V-day and Week from...you know

Since DC tends to make everything a little more stressful, C and I decided not to try to brave the Valentine's Day crowd. Instead, we went to ACKC, one of the best DC chocolatiers, before having dinner at my apt. ACKC was, not surprisingly, pretty crowded. It was V-day, so one would think that they would be prepared for a large crowd, but it was like a comedy of errors. Everything in the store was broken. One of their big draws during the winter is their flavored hot chocolates, but something was wrong with their flavor, so they only had regular hot chocolate. Luckily, we weren't there for the hot chocolate - we wanted their chocolate and wine. We had gotten a "DC Tasting Table" e-mail that touted the store's new chocolate and wine pairings. When I got to the front I ordered 2 of the "2 chocolates and 2 wines" tasting, which are 2 wine tastings each paired with a chocolate. The conversation went something like this:

Me: I'd like 2 of the "2 chocolates and 2 wines"
ACKC guy: Ok, 2 of the what?
Me: I want 2 of the "2 chocolates and 2 wines." Meaning, I want 2 in quantity. I want 2 champagnes and 2 of this red (which I pointed to him on the menu).
ACKC guy: Ok, what year is that? I'm not old enough to drink, so I don't know.
Me: No problem. It's this one, the 2007 (again pointing on the menu).
ACKC: So, you want 2 of those?
Me: Yes, I want 2 of those plus 2 of the champagnes for the "2 chocolates and 2 wines."
ACKC: Ok, that'll be $9.
Me: For 2 of them?
ACKC: Oh, you wanted 2. Ok, look at this and make sure I wrote it right. 2 champagnes and 2 2007 Cotes du Rhone.
Me: Yes, that's right.

We sat down at the bar and watched them scurry around in the back, making hot chocolate. When they came to our order, the lady went to the cashier and had basically the same conversation with him that I had. If naming something "2 chocolates and 2 wines" was going to be so difficult, then should have named it something without numbers.

When they finally straightened out the confusion, they brought us our order in these cute little glasses where the chocolate is in the bottom and the wine is in a small glass that fits in the top. The only flaw is that the top glass doesn't have a flat bottom, so you can't set it down by itself; C almost learned the hard way. The email and menu made a big deal of how good a pairing could be and listed out all the different, unusual chocolates that would match well, so I was a little disappointed when I saw that I had 2 dark chocolate truffles and C had 1 dark and 1 milk chocolate. The champagne and truffle was fabulous! I was definitely impressed by the matching, no matter how simple. The 2nd was gross. The chocolate was delicious, but the wine tasted like butter water - yuck.

Anyways, I didn't mean to turn that into a review. It was just an amusing experience for us. For dinner, we had baked grits with proscuitto and mushrooms (C did an excellent job on the sauce), salad, and skirt steak with garlic cilantro sauce. It was really yummy and so much easier and more relaxing than fighting a DC crowd.

Avoiding stress on Sunday night was especially important since Monday was the beginning of the week from Hades. As mentioned in my previous blog, we had a lot of snow that caused me to lose 4 days of school. Not that I really minded at the time, but I knew it would come back to haunt me. This past week we resumed a normal schedule, but it consisted of a lot of catch up. The way it was originally designed, I was to have exams on a fairly consistent schedule: Thursday (of snow week), Wed, Wed, and Tues in consecutive weeks. Our redesigned schedule moved our snow week test to the next Thurs, and the Wed test was pushed to Fri. What it meant for me: back to back tests. Not fun. I made it through the first test and pulled a college-style (semi) all-nighter to survive. I made it - just to start the cycle all over again next week.