Ginger Chocolate Pudding

On Sunday I tried to eat a sandwich for lunch and had excruciating, shooting pain in my right jaw/ear when I tried to chew. My doctor says I have TMJ and put me on a soft food diet for awhile. So, I've been eating smoothies, soup and other things that I can mush around and swallow without too much effort.

It seemed like this was a good time to treat myself to some chocolate pudding, which I haven't had in ages. Sad but true: I've never made pudding from scratch! But I found a recipe on Simply Recipes and I had all of the ingredients so I whipped up a batch. Instead of the chocolate chips, I used about half a bar of the Extra Strong Dark Chocolove bar that I like to keep in the fridge (my favorite basic dark chocolate bar). I also had a thumb-size piece of fresh ginger in the fridge, so I grated that and added that at the same time as the chocolate bits. The result is amazing, if I do say so myself.

(Photo credit: Under creative commons license from foodchronicles because I'm feeling far too lazy to take a decent pudding picture myself.)