Here are some chocolate and coffee combinations:
Chocolate syrup in your latte turns it into a mocha – why not experiment with mixing cacao with honey, or maple syrup (or both!) and making your very own chocolate syrup to stir in? You can also sprinkle cacao and sugar atop the froth!
Chocolate covered espresso beans are a good kick to munch on!
We found someone online experimenting with grinding cacao nibs to put in their ground coffee to make a new taste…maybe?!
Add a shot of espresso to your chocolate brownie recipe!
Have your next espresso with a square of dark chocolate.
Shade Grown Coffee – An Environmental Bliss
Shade grown coffee might cost a penny or two more to buy, but it might be well worth your money. According to recent studies it does the environment a whole lot of good.
If you clear wooded “shade” plantations first of all it will hurt the biodiversity as the animals that used to live there will either have to move, or if they can’t, will die. It also makes it more difficult to control pests and can lead to crop losses. If pest control isn’t possible, people usually take to poison and sufficient to say most of us prefer as organic coffee as possible. Mainly because we won’t have to get the poison in our bodies, but also because poison doesn’t just kill the pest, but also animals that come across it.
“As you go to more and more open agriculture, you lose some bird groups that provide important ecosystem services like insect control [insect eaters], seed dispersal [fruit eaters], and pollination [nectar eaters], while you get higher numbers of granivores [seed and grain eaters] that actually can be crop pests,” Ça?an H ?ekercio?lu said in a University of Utah press release about a study in the Journal of Ornithology.
Apparently the only birds that seem to prefer open farmland is the seed eaters, who might lead to a profit loss, as they eat the seeds you plant!
In a time when the environment is becoming more and more precious to us the more we can do to help it, the better. After all it would be lovely if generations to come still had a rainforest to visit. Not only does it provide plenty of oxygen for the planet, as well as stunning beauty, it also provides a lot of different plants that might very well contain cures to various diseases, such as cancer.
All of us aren’t die hard environmentalist whose main purpose in life is spending time lobbying for Greenpeace, but it’s nice to know that there are small, simple things one can do, such as paying two pennies extra for shade-grown coffee, cacao, cardamom and yerba-mate!
