Truffle Shuffle

Please forgive my missed post last week and my slightly late post this week. We will blame a fatal combination of dinner guests, a family injury, the resulting road trip and the Olympics. Here is the post that I started last week but didn’t have time to finish until today:

Yesterday we had guests over for dinner. Being truly exceptional guests, they brought with them a box of Godiva chocolates. As I was savoring a delicious dark chocolate truffle, Marc asked me who Godiva was. I explained about the legend of the woman who rode nude through town in order to get her husband to lower the taxes on his overburdened subjects. Marc then wanted to know what this story had do with chocolate. “Did Lady Godiva even like chocolate?”
After extensive research on wikipedia, the answer to this question is clearly “no” since chocolate, even as a beverage, did not reach Europe until around 500 years after Lady Godiva’s time. It was even longer before chocolate was available in its solid form. This, then, begs the questions, “Why IS a chocolate company named Godiva?” and “Would Lady Godiva’s strategy work on the IRS?”
I think that the point of the name Godiva is to remind consumers what could happen when a woman has far too much stress and far too little chocolate. Lady Godiva was married to a tyrant and felt guilty about the starving populace. Clearly, this woman needed chocolate. If she had only had a reasonable supply of truffles she would never have felt the need to go on a ride without adequate clothing- also she would have been too fat. Perhaps the real goal of the chocolatiers at Godiva is to combat public indecency by expanding Americans' waist lines. Regardless, one fact is clear: women really do need chocolate.
Indeed, science is only now discovering what women have known for centuries: chocolate is the answer. Chocolate seems to speed the healing of emotional wounds and, according to a recent reliable source, even physical wounds including partially-severed fingers. Recent studies show that chocolate may also improve mood, reduce your risk for cancer, lower blood pressure and reduce risk for heart attack. This is why a woman with enough chocolate in her system can walk into a room and discover that her child has drawn all over the furniture with a permanent marker without keeling over and dying on the spot.
Please don’t think me a chocoholic. I really don’t think I eat that much of it but I do think our guests were inspired to bring chocolate that evening. David John chose to scream for several hours before finally falling into a fitful sleep and I certainly needed a little treat that night. It was as if eating that small piece of something lovely and delicious negated some of the frustration and stress I had experienced and nudged me towards complete sanity. On some days, perhaps chocolate is the only thing keeping me from losing it like Lady Godiva… besides the fact that I don’t own a horse.

P.S. My fabulous friend Holly introduced me to Godiva Rewards which gives you free chocolate! Details are here: https://www.godiva.com/member/rewardlogin.aspx