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How to Identify Good Chocolate

While not your usual step-by-step instructions, it provides more information than I think 98-99% of the U.S. population has that’s required to know what’s “good” and what’s… not good.

The February 2006 issue of Gourmet magazine has a nice ranked list of chocolate (available in the U.S.) that they tested in a brownie recipe. Valrhona was ranked #1, an relatively unknown at #2 (no one I know has heard of them), and Scharffen-Berger at #3.

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Mediocrity by “areas of improvement”

Excerpt:

Creating Passionate Users: Mediocrity by “areas of improvement”
How many times in your life (school, career, relationships) have you been told about your “areas of improvement”? How much time and energy have you spent working on those areas? If you’re a manager, how much emphasis do you put on those areas during a performance review?

Maybe instead of working on our weaknesses, we should be enhancing and exploiting our strengths? What if the price for working on weakness (and who even decides what is and isn’t a “weakness”?) is less chance to be f’n amazing?

There are several books out about this, although I haven’t read them — but the idea gets my attention:

Teach With Your Strengths, which says on its Amazon page,
“Defying the orthodoxy that teachers, to be more well rounded, should work to strengthen their weaknesses, this book, drawing on research by the Gallup Organization, maintains that great teachers are those who teach with their greatest talents and abilities.”