May 20, 2021 Lunch - Sashimi and Sushi rice. Dinner - Chicken Mole with Black beans, rice, avocado and green bean salad

May 20, 2021 Lunch - Sashimi and Sushi rice. Dinner - Chicken Mole with Black beans, rice, avocado and green bean salad

I cooked the preparatory dishes required for dinner this morning. 

I started by draining the water soaking the black beans.  Then I filled the French casserole I had soaked the beans in with fresh water and began to simmer them.  I diced a large onion, four stalks of celery, four cloves of garlic, and three carrots and sautéed those ingredients in a large pot with 3 T. of butter, 2/3 of a red bell pepper, and 2 T. of olive oil until they softened.  

Then I put some of the mirepoix into the beans and added water to the large pot, skinned the three leg quarters I bought at El Super yesterday, separated the legs from the thighs, and put the chicken pieces into the large pot and simmered it for several hours.  I added cilantro stems and about 2 T. of Mexican oregano to the beans and simmered the beans all day, adding water as necessary to keep the beans covered.  After lunch I put the cover on the casserole, which caused the beans to come to a rolling boil, so I turned the heat down a bit and they finally began to soften.

After starting the beans and chicken cooking, I cooked 1 1/2 cups of rice with a T. of chicken flavored better than bouillon and then worked about an hour until 1:00 when I ate lunch.  

Lunch - 

I sliced slices of raw salmon and tuna and daikon and filled the dipping bowl with soy and wasabi sauce.  I put pickled ginger into a bowl and put it on the table.  Then I made sushi rice by filling a bowl with the warm rice and adding rice vinegar and Aji Mirin to the rice and heating the rice in the microwave.  

Finally I made a cup of green tea and I was ready to eat.  I enjoyed the fresh raw fish, daikon, and pickled ginger dipped into the soy and wasabi mixture and the sushi rice was drier and better tasting that the over sauced wet stuff I made yesterday.

After lunch I sliced the 5 Persian cucumbers I bought yesterday and added them to the revived and increased volume of the pickling medium that I had added salt and water to to hold the additional pickles.

I then removed the six chicken pieces from the broth and removed the meat from the bones and took the broth to the garage fridge and refrigerated the meat.

I checked the market and was pleased that my portfolio gained 1.8% today.  But it still is 5.4% below its recent all time high.  So it will three more such day’s gain to return to my recent all time high.  But I am thrilled things and going in the right direction after the worst few days of sell off in the market since March 2020, in which my portfolio lost approximately 7.2% of its value.

I guess the good news is that the 7.2% drop in my portfolio is not even close to the 33% drop in Bitcoin that occurred from Elon Musk’s decision to stop taking Bitcoin in payment for Tesla cars.  The precipitous drop in Bitcoin shows me and others that Bitcoin has not achieved the status of a store of value that makes it a hedge against inflation that  gold enjoys and has a long way to go to becoming a medium of exchange.  As Willy’s friend Brian said the other day, “You can not buy a cup of coffee with bitcoins.”

It was approaching 3:45 when I decided to walk the half mile to the Clerk’s Voting Annex at 15th and Lomas to vote.  It was warm so I took my time and took a sugar pill. The only item on the ballot was the election of the replacement for Deb Haaland and I was the only one voting, so I returned home by 4:45.

Suzette was home working in her office, so at 5:00 we closed the two doors that separate our respective offices and I meditated for 30 minutes with the group by zoom.

Dinner - I lay down for a few minutes after meditation, but at 6:00 Suzette was ready to cook dinner.  She fetched the two types of red mole we had in the fridge and we used about 1/4 lb. of each.  I fetched the broth from the fridge and skimmed off some of the grease that had gathered on the surface and we dissolved the mole in a little more than 1 cup of chicken broth.  When the mole went into solution and turned into a sauce, I diced about 1 lb. of chicken meat into large bite sized pieces and we added the diced chicken meat to the sauce and cooked it for a few minutes to absorb the flavor of the sauce.  The sauce had a perfect creamy texture and that unique mole flavor blend of chocolate sweetness and chili hotness.

I fetched cold Negras and Dos Equis beers from the garage fridge and diced an avocado into small cubes and Suzette fetched the new container of Mexican sour cream and the green bean salad and plated bowls with a pile of rice, then a pile of mole, and finally a pile of black beans with a bit of bean water.

The beans and rice had little flavor but the mole had more than enough to give the dish a strong mole flavor. We added sour cream, green bean salad, and avocado and loved the dish. 

And we have a bucket of chicken broth, a bucket of black beans, and about a lb. of chicken meat left, so we could repeat the recipe or use the PPIs for other dishes.

We made a plate for Willy with the mole that was left and he came by around 8:00 and heated it and ate some for his dinner. 

After Willy left we watched a new episode of Midsomer Mystery and went to bed at 9:45.  I found that I was invigorated by my one mile walk to the voting center.

I woke up at 1:45 to finish the blog with reduced pain in my legs.

I did not mind the effort involved in cooking all of the ingredients for the mole because the result was so delicious and we were saved the hardest part of the dish by utilizing commercially prepared mole. In fact, both of the prepared moles we used were made in Mexico for sale in Mexico.  Prepared mole sauces are sold in all the supermarkets in Mexico.  My guess is that except for high end restaurants, almost every cook in Mexico uses store bought moles and dissolves them in chicken broth the way we did.

Willy did not eat all of his dish so there is some mole left for my lunch some day.

After dinner I drank a cup of chai and ate four of the new cookies I bought at El Super; vanilla creme between two chocolate biscuits, similar to an Oreo but with a hole in the middle of the biscuit where the creme is visible; at $1.49 for 20 oz., a super buy.

Bon Appetit