0 Champan-Hayes-Boh

For a small honors seminar this semester, I decided to hold the final exam as a discussion over food at Casa Hayes-Boh. I decided to make champandongo the main course, as I have been thinking about this mole-based (MOH-lay) dish ever since we had it here with a group of Pam's students here three years ago.

In that case, Pam had made the food of Coma Agua Para Chocolate a major theme of her Spanish course, and had secured an undergraduate research grant to facilitate having the class make most of the dishes from Laura Esquivel's book (see my posts on its revolutionary context and on Latin American films).

We have cooked several of the dishes from Esquivel's work before -- most notably chicken based on her quail-and-rose-petal recipe, but Pam's class project was far more ambitious, especially since it involved students, many of whom had little if any cooking experience. Working in pairs, students created both a fabulous meal and a permanent record of their culinary efforts. Each post on the CAPCR blog explains how a dish was prepared and how it is connected to the story. All of the dishes were shared at our house during this 8:00 a.m. class. Most were then served again -- either remade or thawed from leftovers -- at an undergraduate research colloquium open to the entire campus.

I must admit that I know the movie far better than the book, and so was unaware of champandongo prior to this adventure with the students. I have been a huge fan of mole -- a complex chocolate-chile sauce usually associated with poultry -- since Pam and I spent the summer of 1989 in Puebla, Mexico. The sauce is properly known as mole poblano, meaning "sauce of Puebla" and represents one of the several ways cacao was used for centuries before people thought of it as a candy. Its use in this lasagna-style dish was simply amazing, and it is hard to believe I have not yet attempted it myself.

In planning my own version, I of course began with the description by Sullivan and Laura. (Incidentally, Sullivan is the only student in this class who I knew previously, both as a student and a long-time family friend.) As complex as the dish was, however, I knew that authentic mole is much more complicated: Campbell's soup, for instance, was rarely available to the ancient Aztecs. I turned to the Hispanic Kitchen blog for more authentic versions, and quickly found an impressive recipe for chicken mole.

Detail: Champan-Hayes-Boh

0 The Secret Ingredient is L.O.V.E.

We planned our Valentine's dinner for over a week, with one overriding goal: no crowded restaurants for us. With a little work and forethought, we knew we could have a superior dinner with no reservations. Each year at this time, we recall an evening spent wandering from restaurant to restaurant, skipping a 20-minute wait only to find a 40-minute wait, eventually settling for a dinner that was made enjoyable mostly by our readiness to eat anything.

Once we established the Valentine's-Day-at-Home tradition, actually, we have endeavored to make it both a romantic and delicious experience, and this year we seem to have done quite well. We each prepared an entree, waited a bit, and then each of us created part of dessert.

James: A week before the event, I accidentally recycled the newspaper in which I had seen a very intriguing recipe for steak tips with mole (moh-LAY) sauce. Librarian Pam said, "Have no fear!" (or words to that effect), since newspaper recipes are all syndicated and will show up easily on some other paper's site. About 2.5 seconds later, I was looking at Beef Mole with Buttery Baguette, courtesy of The Oregonian.

Fans of this blog will know that we have an affinity for mole, more properly known as mole poblano, after the Mexican state of Puebla, where we spent the summer of 1989. Although I love making "real" mole, it was nice to find this "express" version of the recipe, a gringo simplification that required no pepper roasting and a simplified ingredient list. I followed the recipe as written, using our new immersion blender for the sauce itself. Just as I was bringing it to boil, I realized that two vinegars from our friends and fellow Retrievers at Lebherz Oil and Vinegar Emporium (hence the L.O.V.E.) would make it even better. I added the dark chocolate and espresso balsamics, and as with our first mole encounter in July 2012, it turned out loverly, indeed! (Careful readers will recall that the chocolate balsamic also figured in the success of our award-winning mocha cake later that year.)

Pam: I knew that I'd find an appropriate Valentine's Day recipe in Intercourses: An Aphrodisiac Cookbook, but Wow! How could we have imagined how great the strawberry pasta would turn out! This super simple recipe had only a few ingredients. To the 1/4 pound cooked spaghetti I added some shredded Parmesan cheese and then about a dozen pureed strawberries and some melted butter heated with 1/4 c. heavy cream. This was all tossed together in one bowl and then garnished with fresh chopped mint leaves. It was sweet, incredibly creamy, and a perfect complement to the chocolate in the mole sauce. It truly had a sensuous flavor and texture. Everything was served with sparkling Brut Curvee "RJR" from Westport Rivers Winery.

Pam: After allowing our fabulous dinner to settle a bit we made our dessert and coffee. A Facebook friend posted this recipe for "Cake Batter Ice Cream" (essentially an ambitious banana ice cream). We already had frozen banana slices in the freezer as anytime I have a banana go past ripe I slice it up and freeze it to use for smoothies. These had been frozen for several months and gave our blender quite the workout. It actually began to smoke. I modified the recipe a bit to use ingredients we had on hand, although James did go out and get romantic red sugar sprinkles to put on top! Smooth, creamy and sweet!

Proportions are 4 ripe, frozen bananas; a t. each of vanilla, and almond extracts, 1/4 t. baking soda; 1 T. agave nectar; 1 T Butter Pecan syrup; sprinkles to taste.

James: The two-shelf collection of cookbooks that got this blog started includes several that are specifically about the romance of preparing and sharing food. One of these is called quite simply Coffee Love (which is incidentally also the title of the PG-13 section of my Geography of Coffee web site). Leafing through the book, my eye settled quickly on Café de Olla on page 52. I started one cup of coarsely hand-ground Sol y Luna coffee from my good friends in the Corrales family. It is not dark-roasted, but it was grown and prepared with love, and just happens to be some of the best coffee on the planet. I added 1/2 teaspoon of anise seed and a two-inch piece of cinnamon stick to one quart of cool, filtered water in a saucepan. I had hoped to add four ounces of piloncillo (Mexican brown sugar), but had to substitute a half cup of regular brown sugar and a tablespoon of molasses. I brought all of this gently to a boil, while briskly stirring with our molinillo. After letting it simmer for 15 minutes, I filtered it. The recipe does not specify how to filter it, but no better method could be found than our trusty Chemex.

The result was surprisingly delicious -- I usually do not like to have anything at all in my coffee except for coffee, but this was an exception worth making. It was quite good while hot, though the flavor did not withstand cooling very well at all. Next time, though, I hope to use real piloncillo, and a real olla instead of our steel saucepan!

Detail: The Secret Ingredient is L.O.V.E.

0 Mole L.O.V.E.

During a recent visit to Frederick, Maryland, we found ourselves slurping vinegar straight from little sample cups -- a lot of them! What inspired such strange behavior? The delicious balsamics and infusions of L.O.V.E. -- The Lebherz Oil & Vinegar Emporium, that is.

We learned of the shop from our UMBC alumni magazine -- the shop was founded by the delightful Maggie Lebherz, a recent graduate of the Spanish program from which Pam graduated a few years back. Our visit was even more enjoyable and interesting than we expected. We learned that -- as with coffees and teas -- oils and vinegars can be special either because of special origins and preparation or because they are infused with other flavors.

Samples in the Emporium are free but fine oils and vinegars are expensive, so we had to choose carefully. Fortunately, Maggie mentioned a tantalizing recipe that employs the most decadent vinegar in the shop: 12-year-old dark chocolate basalmic. The recipe in question is Lebherz' own version of chicken with mole (MOH-lay) sauce.

As I mentioned in my Champandongo Magic post last November, I have been a sucker for mole poblano, after first having it in the summer of 1989 on the flanks of Popocatepetl, near its birthplace. "Poblano" refers to the Valley of Puebla, arguably the hearth of mole and of maize. I use "arguably" because the neighboring state of Oaxaca has competing claims on both, and according to a food-travel article in today's Boston Globe, it is home to at least seven kinds of mole!

A few restaurants in our area serve mole, but always as an enchilada sauce or over boneless chicken breast, rather than the bone-in turkey or chicken that Moctezuma intended. For me, that original mole was served over a turkey I had seen wandering around the kitchen only hours before, prepared by ladies who spoke only Nahuatl!

In gathering ingredients for the Lebherz version of mole, we were fortunate enough to have cooking chocolate from Castillo Cacao in Matagalpa, and we were even more fortunate that Pam remembered this fact.

Moles vary, and mine varied even a bit more, with thees slight modifications to the recipe:

1. Because almonds are mentioned in the directions but not listed in the ingredient list, I guestimated that 1/3 cup of slivered almonds would work. 
2. The biggest gumption trap that led me to delay making my first mole sauce by two decades was the need to roast peppers. This should have made the listing of one ordinary green pepper welcome news, but instead I was determined to employ this new skill. I was therefore pleased to see passilla chiles in a local grocery, even though I had to go to a separate store for corn tortillas. I roasted them according to the method I mentioned in my Busy Kitchen post last month, along with a half of a jalapeño we had on hand.
3. The recipe calls for olive oil, for which I substituted Chipotle Olive Oil, also from L.O.V.E.
4. Finally, the recipe calls for light rum, which we do not usually keep around. I almost substituted aged, dark rum from Nicaragua for a bit more complexity, when I had an even more brilliant (in my mind) idea: Kahlua.

I did not take any photos of the final product -- I expected it to taste much better than it looked, and I was correct -- but I did make a little still life of some of the more colorful ingredients (including the oil and vinegar and a beautiful onion from Colchester) during preparation.

I increased everything in the recipe slightly by about half, both so we could be sure to have enough for guests and so that we could have leftovers. I think I added more broth than necessary; in any case the result was more like a stew than a sauce -- a happier spot along the mole continuum for Pam, but thinner than I would have preferred.


The result was not as photogenic as the tableau above, but it was certainly delicious, served with rice, warmed corn tortillas, and of course beer. It was even better on subsequent days. We finished the chicken but have some sauce left over (yes, leftovers of leftovers), which I hope to fashion into some sort of champandongo.


If I ever find a source to a proper assortment of fresh chiles, I will try the Puebla-style recipe on Epicurious, perhaps modifying it to include the Lebherz secret ingredient. The sad assortment of peppers in our local markets make this highly unlikely, unless I treat the ingredients list as a shopping list for next winter's seed catalogs.


Which I might just do.

Detail: Mole L.O.V.E.