November 17, 2014 Sautéed Chicken in Mole Sauce

We had decided to make chicken in mole sauce for dinner with the dark mole cube we bought at Altos Ranch Market on Saturday.  The recipe called for boiling a chicken but Suzette likes sautéed chicken better, so she made about three cups of chicken broth while she sautéed the chicken.  We then emulsified one of the cubes of dark mole we had bought at Altos Ranch Market yesterday in a skillet filled with chicken stock (Altos sells cubes of fresh made mole concentrate that are not in bottles in oil, so they make a much cleaner tasting less oily mole.  The mole went into solution quickly but did not thicken.

Suzette had also selected a fresh pumpkin recipe from Diana Kennedy’s Oaxaca al Gusto cookbook, so Suzette roasted the pumpkin we had bought at the Farmers’ Market for Halloween that was still out on our porch in the morning and I spent about an hour peeling and cubing about ½ of the pumpkin.  When Suzette returned home from work at 5:00 she peeled and cubed the rest of the pumpkin and bagged most of it for our Christmas Eve party.  She decided to cook about three cups of the fresh pumpkin.  The recipe called for sauteing the pumpkin in fresh garlic and serrano chili and then garnishing with fresh cilantro and mint.

Suzette had brought a handful of fresh mint from the Center and I went to the garden and lifted the plastic covering one of our raised beds and selected three or four sprigs of cilantro.

We also made two cups of rice.

After we both tasted the mole sauce and decided it did not have as good a flavor as we wished and was too thin and needed some other ingredient.  We decided to add sugar and cook it about thirty minutes longer.   The sugar helped and I have since read on pages 275-276 of Rick Bayless’ Mexican Kitchen Cookbook that tourist restaurants in Mexico often make mole from a commercial mole paste and add sugar to make it more palatable to tourists.  I felt like we are on the right path of research that will hopefully lead us in Mexico to real mole.

I wanted a green vegetable so I snipped flowrets from two stalks of broccoli and we steamed them.  

After we cooked the pumpkin and the mole a few more minutes, we fetched two beers and were ready to eat.

Bon Appétit