one of the real big upsides of being a grandma on the inside is that when tema is looking high and low for someone to wake up before 10am on a saturday to go on a tour of the mast brothers chocolate factory she stops at me. it's because last friday night in new york city, i was full on homemade thank-you-for-letting-me-sleep-on-your-sofa-bed scotch eggs and in that sofa bed by 9 with netflix and a cookbook.

so not that waking up "early" and getting on the g train was at all a chore for me, but if it had been, it would have been completely worth it.

in a heavily tattooed, bearded willy wonka way... (side note about tattoos: marian gave me a temporary one with a blue and purple pony on it and i feel almost cool enough to consider getting a real one and it's making me scared.)

like i have always felt ooooook paying a small fortune for a mast brothers bar if it's a special occasion like eggboy is playing a show in the west village, because pretty packaging and a high percentage of cocoa are my jams (!!) but now that i've learnt things about their process that go deeper than that--for example, taking very very very good care of their farmers and aging their chocolate for months upon months--i get all warm and fuzzy. and it makes me want to be bffs with michael and rick.

anywho, if you're in brooklyn and have eaten so much that you need a thing to do that doesn't require eating too much but you still want to be around food, take this tour, it is fun.

-yeh!