I’ve been desperately waiting to use that line all week!
This recipe is the first bit of Mexican food that I ever made. I was once quite addicted to a show on PBS called “The Frugal Gourmet”. This was when I was about 13 years old. I would watch Julia Child create delicious French dishes and then this really gentle man would come on and opened the entire world of food up to me. “Wok with Yan” and “Pasquale’s kitchen” did similar things to a degree.
My mom would let me make a list of ingredients for one of the dishes each week and if we couldn’t find them in the grocery store we figured out how to improvise. I remember that this recipe seemed so appealing because it had chocolate in it but was still savoury. It seemed naughty and exotic. I haven’t made it in years but I’m trying to use my old cookbooks more (see new challenge this Monday).
I did a bit of searching and found a lovely site that has a somwhat bittersweet write-up on Jeff Smith (aka The Frugal Gourmet and a practising Methodist chaplain) and I was sad to see that he had passed away quite some time ago. I think he was the type of person I would/should have written a letter/email to saying how much his enthusiasm meant to a kid in suburban Toronto who lived the most of her life in the world of books.
http://www.food.com/cookbook/famous-chefs-jeff-smith-the-frugal-gourmet-recipes-34702
This is not a totally authentic version but is instead the version that my 13 year old self created after furiously taking notes while watching one Saturday morning. It’s tasty and our family first ate it with turkey breast so that is what we will have tonight. I actually made the sauce the other night and it took me just a minute or two. The trick is to just dump EVERYTHING into the blender and let it sit in a jar in the fridge. Fasthand Louie (aka the baby) is “helping” me here take the picture. Having had much more exposure to different foods now I realize that this is not a totally authentic mole and their are as many different types of moles as there are people and family traditions but this one will always be special to me.
{Adventuresindinner} 