Pollo en mole verde

When I first planned this dish, I was going to make the famous pato en pipián, which is duck in a pre-Hispanic mole of pumpkin seeds, tomatillos, and green chiles.

But as I continue to adjust to life with an under-one in the house, what I really need are more dishes that can be put together in less than an hour.

It is possible to cook two duck breasts in that time, but it's "fussier". You have to sear the breasts to give them texture (crispy skin) and flavour, then put them in the oven to finish. And you have to keep an eye on them or they will overcook.

By substituting chicken, I just had to poach the breasts in seasoned water for 20 minutes.

If you accidentally poach them longer, the breasts don't dry out as easily as they would in the oven, plus you can let them "cool" in the water once they're done and not only will they not overcook, they will stay moist and just the right temperature, pretty much until you're finished cooking everything else.

The other "cheat" was that I used some pipián I had made previously and frozen.

Some cookbooks tell you not to freeze pipián, but I think they mean the finished dish, with the chicken and rice incorporated. There's nothing "unfreezable" in the sauce itself.

So: pipián or mole verde?

There are seven molesin the legends of Mexican cuisine. The one you probably mean if you just say mole is the dark brown mole poblano, by far the most famous, because it contains chocolate. It also has 26 other ingredients and takes several days to make from scratch (I've tried it).

There is also a (slightly) simpler mole rojo ("red mole"), which has fewer ingredients than the mole poblano (though it still includes a bit of chocolate) and is slightly easier to make.

And there's a green mole, mole verde, which, as Rick Bayless wrote, replaces everything red in the red mole with something green: instead of tomatoes you get tomatillos; instead of dried reddish chiles you get fresh green chiles; instead of dark rich spices you get fresh green herbs.

All three of these are thickened with seeds (the French thicken sauces with flour; Mexicans thicken sauces with ground nuts or seeds).

Sesame seeds are the star of the brown and red moles, but pumpkin seeds (which, again, are green) take the lead in mole verde.

(By the way, the other four moles are mole colorado, which is another red mole; mole amarillo, the yellow mole - though it's actually kind of orange; manchamanteles, which means "tablecloth-stainer" and includes fruit; and the most complex and challenging of them all, the Oaxacan black mole, or mole negro.)

Some people don't believe that mole verde and pipián are the same thing. They may be right, though I say they're basically the same: a rich green sauce of pumpkin seeds, tomatillos, and green chiles.

pipián is one of the earliest pre-Hispanic dishes described by the conquistadors. It was served to them when they visited Moctezuma (before all hell broke loose).

Of course, modern mole verde/pipián is embellished with some things the Spanish introduced, not least of which are onions, garlic, and coriander (cilantro).

Because I used my pre-made frozen mole verde, I'm only going to give recap on the recipe here. You can read the full thing in my post on mole verde last year.

Ingredientes

• 6 tomatillos
• 100 g pumpkin seeds, hulled (I used half pumpkin seeds and half sesame seeds; some recipes even add peanuts)
• 1/2 a white onion
• 3 cloves of garlic
• Green chiles to taste (I used 2 chiles serranos, 1 chile jalapeño, and about half of a chile poblano)
• A bunch of coriander
• 1tsp of dried epazote
• 10 black peppercorns
• 2 cloves
• A 5 cm stick of Mexican cinnamon
• A pinch of cumin seeds (say, 1/8 tsp)
• Stock (homemade if possible)
• Salt
• Oil or lard for frying

Procedimiento

Basically, prep all the ingredients, put everything but the seeds and spices into a blender and blend to a smooth sauce. Gradually add the seeds and spices and continue blending while the sauce thickens.

Then heat some oil or lard in a pan and fry the sauce until it darkens and thickens some more. Then thin it back out with some stock.

Mole verde is best served on the day, but I froze it and then thawed it in the fridge overnight. That way I just had to gently re-heat it in a pot over the hob, adding some stock when necessary to thin it out.

Where did I get the stock? By poaching my chicken breasts, of course!

Basically just bung the chicken breasts into a pot, add some bits to season (usually chopped onion, garlic, a bay leaf or an avocado leaf, black peppercorns, etc), cover with water and bring to a rapid boil, then turn the heat down to medium and simmer for 20 minutes or so.

Let the chicken "cool" in the broth if you have time. Not only is the chicken cooked beautifully, you now have a basic, though not very strong, chicken stock!

I also served a modified version of arroz a la poblana (Pueblan rice), which is normally white rice with chiles poblanos, but I used green bell peppers and some yellow corn.

Take some diced onion and sweat it in some butter over a medium heat until it gets soft and a bit translucent but not brown.

(I didn't use to use butter for Mexican rice until I read this post by A Mexican Cook in Ireland.)

Then add the rice and fry a few minutes more. Then add the corn and fry a few minutes more (unless you're using tinned corn, in which case add the corn last because it's already cooked). Then add some diced green bell pepper.

After the bell pepper has softened, add some water, bring to a rapid boil, then turn the heat down to medium-low for about 25 minutes or so. When it's done cooking, you can take the rice off the heat and keep it covered. It will stay warm for like an hour.

Nearly done!

The quantities I use, by the way are:

1/2 cup of diced onion

1/2 cup of yellow corn kernels

1 green bell pepper, diced

10 g butter

150 g white rice

300 mL water or stock

You want the uncooked rice to be exactly half the volume of the water, so what I actually do is fill a cup with rice and then put in two measures of the same cup of water. But this time I weighed it out as well and those were the quantities I got.

It works for me every time.

So how this worked out was, at just after 8pm I put the pipián in a pot to heat up, put the chicken on to poach, and started on the rice.

I checked the pipián every now and then to make sure it wasn't burning or anything.

When the chicken was done, I used some of the broth to thin the pipián to the desired consistency. I probably could have thinned it more, actually.

Once the rice was simmering, I used my "free time" to lay the table and whip up a "wintery" salad of watercress, pear, and toasted walnuts with a balsamic vinegar and agave nectar dressing, which was just phenomenal.

Everything about this was awesome

We were eating by 9pm. WIN!

I have warm feelings about this dish, because it was one of the first authentic Mexican dishes I ever cooked, using the recipe from Two Cooks and a Suitcase (where it appears as Pollo Verde).

It blew my mind. On the one hand I had never tasted anything like it (it was completely different from the Americanized Northern Mexican food I grew up on). On the other hand something about it tasted so inimitably and unmistakeably Mexican, as if it could not have come from any other national cuisine.

That was years ago now, and the recipe I currently use is a synthesis of several different recipes from various cookbooks.

It's a very good dish (and quite spicy if you use enough chiles!). If you have never tried it, you really should. Mexicans have been cooking with pumpkin seeds since before they invented the tortilla.

It is a true classic of Mexican cuisine.

Quick post on mole verde

I don't usually do this, but someone was asking for a recipe for this on my Facebook page, and since my blog backlog is now so long, it may be a while before I get to post the full dish.

So over the weekend I made mole verde, which some people (including me) believe is the same thing as pipián. (Both are a rich Mexican stew/sauce thickened with pumpkin seeds.)

I haven't made all seven yet, but I believe this is the easiest of the moles. And this is how you make it.

Ingredientes

• 6 tomatillos
• 100 g pumpkin seeds, hulled (I used half pumpkin seeds and half sesame seeds; some recipes even add peanuts)
• 1/2 a white onion
• 3 cloves of garlic
• Green chiles to taste (I used 2 chiles serranos, 1 chile jalapeño, and about half of a chile poblano)
• A bunch of coriander
• 1tsp of dried epazote
• 10 black peppercorns
• 2 cloves
• A 5 cm stick of Mexican cinnamon
• A pinch of cumin seeds (say, 1/8 tsp)
• Stock (homemade if possible)
• Salt
• Oil or lard for frying

This, plus some stock, is about all you need

Procedimiento

Peel the papery husks off the tomatillos and rinse them well under warm water - their skins will be sticky. Boil them for about ten minutes until they go a paler, translucent shade of green, just like tinned tomatillos.

If you're using tinned tomatillos in the first place, just open the tin and drain them.

You may recall that when making salsa verde I opt for roasting the raw tomatillos on a hot dry frying pan or comal. I still think that gives the best flavour for salsa verde, even though it's non-tradish. But for this recipe I go by the book and boil the tomatillos.

While the tomatillos are boiling, heat a dry frying pan over a quite high heat. Put the pumpkin seeds in the pan wait until the first one pops. Then stir constantly until they all (pretty much) pop. 

Remove them and let them cool slightly, then grind them in a molcajete (mortar and pestle).

If you're using any other nuts or seeds, repeat with one kind at a time, but stir constantly from the start, add most seeds will burn quickly (especially sesame seeds).

Roast the garlic in the pan with the skin still on until it comes up in black spots on all sides. Let it cool. The skins should come off easily.

If you're using whole spices, toast each kind separately in the hot dry frying pan until it releases its aroma, then remove and grind as with the seeds/nuts.

(The spices are only a guide, by the way. You can use any or all or none of these. The seasoning will be subtle in the finished sauce, but you'll know they're there. Don't use too much, though, because these are warm spices and you don't want to clash with the fresh green flavours.)

If you're using a chile poblano, use tongs to hold it over the open flame on your hob until the skin blisters on all sides, like this:

Back in black!

Put the poblano in a sealed plastic bag to cool for a few minutes, then peel the blackened skin off. Stem and seed the chile.

The other two types of chiles I just stemmed and sliced into rings. Because I like it hot. 

Roughly chop the onion. 

Put everything except the seeds/nuts, spices, and stock into a blender and blend to a smooth texture. Don't worry about over-blending, because the finished sauce should be very smooth. 

At this point you basically have a kind of salsa verde.

Now add the seeds/nuts and spices to the blender, about a quarter at a time, and continue blending. The sauce will get paler and thicker each time you add more of the pumpkin seed/spice mixture. By the end it will be very thick. 

Heat some oil or lard in a pan. when it's hot enough to make a drop of the sauce sizzle, add all the sauce (it will take some doing to scrape all of it out of the blender; I use a hand-blender and a plastic jar so I don't have to worry about the blades).

Stir constantly for a couple minutes until the sauce thickens even more. Then start adding the stock a little at a time until the sauce thins to a pourable consistency. 

It's nearly ready!

Taste for salt. If you're using a stock cube, you probably won't need any more salt. If you're using homemade stock, you may well do. 

The best way to get your own stock is to poach some chicken breasts with a chopped up onion, a couple cloves of garlic, maybe some celery and carrots, a sprig of some kind of herb like oregano, maybe some black peppercorns, etc. 

The chicken will go great with the finished mole and you can use the poaching water as a stock. Just add the chicken breasts to the simmering sauce in time for it to heat all the way through. Then serve on a bed of arroz a la poblana (which will use up the other half of that poblano chile you'll have spent twenty minutes prepping).

This may well be my favourite Mexican sauce ever. 

A Real Oaxacan Smoked Chile Paste: Gran Luchito (product review)

This is possibly the most exciting Mexican product to arrive in the UK since I’ve lived here: a real Oaxacan smoked chile paste called Gran Luchito.

It’s exciting not only because it’s delicious - which it is - but because it used to be available pretty much in only one part of Mexico.

Gran Luchito is made in Oaxaca, a state in the south of Mexico (bordering Guatemala). Oaxaca is one of the culinary capitals of Mexico and is world-famous for its distinctive regional cuisine, including chiles so rare they aren’t even widely available in the rest of Mexico, let alone all the way across the Atlantic.

Chief among these is the pasilla de Oaxaca, a smoked chile exclusive to the region. I’ve read about this chile many times, in many books. They all say the only place to get it is a market stall in Oaxaca - if you’re lucky, because it’s becoming increasingly rare.

The elusive pasillas de Oaxaca.

You can’t just nip down to Tijuana and pick up some of these chiles. They ain’t there. But they are the star ingredient in Gran Luchito.

So how does it taste?

Gran Luchito is a smoked chile paste, somewhat like a chipotle paste, but much deeper and more complex.

It has a gorgeous aroma, and because it’s sweetened with agave nectar (agave is the plant from which mezcal and tequila are made) rather than sugar, the sweetness is more natural and subtler than that of commercial chipotle pastes, which tend to use refined sugar.

Heat-wise it’s at least as hot as a chipotle paste, which most people seem to rate as 7/10. I can’t quite decide whether I think it’s slightly hotter, because for me chile heat takes a backseat to chile flavour, which Luchito has in spades.

I’m a guy who LOVES chipotles, but Luchito could honestly make you switch.

How do you use it?

The producers advertise its versatility, because it can be used on its own or as an ingredient in other dishes.

On its own I like to spread it on toast or a warm tortilla. It can really liven up a sandwich as well. I also mixed some in with my homemade Sikil p’ak (Mayan pumpkinseed and tomato sauce) for a Yucatecan/Oaxacan fusion.

Mixing some Luchito into a sauce or mole will give it a beautiful, smoky dimension, and it would be an incredible marinade for roasting or grilling meat.

You can also transform it into a delicious salsa by simply blending a tablespoon or two with a of couple roasted tomatoes and one or two cloves of garlic.

Don’t overdo the garlic because there’s already some garlic in Luchito, and make sure you blend to a rough, textured consistency.

This salsa will blow your mind, and it's great for dipping or to spoon on top of tacos or other dishes.

You can also substitute tomatillos for the tomatoes (if you have some). The contrast between the smokiness of the Luchito and the tartness of the tomatillos is incredible.

The other great thing about Luchito is that’s it’s easy to use. Many, many Mexican recipes call for you to make your own chile paste, usually by toasting dried or smoked chiles in a dry pan, soaking them in boiled water, and then grinding or blending them down. Luchito have basically done that for you.

Así se hace en México. They grind the chiles with a metate so you don't have to!

As making a chile paste is one of the more labour-intensive steps in making a sauce or mole, having a jar of Gran Luchito means you can have a authentic Mexican meal midweek. And how can you not be amazed by the possibility of cooking with authentic Oaxacan flavours after work on a Wednesday?

Now, I like to be balanced in my reviews, so I tried to think of any negatives, but I really can't. This is just a delicious and exciting product and I'm amazed that we can actually get this here in the UK.

So where do you get it?

Probably the easiest way is online from Gran Luchito’s website. (They also sell dried pasillas de Oaxaca. Awesome!)

Or you can check your local Mexican deli, grocer, or shop (if you’re lucky enough to have one near you).

I’ll be ordering another jar of this shortly, as well as some of the dried chiles (which I need to make mole negro). And a lot of my chipotle-based recipes are already becoming Luchito recipes.

MexiGeek can’t go to Oaxaca, but Oaxaca has come to MexiGeek!

(¿)Carnitas de Pollo(?)

Apparently the Spanish for "WTF" is "WTF", and that is exactly what I'd expect Mexican and Mexican-American readers to think when they see the title of this post.

This is a dish I learned from Two Cooks and a Suitcase. I have no idea if it's really Mexican. It's not that I expect there is no shredded chicken in Mexico; it's just that the Spanish word carne usually seems to refer to non-poultry meat, and carnitas (the diminutive plural) in particular refers to slow-cooked, shredded pork (or "pulled pork" in the UK).

Obviously, from a purely technical and scientific point of view, the flesh of birds (as well as fish, reptiles, and amphibians) counts as meat or carne in Mexico just as it does in the rest of the world. And tomatoes are technically fruit, as we all know. But we still think of them as a vegetable, and I suspect Mexicans still think of carnitas as pulled pork, not chicken.

Also, "shredded chicken" in Spanish is pollo deshebrado. It's related to hebras, which are "strings". In Mexico, cheese which hace hebras ("makes strings") is highly prized.

Having said that, this is certainly a clever construction: having seen carnitas all over the place in Mexico, the authors of Two Cooks clearly thought "Hey, why not do the same thing with chicken?" And indeed, why not?

Also, it's delicious. I've used this as a filling in tacos, burritos, even tamales. It's never gone wrong, and, with good, tender chicken breasts, is certainly quicker to make than the traditional carnitas.

Our story begins when I ran out of epazote just as The Cool Chile Company got their fresh tomatillos in stock. Normally I would just get epazote from Lupe Pinto's, but I decided to take the opportunity to do a bulk order from the Cool Chiles, as I mentioned in my last post. When it arrived it looked like this:

 
The tortillas, by the way, were a suggestion from Chilli and Chocolate by Isabel Hood, who recommends you always keep a pack of Cool Chile Company tortillas on hand (they freeze and defrost well) in case you ever want to whip up some tacos for a quick meal. Hood writes that she only uses masa harina for making non-tortilla-based corn antojitos like tamales, sopes, etc. When I read that, it was like a revelation. In many ways I'm guilty of taking the hard road when it comes to cooking (for example, I'm peculiarly attached to roasting and grinding seeds by hand). But even I have been put off making tacos because I couldn't be bothered making homemade tortillas. It is a lot of work for something like a taco, which is meant to be a simple and hassle-free meal (or snack, really).

Plus, Hood reminds us that, except maybe in rural areas, most Mexicans don't make their own tortillas anymore either. Think of it like this: do you bake your item bread every day, or do you leave it to the professionals?

I will do a proper review of these tortillas soon. For now let's just say these are the best tortillas you can buy in the UK, and easily hold their own against any I've bought or tasted anywhere else.

Now, fresh (or non-stale) tortillas are usually used for tacos, and obviously that's what the so-called carnitas de pollo were for. However, tortilla and filling are only two of the three components of a complete taco. Any taquería with it's masa would also provide you with at least two or three salsas to put on your taco (self-serve, your choice and at your discretion), and one of these is invariably a salsa verde, which is a kind of green version of more familiar Mexican salsa, using tomatillos in place of tomatoes

Having just received half a kilo of fresh tomatillos, it was really the salsa verde that inspired me to make this dish. Until then, I had only ever made it with tinned tomatillos.

Any common Mexican salsa has a number of acceptable variations in ingredients, and I read quite a few recipes before I decided how I was going to make mine. Because I was using fresh tomatillos, I had three options:

1) use them raw
I decided against this after trying one on its own. Tomatillos are related to the Cape Gooseberry, and as such are very tart, without a large quantity of natural fructose to balance it out.

2) boil them until "just tender"
Two things stopped me doing this. First, how the hell do I know when they're "just tender"? And second, I imagine they would come out, taste- and texture-wise, a lot like tinned tomatillos, which are heat-treated after all.

3) asar-roast them
We have a winner. I am, as you know, a major proponent of asar-roasting, and I feel very comfortable with the technique. Also, I thought (correctly, as it turned out) that this style of roasting would concentrate the sugars and yield a superior flavour.

But let's start with the carnitas de pollo.

For traditional carnitas you would marinate pork shoulder in a spice mix, slow-cook it for the better part of a day, cool it, shred it, then fry it quickly before serving. It's delicious, but you need a lot of planning. With a couple of tender chicken breasts you could be eating carnitas de pollo in under an hour.

Chicken, in Mexico, has traditionally been more economically valuable as an egg-layer than as a meat source, usually not being killed until they have reached the end of their laying life. In addition, the chickens usually got more roaming space, so they could be quite "muscular".

By contrast, British and American chickens have largely been degraded into mere biological machines whose sole function is to produce (usually flavourless) meat.

Apart from the moral outrage, this means in Mexico you generally had to boil your chicken for hours to make it tender, while in the UK and US you don't, because the poor chicken has never actually been allowed to use its muscles before.

Having said that, I usually try to buy free-range or organic chicken, not only because the bird will have had a nicer life but also because it will actually taste of chicken. Many people think chicken is just a cheap carrier for flavour, but it was once a highly-prized food eaten only by the rich. That was, of course, before ethically bankrupt battery farming transformed chicken into the world's most affordable meat source.

So, now that you feel bad about type chicken you eat, let's get to the cooking.

The first step in making carnitas de pollo is "poaching" the chicken. This is also your first opportunity to add flavour to the dish.

Poaching chicken is basically boiling it in seasoned water. The seasonings will seep into the flesh. Also, the water can then be used as a weak chicken stock. For this recipe I used

Salt
Pepper
1 tsp Mexican oregano
2 avocado leaves

You can also bung in things like roughly chopped onions and garlic or other vegetables - anything you don't mind throwing straight into the compost bin when the poaching is done.

I got the avocado leaves from the Cool Chile Company and so can you (Americans: they might have these in your supermarket, otherwise see if there's a Mexican grocer in your area). Or you can use bay leaves instead, but they won't have the subtle aniseed flavour of avocado leaves.

Put your chicken breasts in a pot, add all the seasonings, cover with about an inch of water and bring to a boil.

Turn the heat down and simmer for 15-20 minutes. Remove to a plate and cool.

In the meantime, I made rajas. To make rajas, flame-roast some chiles poblanos as if you're making chiles rellenos (which I'll write about next time). After you've cooled and skinned them, cut them into thin strips (which is what "rajas" really means).

I also chopped up some spring onions. I chopped them at an angle, Asian-style, rather than just straight across, so they wouldn't get lost next to the rajas.

When the chicken is cooled, shred it with a fork (it should fall apart quite easily).

Now heat some fat (oil, butter, lard: your choice, though Mexicans would use lard). When it's hot, add the shredded chicken and fry until it starts to colour. Then add the rajas, fry a couple minutes more, then add the spring onions.

Now turn the heat way down and add about two tablespoons of sour cream or creme fraiche (Mexicans would use their own crema fresca, but it's not pasteurized), stir it in, and provecho! You may need to add more cream, but otherwise you're done.

 
And since I already had some delicious corn tortillas on hand, this was a pretty hassle-free meal.

Or it would have been. But I had to make the salsa verde as well...

Salsa Verde

Ingredientes

5 fresh tomatillos
2 fresh green chiles (I used jalapeños)
1/2 white onion
2 cloves of garlic
The stems of a bunch of coriander, plus some leaves
The juice of 1-2 limes

Preparación

Tomatillos come in papery husks, so you have to take these off and then give them a good wash, because their skin is sticky.

Asar-roast the tomatillos. I used the dry pan technique, foolishly thinking they would go quickly like tomatoes (even though I know they're not actually related to tomatoes). It worked but it took a long time, and the skin didn't blacken evenly. Next time I will try the Diana Kennedy technique, where you take the rack out of your grill pan, line the bottom with foil, put the tomatillos under a hot grill until they start to get soft, then turn them over and grill the other side. I find things get mushy using this method, but the tomatillos turned out that way anyway, so you've nothing to lose.

Dice the onion and garlic. Chop the stems off your coriander and roughly chop them.

While you're still waiting for the tomatillos to roast and/or cool enough to be skinned, grind the chopped coriander stems in your molcajete or with a bloody great mortar and pestle. You need it to go down to a paste, more or less. This is really hard and takes forever. Or you can throw it in the blender and have done with it (I'm trying to keep in mind not everyone wants to cook for four hours a night).

When your tomatillos have roasted and cooled, take the skins off and add them to the molcajete (or blender) and grind them up. If you're using the blender, blend in pulses, because you want to retain a fairly chunky texture.

Now add the onion and garlic, a bit of finely chopped coriander leaf, and the juice of one or two limes (use taste and consistency as a guide. The sauce is wet enough without overdoing the lime).

I was very proud of this, because it was my first sauce made almost entirely in the molcajete. Really only the onions and garlic didn't get crushed with the pestle, and that's because they weren't meant to.

Also, Mrs MexiGeek thoroughly enjoyed it.

It was a very wet sauce, though, and reminded me once again that, delicious though they are, tacos are not "neat" food. Bring lots of paper towels to the table.

Mole Poblano 4: verdict and meaning revisited

[First published 18 February 2012]

The last instalment in my mole poblano series is something of an anticlimax in that, once the sauce is made, there isn't that much work left to do.

What had been worrying me (besides the flavour) was how I was going to make the dish look nice.

It's difficult to make a big lake of brown sauce look beautiful.

To add to the trouble, I'm not really much of an artist. I love being served beautiful plates of food in restaurants, but I'm not sure it's my calling to design them.

So I basically ripped off the common technique of resting the dish's main component on a neat round pillar of accompanying rice, with extra sauce around the edge.

Choosing the rice was tricky.

 I wanted something with colour, to relieve the brown of the mole. But the recipe I usually use for arroz verde has tomatillos, which are very tart, and would probably clash with the dark, rich sauce.

Luckily I found an alternative version of arroz verde in Thomasina Miers's Mexican Food Made Simple. She excludes tomatillos, cuts down on the coriander, and ups the quantities of common green leaves and herbs like spinach and parsley.

This is most likely because her book is written for British cooks, and she is mindful of what ingredients are available in the UK.

Tomatillos are especially hard to get here, though, as expected, Lupe Pinto's sells them tinned, and you can even order fresh ones from The Cool Chile Company when they're in season. The website currently promises them in July 2012, and I will definitely be ordering some for fresh salsa verde.

By the way, the basic recipe for any arroz verde is:

1) blitz whatever green leaves and herbs you're using together with some green chiles

2) sweat some finely chopped onion in an oven-proof pot over medium heat

3) add plain white rice to the pot and fry for a few minutes, until all the grains are coated in oil

4) add minced garlic to the pot and fry for a minute or two longer (you want the garlic to get lightly brown, but don't let it burn)

5) add the pureed greens to the pot and fry for a minute

6) add stock (about twice the volume of rice) and bring to the boil

7) either turn the heat down and simmer for a half hour or cover and place in a 150°-170° C oven for a half hour

Anyway, the other thing I wanted was a salad of some kind.

The Romans apparently invented salad, and it's really a European thing.

In Mexican dining, vegetables are included in the main dish, or there is a separate vegetable course. But because American dining is largely based on European dining, I feel compelled to have an accompanying salad.

My original plan was to use the sweet corn salad from Thomasina Miers' book. It's delicious. But then I discovered an even better idea from an unlikely source: Jamie Oliver.

One of the books my wife uses is Jamie's 30-Minute Meals. Though we never really get the food cooked and served within a half hour, the recipes are amazing. I know people have mixed views about Saint Jamie, but you have to admit he's got it in the flavour department. I'd take him over that twat Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall any day.

The salad is meant to have an Indian feel to it, and consists of shredded courgette (zucchini) and carrot, in a dressing of plain yogurt, fresh red chiles (yay!), and red wine vinegar.

As I was eating this bomb-ass salad, it ocurred to me that with minor alterations, this salad could be completely Mexican.

Courgette is native to Mexixo (where it is called calabacita). And though carrots originally come from the Middle East, they are a popular vegetable in Mexico. Check your jar of pickled jalapenos if you don't believe me.

In fact, in 2010 Mexico produced over 346,000 tonnes of carrots.

The alterations I made were swapping the yogurt for sour cream (okay, technically sour cream isn't Mexican either, but it is the closest thing I'm likely to get to crema espesa, unless I make my own, which I'm scared to do), and the red wine vinegar for lime juice.

Now, after the epic journey to make the sauce over the preceding four days, today's work was relatively minimal.

First, I took the mole sauce out of the fridge and put it in a pot on the hob over a medium heat, stirring occaisonally. 

In a separate pan I melted some butter. Mexicans cook with lard, but I don't, and my wife also expressed interest in frying the turkey breast in butter before adding it to the sauce.

So when the butter was melted and beginning to foam, I put in the turkey breast left over from Christmas and browned in on all sides. Then I put it into the mole and left it to simmer.

Next I did the rice as described above and shredded the carrot and courgette.

I had never eaten raw courgette before I tried this salad, but trust me, it's delicious.

I also whipped up the salad dressing, but kept it separate until it was time to serve. It's not very acidic, but I didn't want to risk the lime juice (and chile acid -- see my post on cebollas en escabeche) cooking the veggies and making the salad go soggy.

When the rice was done it was time to serve. The salad went on side plates, and I spooned the dressing on at the very last minute.

I created a restaurant-style column of rice by using an ordinary cookie-cutter. I was very pleased that the rice held its shape after I gingerly pulled the cookie-cutter away.

Using tongs, I painstakingly placed slices of turky breast on the rice, spooned over a bit more sauce, and then made a ring of sauce around the edge of the plates.

Because my efforts weren't as neat as I had hoped, here's an airbrushed version of the final result:

Yes I cooked this. I also edited it using Photoshop.

So how did it taste?

I've had mole a few times before.

There was the mediocre mole with chicken I had in a Mexican restaurant in Edinburgh.

Also I have been given jars of mole paste on two separate occasions: once it was La Preferida, and once La Costeña. Both are respectable brands, the latter being an actual Mexican company while the former was founded in Chicago by Hispanic Americans.

Fortunately my homemade mole tasted more like the jarred versions than the bad restaurant one. Which is not to say I hadn't been worried.

There is so much preparation involved in this recipe, but once you get to the long simmering stage, there's not much more you can do to add or improve flavour, beyond a bit of seasoning.

I tasted the sauce several times as it simmered.

First it needed salt, because I'd used homemade stock instead of a salty stock cube.

Then I was concerned it didn't have enough rich "darkness", so I added 25 grammes more of the chocolate.

But the chocolate had sugar in it, so now it was too sweet. I added a bit more salt and a bit of the chile water.

It still didn't taste quite right, but I was now afraid to tweak it further.

Besides, the flavours apparently needed time to mingle, so I went upstairs for a shower. When I came back, I found the promised layer of fat that meant the mole was cooked.

I skimmed off the fat and tasted it again. Still not quite there, but moving in the right direction.

I cooled it and let it "mature" in the fridge overnight.

However, when I finally dug into the finished dish, I was pleasantly surprised. It tasted like mole. I had actually made mole!.

Nevertheless, if I ever make this again - and that's a pretty big if - there are a few thing I will do differently.

Firstly, I still think it was a bit too sweet, so I'll forget the brioche and substitute a stale slice of baguette.

Also, it was a bit too chocolatey in that commercial milk-chocolate way, so in the absence of solid Mexican cooking chocolate, I would use high coco-solid European cooking chocolate, for a bitter, rich base note.

Also, as a time-saver I might use more of the chile water in place of stock. It's much easier to make, and would probably make the flavour darker and spicier as well.

Overall the mole was a great sucess, though the big hit of the evening was actually the green rice.

My wife even had seconds, which she never does with rice (except for risotto, which should give you an idea of how tasty the rice actually was).

So well done, Thomasina. No wonder you won MasterChef.

This was quite an undertaking, and certainly the most ambitious thing I've attempted in the kitchen to date.

But there are actually seven types of mole in Mexican cuisine. And I intend to cook them all.