Making Mole' with Mari!

One of my favorite activities here is STILL cooking with Mari! The more time I spend with her, the less uncomfortable i become with not understanding most of what she says and i think she grew more comfortable with us too! We just smile and say Si' a lot. Even when no one really means it. Tuesday we made Mole Mexicana - which is Mari's favorite kind. Our daughter was excited after reading my facebook post and wants us to make it when we get home. Her boyfriend loves it! So... Catt, have you been reading my blog? Let me tell you the story about Mole.......
First... It requires hands of steal to make. The list of ingredients is endless. Mari actually wrote them down for us this time since we are always trying to take notes anyways... not that we remembered to GET her notes or even to take a picture of them.... we were WAY to busy working. First - there were three, maybe four diferent kinds of chilies that we had to destem, pry open, and scrape the seeds out of using our fingernails. The chilies smelled a bit sweet like prunes, so we followed Mari's example and deseeded them all. Set them aside. Broke apart a small loaf of bread, a few tortillas, cut up a tomatoe and an onion, put together a selection of seeds nuts bark and chocolate all the while the chicken is cooking and our hands are starting to burn, and tinas face is on fire and denise has alit her upper lip by tasting a peanut. Gringos like us, should NEVER touch chilies without protection you know. Mari on the other hand can flip frying objects with her bare fingers without flinching. Tina is pouring sweat now because her face is on fire as well as her hands, we are washing our hands with laundry soap and salt and nothing seems to help. I decide just to pretend it didn't hurt at all... but it did. and continued for about three hours until we were home, dinner was cooked and we were ready for bed. Now, back to all these ingredients. Fill a pan with oil and start frying. Fry the breads - set them aside. Fry a bananna - put it in the pan too. Fry all the chilies and put them in the pot. put all that in a blender with some pollo broth and wiz. fry the nuts and chocolate and tomatoe and onion - put in a blender with pollo broth and wiz. Mix all together and cook. fry the rice and then cook in pollo broth. put the cooked chicken in with the mole sauce, serve with the rice and with tortillas that are warmed on the stove. Laugh a lot about the hands (mari, of course is fine.... she even flips frying food by just sticking her figers in there and grabing it). We made enough mole' for a small army - since we don't actually speak fluent spanish we cut up EVERYTHING she put in front of us not just the "right" amount...... or maybe just too many of the little peppers, the chipotle ones.... i'll never know for sure. But it tasted GREAT as always when we sat down to eat it two and a half hours later. Creepers this home cooking takes HOURS!!!! And that was with three extra pairs of hands to chop and stir and fry! I think Mari likes us. Brian says that usually they only have a cooking class maybe once a month or so..... but we just kept wanting to make more and more and more! At dinner last night Mari gave each of us a gift all wrapped up in tissue paper and kisses on our cheeks. We want to figure out how to wrap up our new mamma Mari and bring her home with us to the us so that she can teach us even more!!!! The process of cooking is fun, overcoming the language barrier is fun, and sitting down to a meal where we try to converse in broken spanish over our hard work and cold cervesas is fun! I can't think of a better way to learn.... anything!!!! Hands on AND tasty! (and so hot that we will NEVER forget it! - though the food itself was tamed with sugar and was not very picante at all!)


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