Hot Chocolate Submarinos

Last week, my son Solomon had high school finals. On one of the exam days he finished early, and would have had to wait about 3 hours before the school bus could take him home. He decided to make his own way home and ended up waiting outside in the chilly rain for over an hour for a public bus that could drop him about a mile from home. When Solomon reached home, he was cold, tired, and wet and asked if I could make him some hot chocolate. I was proud of him for being so independent and getting home on his own without disrupting my work day and I wanted to make him something special. I thought of the most delectable hot chocolate drink I had once sipped in a café at a bus terminal in a remote area of Argentina, when I too, was feeling chilled from winter travel. When I ordered hot chocolate, I was surprised when the bartender served me hot milk with a chocolate bar on the side. He told me to dunk the chocolate in the milk until it melted.  

After making sure I wasn't the butt of a clueless tourist joke, I took a sip and was enthralled. It was one of the most delicious things I had ever tasted, just the perfect thing to turn around a day when I was feeling lonely and far from home. I don't know why it took me 25 years to try making Argentinian chocolate submarinos but I'm glad I finally did. (They're called submarinos because you dunk the chocolate into the milk like it's a submarine.) Solomon couldn't stop talking about how delicious the hot chocolate submarino was (he even boasted about it to his friends on Facebook!), and how much better it made him feel, so I knew I had to share the recipe with you. If one of your kids has a particularly challenging day, these hot chocolate concoctions are sure to both cheer and warm them up.