HOLY MOLE!

Ever since my older son, Sam, came home from my neighbor’s house raving about the chicken mole he’d had for dinner, I’ve been trying to make the dish myself. I should say I’ve been trying to make an edible version of the dish. It’s been close to a year now and I’ve prepared no less than four putrid renditions of mole sauce, ranging from an über-time-consuming one that sent me on a search for Pasilla chilies and Mexican chocolate, to one so simple that all you had to do was add chicken broth to a bottle of supermarket mole poblano sauce.

You’re probably thinking to yourself, “How bad could they really have been?” Well, pardon my French, but we have a saying in my family when something tastes truly awful, and I can still picture Sam taking one bite of the made-from-the-bottle mole and telling me, “Mom, this tastes like ass.” If ass tastes like spoiled milk interlaced with hot sauce and chunks of bitter chocolate, then he was right.

I was finally successful with my last try, a recipe that I found on the Rachael Ray magazine website, believe it or not.

Bob nearly begged me not to make the mole again. “Laura, I don’t understand. Why are you doing this to me?” he asked.

“If, I get the recipe right, you’ll like it,” I promised him.

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“I don’t think I like mole, even at a restaurant,” he said.

“Yes, you do. Remember the time at Guadalajara when you tasted Lauren Fisher’s mole sauce and you said it was so good?”

In case you haven’t figured it out already, not only am I the Inspired Chef but I’m also the Obstinately Determined Chef. Even though I’d had a succession of failures, I wasn’t going to give up because I really wanted to nail this mole sauce. That wasn’t my only reason though. Bob had had some complications from a recent sinus surgery, i.e., major nosebleeds, and we had to cancel our winter vacation to Mexico’s “Mayan Riviera,” just south of Cancun, which we’d planned over a year ago with four other families. I cried the entire day we were supposed to have left, and drank tequila straight from the Patron bottle until I couldn’t see straight.

In my haze, I reminisced about an event that took place back when Bob and I were in college. I was a little sister in his fraternity and they were having a “Let’s Go to Mexico” party. Whereas all the other fraternities had similar bashes where the winning couple would be given two tickets to go away on a vacation to Puerto Vallarta or some Caribbean island, the Sigma Chi version was a little different. In a nutshell, you were supposed to drink so much tequila that you passed out and thought you went to Mexico. If my memory serves me correctly, the “winner” here was the person who fell asleep on the couch and got a Frito Bandito mustache drawn on his upper lip in permanent black marker.

Pulling myself together, I decided that if we couldn’t go to Mexico, I was going to bring Mexico to us. So, that’s where the mole came back into the picture.

Do you know what the history of mole is? According to http://www.mexonline.com/, mole poblano is a “thick rich, chocolate-tinged sauce made famous in the colonial mountain city of Puebla, Mexico.” According to the website, “Some sources say that moles have as many as 100 ingredients, but that’s an exaggeration . . . 30 ingredients are not unheard of, and some mole recipes contain 10 different types of chilies alone. Other ingredients include: peanuts, almonds, fried bread, plantains, lard, sugar, bittersweet chocolate, cinnamon and cloves.”

I had invited our friends, the Peskoes, for dinner. My original plan was to make two different moles, and I figured we could vote on our favorite sauce. That plan came to a halt after I prepared the first recipe, which actually had some of the ingredients I just mentioned. To my horror, it was as terrible as all of its predecessors, tasting heavily of peanut butter and some unidentifiable taste that made me want to be sick. I ended up pouring the entire contents of my Le Creuset iron pot (it was heavy!) down the drain of my kitchen sink.

My heart was heavy too, and I admit I was disappointed. I sat at the kitchen counter and moped as I read over the ingredients for my next mole, the one I had gotten from Rachael Ray. I didn’t have high hopes, as this recipe didn’t actually have any of the ingredients listed on the mexonline.com website, plus it called for Reese’s peanut butter cups. I mean really, how can any decent recipe for mole have peanut butter cups in it? I decided to unwrap a Reese’s cup and eat it while I mulled this over. “Mmmm,” I said out loud. I’d forgotten how good they were, so chocolaty, peanut buttery and sugary sweet! I decided that maybe there was hope for the recipe after all – but not much.

The first thing I did was heat a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil in my pot and sauté some chopped up onions and garlic. Then I added a little allspice and stirred the mixture together. While my other recipe that day had included cinnamon and ground cloves, this one had substituted allspice, which I assumed was a combination of those two and other spices. Later research on the web would prove me wrong. According to Wikipedia, “Allspice is the dried unripe fruit of the Pimenta dioica plant, a tree native to the Greater Antilles, southern Mexico and Central America. The name ‘allspice’ was coined by the English, who thought it combined the flavor of several aromatic spices, such as cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves.”

My next step was to add some canned fire-roasted tomatoes, chicken broth, espresso powder, peanut butter cups, raisins, a pinch of salt and, last but not least, half of a chipotle chile in adobo sauce. The recipe called for a whole chile plus a teaspoon of the adobo sauce, but I highly advise against this unless you are into really fiery food. Plus, you can always add more later if you want. The sauce’s faintly sweet smell, hinting at a hidden spiciness, made me believe that I might be heading in the right direction.

After the mixture simmered for a while, I let it cool down and then pureed it in the blender with a little extra broth. The result was a thick, brownish-red sauce that at least looked like mole. The real test would be to taste it. Tentatively, I stuck my wooden spoon in the blender and brought a small amount of the mole to my lips. The sauce actually tasted good, with touches of chocolate and cinnamon, followed by a delayed reaction in the back of my throat when the heat of the chipotle chile kicked in. If not exactly like the restaurant mole, it was close.

Our friends came over for dinner that night, and I served the mole poblano over some grilled chicken cutlets and brown rice, and accompanied it with a salad. I held my breath when everyone lifted up their forks and took their first bites, but to my relief, they seemed to like the mole. Bob even had a second helping. So while there were no sombreros or suntans for us that week, at least we had a little taste of Mexico.


PEANUT BUTTER CUP CHICKEN MOLE
www.rachelraymag.com
From Every Day with Rachael Ray, October 2008

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 small onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
3/4 cup fire-roasted diced tomatoes
3/4 cup chicken broth
1 chipotle chile in adobo sauce, chopped, plus 1 teaspoon adobo sauce
1 teaspoon espresso powder
3 peanut butter cups, such as Reese’s, chopped
1/4 cup raisins
Salt and pepper
1 pound chicken cutlets

In a small skillet, heat 1 tablespoon oil over medium heat. Add the onion and garlic and cook until the onion is soft and the garlic is just beginning to brown, about 5 minutes. Stir in the allspice and cook, stirring, for 2 minutes. Stir in the tomatoes with some of their juice, 1/2 cup chicken broth, the chile and adobo sauce, espresso powder, peanut butter cups, raisins and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Simmer over low heat for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Let cool slightly.

Meanwhile, in a large skillet, heat the remaining 1 tablespoon oil over medium heat. Season the chicken cutlets with salt and pepper, then cook for 3 minutes per side. Remove from the skillet and cover loosely with foil to keep warm.

Using a food processor, puree the cooled sauce with remaining 1/4 cup chicken broth, scraping down the sides if necessary. Spoon the mole sauce over the chicken.

Serves 4