I have a chocolate drawer.  There.  I said it.  My deep, dark, sometimes milk secret is out in the open now. (Although technically it hasn’t been a well-kept secret. All of my neighbors know about it and I’m not shy about singing its praises.)

For the uninitiated: It’s not a drawer made out of chocolate.  It is a whole drawer in the refrigerator containing nothing but chocolate.*  Everyone should have one.  It is the secret to staying sane AND keeping a woman happy.

(This used to be in my chocolate drawer.  It’s not there now.  It’s looooong gone.)

Based on my experience, some of the many advantages of a chocolate drawer are as follows:

• It is temperature controlled. I don’t know about you, but living near the equator makes it nearly impossible for me to have a box of chocolates hidden away (at least between the months of March and November). I tried that a few times and let’s just say the chocolate ended up being a gooey mess mixed with wrappers.
• It is incredibly handy.  Need chocolate for a double batch of cookies you just found out need baked by tomorrow?  It’s in the chocolate drawer.  Need a quick gift for a friend?  Raid the chocolate drawer.
• It is incredibly comforting.   I have found it is very reassuring that an extra bar (or two or three) of my-go-to-favorites (such as Ritter Sport Mousse) are tucked away for evenings after a stressful day of work.  It is satisfying to know I still have a few Milka Alpine Milk Chocolates to randomly surprise someone with.  It’s fun to pull out chocolate nobody thought was still available, because it was stored safe in the drawer for a special occasion.

There are a few types of chocolate you’ll rarely find in my drawer:

• Chocolate with nuts.  (I wholly agree with “nuts just take up space where chocolate ought to be”.  Unless, of course, the chocolate is blended so incredibly smoothly with the nuts that the two are inseparable, Nutella-style.)
• Chocolate chips.  (a) Where I live, you can’t just walk into a grocery store and buy a bag of chocolate chips.**  (b) Why settle for chips when you can have chunks? At my house, we don’t make cookies with tiny little uniform chips.  Nope.  We chop up whole bars of chocolate into chunks instead.

Anyone who knows what’s good for them keeps their fingers out my drawer.  I’ve been known to be very territorial.  (There are some who would say the “very” is an understatement.  Of course they are the same people who call me The Dictator Cook. But that is a story for another day.)

So, there you have it; one of the secrets to making someone you love very happy.

His or her own chocolate drawer.

You’re welcome.

*Sometimes my mother runs out of space in the refrigerator and resorts to storing non-chocolate related things in my drawer temporarily.  She once had the audacity to put raisins in there.
**No, I do not live on the moon.