It is so, so wonderful to see the sun again after all these days of pouring rain. I asked Micha to take a picture of me on the way to school this morning. You can see that I am wearing sunglasses in the picture, and the driveway is almost totally dry. We no longer have to pass through a waterfall going down the stairs to get out to the street. And the streets were also dry--at least in our area.
In class, our teacher told us that a lot of people in the lower lying areas of the town had to be evacuated from their homes and schools were closed because the main thoroughfare was flooded. The highway from San Miguel de Allende to Queretaro was also blocked and under repair.
The forecast predicts that there will be a few days of sun, followed by more rain. The hope is that the water levels in the rivers and ravines will subside sufficiently during these sunny days that there won't be major flooding when the rains start again. They are particularly worried about some of the lower lying villages on the outskirts of San Miguel.
Today the weather is still a bit cool in the shade, but blissfully warm in the sun. After class, Micha and I stayed for an optional cooking class. The menu for the day was chicken mole and Mexican rice.
There were 9 students--and we hadn't met most of them, because they are in different levels at the school. If it hadn't been raining all week, we would have met each other during the breaks between classes. But it was so terrible outside, that no one wanted to stand in the open patio area during break time. We all remained in our classrooms.
Carmen, a lovely woman who runs the office in the Academia, is also a wonderful cook and teaches the class. She had bought the ingredients and started to cook the chicken while we were still in class today. Otherwise, we would have all been too hungry to wait until the chicken was done. She handed out two sheets of paper to each of us. One sheet has the list of ingredients and a summary description of the cooking steps (in Spanish of course). The other sheet has the names and pictures of the four different types of dry chiles that she uses to make the mole.
Carmen boils the chicken in a soup pot with onion and stalks of celery and mint--similar to the way that I make chicken soup at home, except that I've never used mint. That's the easy part. The rest of it involves multiple steps and multiple ingredients (including almonds, peanuts, pecans,raisins, pitted prunes, dark chocolate, an apple and a banana!) and a lot of frying. In other circumstances, Micha is horrified by anything fried. But he seemed totally transfixed by Carmen's cooking today. We all were. And we did help a little--some more than others. The cooking area is located in a shaded area of the patio and some of us were too cold to do much of anything except watch. Micha seeded a couple of the chiles. And my sole contribution was washing the apple and later stirring the pot of mole sauce while it was simmering.
The mole was absolutely delicious. The best that I've ever had. But I'm not sure that I want to tackle trying to make it at home. Carmen suggested that I could try a shortcut--buy some mole sauce in a Mexican grocery and then add some more ingredients. That's an idea. But maybe I will try to make the whole things from scratch at least once.
In case you want to try it yourselves, here is the recipe--I'm using English, but haven't tried to convert the measurements:
Ingredients (for 10 people)
10 pieces of chicken [I recommend more. We had enough sauce for more chicken!]
200 grams of peanuts
100 grams of almonds
50 grams of pecans
100 grams of raisins
50 grams of prunes (without pits)
50 grams of pumpkins seeds
1 small roll of soft bread(optional)
1 tablespoon of sesame seeds
1 package/90 grams of dark chocolate(optional)
1 cinnamon stick
5 chiles anchos
4 chiles mulatos
3 chiles pasilla
3 spoons of sugar [You decide whether to use teaspoons or tablespoons. It depends...]
a couple of black peppercorns
2 cloves
1 onion
head of garlic
mint (one or two stalks with leaf)[Looks different than what I see in USA...]
1 or 2 stalks of celery with leaves
salt to taste
oil for cooking
a pinch of cumin seeds
1. Put the chicken in enough water to cover and season with garlic, onion, mint, celery, and salt to taste.
2. Wipe off the chiles with a clean cloth.
3. Remove seeds and veins from chiles and saute in oil until golden.
4. In the same oil, saute all of the remaining ingredients separately and in turn(nuts, raisins, prunes,pumpkin seeds, cumin seeds) until golden.
5. Put the ingredients that you have lightly fried (which may include one banana and one apple if you like the sauce to be a bit sweeter), plus the cloves and the peppercorns into a blender or food processor.
6. Put the blended ingredients into a pot and simmer on low heat until the flavors blend for about 15 minutes. Taste and add additional ingredients as desired. Keep stirring.
For the rice:
1. Saute white rice in oil until golden.
2. Add a sauce made of a blend of tomatoes (2 - 3 roma tomatoes), onion, and some water.
3. Add some of the broth from the chicken soup.
4. Cook on low flame until liquid is absorbed -- approximately 30 minutes.
To put on top of the chicken mole:
1. Lightly saute the sesame seeds.
2. Prepare a little bit of chopped onion by putting it in a dish with a little water and some lime (or lemon juice). This supposedly makes the onion easier to digest. It is an optional topping for the chicken mole.
It's good to accompany this with warm tortillas. You will want to sop up the delicious sauce.
Don't forget the cerveza!
: )
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