Simple red Mole with meat, fowl and fruit: recipe

Simple red Mole with meat, fowl and fruit

After much anticipation, I took my first stab at a traditional Mexican mole dish. Taking a conservative approach, I opted for the simplest of the 7 Oaxacan moles (only requiring 1.5 hours of active prep time!).

See the recipe images in the following blog post.

Review:

• the sauce was a bit runny than I would prefer, as well as a touch oily. Perhaps I didn't simmer at high enough temperature to reduce the sauce?
• The sauce was somewhat dominated by the apple cider vinegar ingredient, in my opinion. The ancho chilies were quite mild both in spiciness and flavor intensity in comparison.
• The pork was quite satisfactory, but not falling apart tender
• all in all, satisfying and Mexican-rustic in character

Modifications

• used skinless chicken drumsticks (de-skinned myself) instead of skinless chicken breast meat. This seemed to work well; simmered for a total of 25 or 30 minutes instead of the 13 minutes recommended for breast meat.

Notes:

• Used all the pre-ground spices to save time; I wonder how much this reduced the flavor intensity?
• waited until my plantain skin was on the order of 25% black. This seemed to be plenty ripe enough in the end (the cookbooks suggested that a fully ripe plantain is almost entirely black)
• using one of my tall, medium-width pots seem to provide plenty of room during the simmering process
  

Classic tortilla soup

I mostly followed the recipe from "Authentic Mexican" by Bayless. He describes it as a "quintessentially Mexican soup". The final product received excellent reviews from my housemate Mike (as well as me).

Procedure remarks:

• in my first rendition, I forgot to include cubes of fresh cheese in the serving bowls; instead I had avocado chunks, which is just slightly less standard
• also, I forgot to serve with lime wedges, the sourness of which supposedly really bring out the flavors
• instead of using 1.5 quarts of chicken broth, I used one qt of broth and water for the remainder
• I didn't have any ready-made corn chips, so I fried sliced up, stale corn tortillas. While serving left overs the following day, I tried "oven frying" some tortilla strips by taking a tortilla, spring it on both sides of using aerosol-based olive oil and placing under an intense oven broiler for a couple of minutes. In my opinion, this worked better: the strips turned out less greasy and the cleanup was much easier than deep frying in a pot of oil. The challenge was, not over-browning them, though.
  

Roadside whole chicken

This is another recipe from Bayless that was very good, but not easily recognizable as a "Mexican" from my perspective. The heart of the seasoning mixture is the powdered ancho chile pepper. Note that this is one of the most mild peppers and so the chicken is really not that spicy.

Firstly, I didn't really have a functioning grill, so I used the oven to roast instead.

I roasted some sweet potato wedges along with the chicken after briefly soaking them in the same marinade. They turned out delicious and extremely healthy.

DIFFICULTIES:
First, I found the marinade/rub to be a little too runny. I think it would work better if it was more of a thick paste that wood not just run off of the sides of the chicken once applied. This could probably be achieved by simply adding less orange juice and vinegar. I tried mixing in a little bit of a cornstarch slurry to the marinade, but was very hesitant to add much at all.

Cooking chicken all the way through: although the recipe suggested leaving the chicken in the grill for 45 minutes (until the thigh temperature reached about 160°), I ended up going for close to 2 hours in my 325° oven and the breast had only reached 157° at that point. Unfortunately, I was trying to go off my" temperature rules" from memory.

Just now, I did some more research and Alton Brown takes his turkeys out when the breast temperature reaches 161°. Emeril takes his roast chickens out when the thigh temperature reaches 160°. On Yahoo Answers, people give a range of "take-out" temperatures from 160 to 170°. In the future, I will take-out the whole chicken once the breast temperature has just exceeded 160°.

The reason my cooking process took so long (2 hours) was because I only used an oven temperature of 325° as opposed to 400 or 450 as many other people do.

Swiss chard with tomatoes and potatoes

This recipe comes from "Authentic Mexican". Ironically, of all the Mexican dishes I have made recently, this is the one that tasted the least "Mexican" in my opinion. (That's probably due to the fact that the US has given me a very distorted perspective of true Mexican cuisine.) The book points out that Swiss chard is one of the most common greens eaten in Mexico.

The 2 truly characteristic Mexican ingredients in this dish are the Serrano chili peppers and the epazote leaves I couldn't really taste either in the final product, though.

I did follow the "suggested variant" of adding chunks of queso fresco -- this added a nice richness.

The one mistake I made was to use a wide skillet instead of a pot. This meant that during the stage of simmering the potato chunks, the potatoes were only partially covered with the liquid broth, which led to much slower and uneven cooking of the potatoes (as well as the broth evaporating off too quickly.)

In any event, the dish tasted healthy, and nourishing; certainly nothing spectacular, though.

Salad dressings: lime-cilantra, chipotle-basalmic

"Chicken Verde" with roasted poblano peppers

Thankfully, we decided to make this dish a 2nd time (with Nick and Maureen) and were able to get a  photo.

It was a huge success -- Maureen likes to call it the "green crack sauce".

I was worried that the boneless skinless chicken breasts would end up being dry and boring, but by cutting them up into thirds before cooking, I think it worked out well. The chicken was moist; the sauce was pungent and creamy and the peppers had that nice smoky flavor.