The 'rents, a.k.a. Terry and Harley, sent down a 10-pound bar of Ghirardelli chocolate for Christmas 2002. What an amazing sight! It's 1.5 inches thick by about 10 inches wide by almost 17 inches long. That's one impressive piece of chocolate!
12-27-02:
We opened it up on the evening of the 24th and have been
nibbling at it regularly since...
We'd been cutting chunks off the
lower right corner for eating; notice how little evidence there
is of anything missing there...
However, when we unwrapped
the whole thing to take the picture, we discovered some
broken bits on the other side, so we'll probably move there next.
(Click on the small photo for a larger version.)
1-4-03:
As suggested, we are now working on the left side... at least it now
looks like something's missing...
1-15-03:
We made a pretty good dent in it this past week mainly
by chopping chunks off and
giving them away to the
dance troupe.
1-26-03:
A little progress this week... On the right you
can see some chunks we cut off but haven't eaten yet
(keeping them in ziplocks meanwhile.)
The right side does look a bit larger than it really is
because of some shavings that have accumulated there.
2-2-03:
About the only thing we were able to do
this week was finish off
the chunks that were in the ziplocks last week.
2-9-03:
A fair bit out this week, mainly used as an energy booster
for the
dance troupe and friends for their
performance at the Florida State Fair in Tampa.
I think we can say the bar is now over 50% done,
since the top (larger) measurement is 8.5", just a tad more
than 1/2 the original size.
2-16-03:
Not a whole lot of progress this week.
However, here's an interesting bit of trivia I learned
watching a TV program about chocolate on the Food Channel:
the average American eats 11 pounds of chocolate each year.
That means this single bar was almost a
year's worth of chocolate!
3-2-03:
Progress has been slow, so it's been 2 weeks since the
last report.
The weather's been warmer lately, so I've had to keep the
bar in the 'fridge between chunk removals and photo ops.
This has caused some discoloration in the nice uniform
dark chocolate color it started out with.
3-14-03:
Not much progress... made it through some of the chunks,
and you can see more refridgerator discoloration (although
I'm not sure that qualifies as "progress").
3-29-03:
More discoloration.... A fair amount gone because
pieces of the bar have been carried to Minneapolis and Chicago
for sharing with dance friends.
We might be at a stage where we can chunk the rest of it up soon.
4-6-03:
Well, did quite a bit of chunking, but not a whole lot more actually
eaten....
4-20-03:
Well, the bar is defunct, having been reduced to chunks in ziplocks.
However, note that each ziplock has about 6 oz. of chocolate in it
(except for the one that's currently "in process"), so there's
still well over a pound and a half left.
5-19-03:
Progress has been slow, so I decided to make chocolate chunk cookies with
most of what was left. I used up the better part of 2 ziplocks for
the cookies, but we're still not done with the chocolate.
Although
they're not pictured (they look like the ziplocks in the other pictures),
we have 1 "full" ziplock (c. 6 oz.) plus another
"in process" left.
6-9-03: No picture available, mainly because there's not much to picture. The cookies were officially done on June 6, but we're still working on the last few ounces of the chocolate chunks...
10-03:
Amazingly, the bar wasn't officially finished until early October 2003.
After the bar was completely chunkified, and the cookies were gone,
we tended to forget that there was still some leftover chocolate that
still needed to be consumed,
so it took rather longer than one would have predicted based on the
earlier returns.
Return home