I made two awesome discoveries today.

I've been on a dairy-free, soy-free diet for the past 5 months, and the hardest part for me was giving up hot chocolates (my favorite addiction!). I tried making them with rice milk, but the results were inevitably disgusting. Then my wonderful parents told me about this Valentine's Day recipe from the New York Times: Coconut Hot Chocolate. It uses coconut milk as the base, I made it this morning...and OMG it is heavenly! It might even be better than the old dairy hot chocolate I used to make! (I will of course be running many scientific experiments to test that point once my dairy ban is finally lifted.) This morning's hot chocolate was rich and creamy and completely swoon-worthy. I hope to make it again tomorrow...I already can't wait to taste it again! It is 100% recommended to everybody, no matter what your dietary preferences. (Unless, of course, you don't like the taste of coconut, in which case it probably wouldn't work.)

My second discovery was that "The Five Days of Justice Merriwell", my alternate-17th-century historical fantasy story, has been published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. This is the story I wrote in a burst of inspiration after watching Simon Schama's two A History of Britain episodes about the English Civil War and Oliver Cromwell's rule afterwards. It was one of my favorite stories to write, and it's also one of the only short stories I've written that could be classified as YA, although it is way darker than the Kat novels. You can read it for free here.

Now I'm going to go back to picking out photos from our recent Wales trip to upload onto Flickr (castles! rivers! daffodils! I love Wales in the spring) and fantasizing about tomorrow's hot chocolate...