Mole Poblano

My husband, P,  bragged that mole poblano (a delicious mexican dish you can read about here) was the most difficult thing to make to one of his colleagues, which began this whole adventure. The colleague, A, replied: "What are your plans on Saturday?" Upon checking our joint Google calendar and double-checking with me, P discovered we had nothing to do that day. "We are making mole poblano on Saturday then." It was decided. We wives were a bit more reticent to the idea because I had always heard mole took three whole days to make, but we decided to join in.

We met at Sabor Latino, a latin-food store on Bélanger in Montreal, at 10:30am to pick up the various ingredients we'd need. We had found a recipe on Epicurious and decided to stick with it (you can find the recipe here). It was my first time in this particular store and I was just SO HAPPY to see Mexican style snack foods and candy that at first I wasn't much help in picking out the different kinds of chiles and other things that were essential to the recipe.

Snack foods - I bought spicy Cheetos, salt and lime flavoured Fritos, and Rancheritos 

We then headed over to Marché Jean-Talon to buy a few more ingredients (like the chicken and tortillas). We probably spend about an hour at the market because it is just so nice to walk around and try samples! We even got a free baguette! 

We got home at around 1pm and set out all of the ingredients. About half-way through the recipe we realized we never picked up the pumpkin seeds so P set out to the local grocery store to find some.

(most of) The ingredients!

 The first step consisted of removing the seeds and veins from the chiles. Three types of chiles are used: mulato, ancho and pasilla.
After frying the chiles, we had to keep them in a bowl of hot water for 30 minutes.

Keeping the chiles warm

R&A preparing the chiles

While we waited, we cooked the tomatillos and blended them. We also toasted a lot of seeds (anise, coriander, sesame and some from the chiles).

Adding the toasted seeds to the tomatillo sauce

In the meantime, the chicken was boiling.

The boiled chicken

We then had to fry tortillas and stale bread, along with raisins, pumpkin seeds and almonds and add that to our tomatillo-seed blend.

Final mixing

After that, we just had to incorporate the tomatillo blend to the chile blend and cook that for about another 20 minutes.

Final result!

So many pots to clean! (Thankfully we have a dishwasher)

Leftover food (plus conchas and an empty bag of Fritos)

Presentation

The table all set!

We sat down to eat at about 4pm, at which time the kitchen was pretty much clean! So from start to finish it took us three hours to make between four adults! And it was absolutely DELICIOUS!!! I'm so glad we had this adventure together!