May 1-3, 2014 – Although it’s really Tres de Mayo.
Like I said last time, I was practicing making a Mexican dinner for my friends on Cinco de Mayo. This was that dinner.
If Mexican restaurants are any indication, the traditional Mexican appetizer is tortilla chips and some kind of dip. I like guacamole, so guacamole. The batch I made last time was way too big, so I dropped the recipe from 3 avocados to 2 avocados, and halved most of the ingredients. Except for cayenne pepper, half an onion, and a jalapeno pepper. Because I didn’t want to deal with 1/8th teaspoons, or quarter onions, or half peppers. But the guacamole was too chunky and too spicy, so next time, I should.
Last time, I mentioned a tomatillo. (“What the hell is a tomatillo?”) So here’s a close-up of a tomatillo, with a tomato next to it for comparison.
For the beans, I mentioned last time a lot of things I needed to do to make them better. One of them included getting some epazote. Which can be found at the same awesome Mexican supermarket, La Superior. The beans also needed a lot more seasoning (which actually means salt, pepper, cumin, and Frank’s) to make it taste awesome. But taste awesome it did.
For the rice, like I said last time, making Mexican-style rice wasn’t worth it, so I just tossed some Asian-style Calrose rice into the rice cooker. It worked pretty well.
And now for the mole. Like I mentioned last time, I had way too much “mirepoix”. Plus, I had to feed 4 people this time, so I doubled the amount of chilis. (Kept the same amount of nut paste, but used more of it this time.) And swapped out chardonnay for madeira. And instead of a 0.5oz square of Ghirardelli 60%, I used a 0.35oz square of Lindt 90%. And even though my batch was almost twice as big, it worked wonders immediately and still had a hint of chocolate flavor to it.
When frying the chicken, I made a terrible mistake. I pan-fried some chicken thighs last time, and it worked out fine. But the chicken thighs were thicker this time, and pan-frying wouldn’t cook them all the way through. And I wasn’t in the mood to take them off the pan and slice them down properly. So I grabbed a butter knife and filleted them on the pan. I wouldn’t recommend it. Next time, I should slice the chicken down before frying it, or buy thin slices.
Overall, the meal was a success. One of my cohorts, a proper Mexican, claimed that it was better than her mother’s. (I would not repeat that to her mother.) Of course, my mole has an advantage because I make it thick, and it’s easier to concentrate flavor in a thick paste. Perhaps next time I should thin it out with more chili water, or maybe some chicken stock, and make it curry like, and poach the chicken in the mole.
Like I promised last time, dessert was going to be tres leches cake. Like I mentioned last time, soaking the cake in the full amount of tres leches caused the cake to be really fragile and difficult to work with. Plus, it leaked tres leches everywhere and was a mess. And reducing the recipe isn’t really viable, unless I want to deal with “half cans”. So I ended up using only half the tres leches and saved the other half of the tres leches for pouring over the cake at serving time.
Also baked the cake for an extra 5 minutes to make it drier and tougher. And instead of soaking the cake for an hour, I soaked it overnight, to really let the tres leches settle in. Maybe it helped.
Another complaint I had last time was the tres leches was too rummy. With only half the tres leches, it probably wouldn’t be that rummy anymore, but I also halved the amount of rum for good measure.
The biggest one was making more than twice as much whipped cream. Last time, I didn’t have enough whipped cream, so the tres leches cake was a sad little mess that was barely decorated. This time, I had enough whipped cream to, as you can see, do interesting things with the cake.
9.5 hours. The beans and the mole went by faster because I made the smart decision to chop all the produce ahead of time. But the chicken went longer because of the mishap I described earlier. Was it all worth it? Definitely yes. Delicious appetizer, amazing main course, and decadent dessert. Maybe I should do Cinco de Mayo dinner again next year.
Bonus: In April, I got the Samsung Galaxy S5. Now the S3’s camera was pretty bad. My camcorder consistently took better photos than my S3. But supposedly the S5 has a better camera, so I decided to give it a try. I’ll let you be the judge.
Above: Sony Handycam HDR-CX360. Below: Samsung Galaxy S5.
It’s probably mostly the auto white balance, but the S5’s photo was so much more vibrant. The Handycam’s photo is slightly in better focus, mainly because the Handycam is bigger, so the auto-steady feature works better. But the S5 isn’t that blurry. And it takes photos at a higher resolution anyway. So maybe the S5 is the way to go for my photo needs from now on.