October 8, 2019 Lunch – Miso Noodle Soup. Dinner – Pork Green Mole

October 8, 2019 Lunch – Miso Noodle Soup. Dinner – Pork Green Mole

Some days you just need to cook.  It is turning cooler, so Noodle Soup is on the menu.  The two dishes I made today were dictated by the PPIs.

Miso Noodle Soup from PPIs

For lunch I combined clams and spaghetti, rice and vegetables, and some black beans and vegetables with a diced smoked pork chop, three types of noodles, seaweed, tofu, red miso, water, a pho seasoning cube and dehydrated dashi. It produced a thick flavorful broth.  I garnished the soup with sliced green onions and doused it with Sriracha and hoisin.

Pork Green Mole

Around 3:30 when I finished my work for the day I looked up a recipe for pork green mole on the internet.  I was pleased to find a recipe that called for the addition of chayote as a vegetable to the mole stew because I had peeled, cubed and cooked the four chayote I had bought last week for $.99 at El Super and I wanted to use them in or with a dish.  I had guessed correctly that chayote is a vegetable accompaniment to green mole because it was served with rice as vegetable accompaniments when I ordered green mole in Merida last year.  Also, I chose green mole because we now had fresh frozen hierba Santa leaves we bought in LA, which is an ingredient.

Here is the recipe I found and chose to make.

I drove to El Super and bought 8 fresh tomatillos, a white onion, a 1 lb. container of green mole sauce that’s first ingredient was ground sunflower seeds (Pipian) plus chili Arbol, some oil, and a couple of other ingredients, a 1 oz. bag of sesame seeds, 3 Serrano chilis and 1 Padilla chili.

Here is a picture of the green mole prepared sauce.

When I returned home I started cooking. I followed the recipe by dicing a 1 lb. pork tenderloin and covering with water and adding several bay leaves and cooking it slowly in a large enameled casserole. I removed the husks and stem portion from the tomatillos and cooked them vigorously in a sauce pan covered with water for about ½ hour until they turned whitish and collapsed. I destemmed a bunch of cilantro, and chopped the small white onion, and  fetched and chopped four Romaine lettuce leaves and two hierba Santa leaves Suzette had frozen and toasted ½ cup of sesame seeds and put all those ingredients plus about ½ of the prepared mole sauce into the Cuisinart and purred it and poured it over the pork that had reduced and started to brown just like the recipe instructed.

I then diced a zucchini and added the diced pieces.  Finally I added the cooked cubed chayote to the green mole stew.  As the mole simmered slowly I added additional prepared green mole to increase

the chili flavor.  I never added the Serrano or pasilla chilis because the slight chili flavor of the prepared mole was enough for us.

Willy came by at 6:00 and we picked herbs from the garden. He picked an assortment and I picked a bag each of tarragon and basil, but Willy did not stay for dinner.

I then cooked a cup of rice.

When Suzette arrived at 7:00 dinner was ready.

We spooned rice into bowls and spooned the green mole over it.  This was a incredibly rich dish. We could only eat one bowl of it. Suzette fetched bottles of Negra Modelo from the garage that we drank with dinner for a truly Mexican dinner.  We had been amazed lately how cheaply and well can eat.  This dinner is a good example.  The pound of pork cost $1.77, the four chayote cost $.99, the sesame seeds cost about $1.00, the prepared green mole cost $4.99, the tomatillos cost $.60 and the rest of the ingredients were negligible and it made about six pounds of food and we could only eat about 1 pound for both of our dinners.  So our cost was less than $1.00 each for dinner.  Now the problem is that we have five pounds of authentic green mole left.  It is time to plan a dinner party.

We ate around 7:30 and went to bed at 8:30.

It is hard to get your mind around a dinner such as green mole.  It is so different.  It is peasant food, but not of the European variety we are used to.  The flavor profiles are so different, driven by fresh vegetables and herbs that there is no meat centric flavor.  You just must accept the differentness of the dish and accept it as an expression of the indigenous Oaxaca culture and ingredients from which it was created.

Bon Appetit