned phrase — depict food as an art form, as a delightful part of civilized life. In spite of food fads, fitness programs, and health concerns, we must never lose sight of a beautifully conceived meal" (The Way to Cook).

It took a Frenchman, though, to remind us of why eating is so important--if indeed we buy fresh, colorful food, prepare it with attention to taste and beauty, and share it with those we love:

"The pleasures of the table belong to all times and all ages, to every country and every day; they go hand in hand with all our other pleasures, outlast them, and remain to console us for their loss."

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste

The Fat Pack

How do food writers avoid obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and other medical hazards of their chosen profession? Many don't, says Kim Severson in her article in today's New York Times, "The Fat Pack Wonders If the Party's Over":

The journalists, bloggers, chefs and others who make up the Fat Pack combine an epicure’s appreciation for skillful cooking with a glutton’s bottomless-pit approach. Cramming more than three meals into a day, once the last resort of a food critic on deadline, has become a way of life. If the meals center on meat, so much the better.

Severson quotes several writers who are defensive about their lifestyle, but others are trying a new approach. Those

who want to lose weight find themselves trying to forge a new kind of diet, one that rejects the conventional strategy of denial and avoidance and embraces the pleasure of really, really good food.

One who is working on reshaping his body while continuing to enjoy eating is Ed Levine. Check out his website, Serious Eats, where on Thursdays he blogs about "his attempts to find food that is delicious and healthy."

Multinational minerals

.This is a row of bowls made from polished stone. They are so thin as to be translucent, and the sun reflects off them as if they were made of water.

We are in Tucson, and today we walked through booth after booth at the annual gem and mineral show. My father-in-law and his wife love rocks--gems, though they don't wear jewelry; fossils, though they don't believe in evolution. They just love to look at, hold, and sometimes own beautiful things.

They are not alone. People come to this show from all over the world, some to sell, some to buy. One year we bought amber from Poland; the next year, garnets from Alaska. This year we didn't buy anything, but we admired rubies from Thailand and Myanmar. The bowls in the picture were made in India.

Mark Bittman's new blog!

My favorite all-purpose cookbook is Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything. For Christmas my daughter Molly gave me How to Cook Everything Vegetarian--a worthy addition to his line. And now the New York Times columnist ("The Minimalist") and PBS star has launched a blog about food and cooking called Bitten.

"We’re going to look at great food made with everyday ingredients and readily achievable techniques," he writes, "not food as something to be admired from afar, but as a part of daily life. We’ll also bat around the big ideas that foodies sometimes ignore: how it gets produced and moved from one place to another, as well as who pays for it and profits from it."

Better yet, he's posting a daily recipe, with photos.

Truly God, truly man

It took the Christian church more than four hundred years of constant discussion to agree to a formula explaining just how Jesus could be both God and man, without leaning too far in one direction or the other. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 issued a definition that has been accepted by most Christians ever since: Jesus is “truly God and truly man,” “consubstantial with the Father as to his divinity and consubstantial with us as to his humanity.”

The men who framed the Chalcedonian confession had to get past two stumbling blocks that, according to their way of thinking, made the union of God and man almost unthinkable.

First, good Hellenistic philosophers that they were, they were convinced that God is completely unchangeable. If God cannot change, he cannot suffer and he certainly cannot die. How, then, could Jesus be fully God and yet suffer and die on the cross?

Second, for reasons that I have yet to figure out, the church fathers apparently believed that all sexual pleasure is seriously sinful. A woman could conceive a child without sin, but a man could not beget a child sinlessly, and the sin of sexual pleasure transmitted original sin to the descendants of Adam and Eve. How, then, could Jesus be truly man and yet remain untainted by original sin?

Pope Leo I (the Great) came up with a way to get past both barriers. Several years before the Council of Chalcedon was convened, he had written a letter to the Bishop of Constantinople explaining how Jesus could be simultaneously God and man. His letter became known as the Tome of Leo, and the whole thing is worth reading.

Leo allowed that God might not be quite as unchangeable as the god of pagan philosophy: “The Lord of the universe veiled his measureless majesty and took on a servant's form. The God who knew no suffering did not despise becoming a suffering man, and, deathless as he is, to be subject to the laws of death.”

But Leo did not give up his belief in sexually transmitted damnation. Jesus’ birth, he wrote, was unprecedented, “because it was inviolable virginity which supplied the material flesh without experiencing sexual desire. What was taken from the mother of the Lord was the nature without the guilt.”

This is a far cry from the word of Wisdom in Proverbs 5:18–19:

Let your fountain be blessed,
and rejoice in the wife of your youth,
a lovely deer, a graceful doe.
May her breasts satisfy you at all times;
may you be intoxicated always by her love.

Oddly, the church has often identified Wisdom in the Hebrew Bible with the Word in the New Testament. Even the dour old bishops did that, but they seem to have missed some of the connections. I'm still looking for early Christian writers with a wholesome, hearty, Hebrew view of sexual love.

Deferred gratification

I usually feel guilty unless I'm in the process of deferring gratification. My husband, who is slightly warped, says he thinks deferring gratification is fun. He suggests that Purgatory (for people like us) will be a flood of unimaginable pleasure that we will be forced to enjoy as we are experiencing it. This prospect does not terrify him, because he doesn't believe in Purgatory.