The Best Holiday Gift You Can Give! A Year’s Supply of Askinosie, America’s Best Chocolate!
Napaman was one of the earliest press aficionados of Shawn Askinosie’s silky-textured, hand-crafted, seriously decadent chocolates.
Shawn Askinosie, lawyer-turned-chocolate-maker
Now Shawn, a lawyer-turned-chocolate maker, has outdone himself with a new product option: A Year’s Supply of Chocolate, shipped monthly to anyone in the country.
Shawn introduced the C (for chocolate) Ration box about a year ago; it’s a handmade wooden box containing everything a serious chocoholic needs for the short haul: A month’s ration of mini-Askinosie bars (21 grams’ worth per day) individually wrapped for daily use. The Emergency Kit also contains four extra daily rations, I suppose for those occasional months with 34 days, or for those days which progress so slowly they seem like months.
In total, the Askinosie C-Ration box contains 96 individual mini-chocolate bars. Some are my personal all-time favorite bars, made with Del Tambo Ecuadorian chocolate, while others are made with Askinosie’s stunning dark Mexican Soconusco chocolate. Either way, you can’t lose.
After-Eight Dinner Mints are so… 2008!
We had a C-Ration box a while back, which lasted briefly in our home; I offered it at the end of Carol’s extravagant home-cooked dinners to guests, asking them to help themselves to an after-dinner chocolate.
A year ago, there was no where locally I could send guests to buy their own Askinosie bars, when they fell victim to Shawn’s sensual chocolates, becoming dependent on them.
My how times change! Today, any of our dinner guests who get hooked on chocolates in the C-Ration box, which I pass around after dinner, can find these superior chocolates – in larger format tablets, or bars - in many Bay-area Whole Foods locations as well as at our supremely well stocked, and well managed, neighborhood grocery in St. Helena, Sunshines.
What you find when you open the wooden box – a stamped message from the chocolate-maker.
What makes Askinosie chocolates so special is that, as far as I am aware, these are the ONLY chocolates made in the United States, which contain NO lecithin (usually added as an emulsifier) and NO vanilla. What you taste is unadulterated, single-origin, fair-trade, handcrafted, silken-textured, sensual chocolate. Do I make my point?
Break off a piece and let it melt on your tongue; resist the urge to chew. The melting fondant is primal chocolate, essential chocolate, the Mother of All Chocolates.
If you know how, or where, to get a richer, darker, deeper, more penetrating hit of chocolate, please share with napaman; as it stands, I think of Askinosie Chocolate as a Basic Food Group; like vegetables or fruits, one should have several pieces of Shawn’s chocolate everyday to constitute a healthy, balanced diet.
To help you live up to this chocolate regime, Shawn has several commercial options: You an order a single month’s C-Ration box online for $68.50 or you can step up to the plate and be a real mensch and give someone – or yourself - a full year’s supply of C-Rations. For $921.50, Shawn will send out one of these wooden boxes with 96 mini-bars every month, 12 times in a row, with delivery included.
Interested? Go to https://www.askinosie.com/p-47-c-ration-month-supply-of-chocolate.aspx to place your holiday gift orders – while Shawn still has time to fill them and deliver the first of 12 monthly boxes to your gift recipient.