Mole!

Times are getting harder, money is tight, unemployment at 10.5% and I just can't waste money on luxury foods, not when I can afford rice and beans and flavor them with a modest degree of skill.

I recently found a heck of a deal on pork loin, 10 pounds of it for $17 at my local supermarket. It was boneless and lean enough to be quality meat. I bought it, sliced it into chops and then froze those in pairs. I've been eating them for two weeks now. Pretty amazing, when you stop to think about it. I've fiddled with seasonings. My wife is under orders to cut her salt intake for high blood pressure and I know that salt makes me sweaty, so that excludes the typical boring cream of mushroom soup my Mom always seemed married to for pork chops.

I took things in a different direction. Ever heard of Mole sauce? Its chocolate, chili powder, and ground peanuts with probably a bit of masa so it thickens given a chance. Partially cook the pork, add the mole concentrate, about a tablespoon worth, and then stir it in. Masa doesn't clump, which is why I prefer it to wheat flour as a thickener. The downside to this particular brand of mole is the chocolate used is very weakly flavored. It has little of the theobromines I like in chocolate, that bitter flavor. So I fix it by adding semi-sweet chocolate chips. The slight sugar intensifies the spice of the chili powder and the bitterness brings out the chocolate. This sauce is good on the meat (pork, chicken) as well as plain white rice. Fantastic on rice. I want to experiment with beans tomorrow and see if I can get some awesome flavor into them too. Maybe roast one of the chops in the beans with some of the mole and soak in the flavor a bit, as well as prevent some of that secondary fermentation that last batch did. I think I might have gotten a little food poisoning from it.

Cast iron stomach or not, food poisoning toxins often resemble a strong allergic psychosis reaction, which isn't fun. Ever had a temper tantrum for no reason, sweats, and then want sex for no reason, all at the same time? That's one of those allergies, probably food allergy or food poisoning. They see this in Emergency rooms sometimes, give Benedryl injections to fix it. I was once in the emergency room sick when a guy who'd broken his leg motorcycling offroad was brought in. They gave him a painkiller and some kind of antibiotic. He had a reaction to it, a strong one, and begged his girlfriend to suck him off on the other side of a thin cloth curtain from me. I was a bit stunned and slightly turned on by how kinky that was (I was very inexperienced at the time) and shortly after she finished slurping him up and wiped her mouth, the emergency room doctor noted his allergy, said so, and gave him the injection. Within 5 minutes he stopped asking to walk out of the hospital on a broken leg. Allergies really do make people act crazy. I wonder if that's part of the problem with my nutty neighbors?

Anyway, mole sauce is good for lots of things, including pairing chocolate with chili powder and teaching you that its good for more than just candy. Its wonderful on slow cooked foods, like crock pot stuff. Just don't add it too soon, since its a thickener. Its gotta go in late, just like noodles to soup or stew.

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When I was four years old my mom lifted me onto the kitchen counter, handed me the old measuring spoons, pointed at the various spices and told me to measure them out while she rolled the pie dough. I could read so this was certainly possible and I, with lots of help from Mom, helped make my first pumpkin pie. This continued with apples (peeling and coring them at age 5 using a peeler and a small knife), to making the crust by age 6. By the time I was 10 I'd perfected most sorts of baking I'd attempted, including solo chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal cookies, and even made the perfect copy of McDonalds french fries. I needed help dealing with the hot oil. I should point out that I've always been "bright" and while I was pretty retarded in some social skills areas I was always way ahead of my peers at these sorts of scientific experiments (cooking is chemistry, after all). I kept cooking every once in a while, when I felt like it. As a latch-key kid my brother and I ended up cooking for ourselves more often than not, particularly since Mom's cooking wasn't always to our taste. At age 11 I was in the boy scouts and learning to cook over camp stoves, over and in camp fires, and learning all the skills necessary to manage natural heat (fires are a skillset all by themselves) and as the years passed I learned more and more, perfecting recipes of old standards like Cornbread. By the time I was in college and cooking on our geology field trips I learned how to bake in a dutch oven, from chocolate or lemon cake to pineapple upside-down cake (a true accomplishment in the desert, let me tell you!). When I finally moved out of the parental domicile I was a fully capable amateur chef able to make anything I saw on TV or read in a recipe or tasted in a restaurant. Once I met my wife and we moved in together I was accomplished enough to make multiple meals from raw materials which baffled her. I love her dearly but when we moved in she'd claimed to be a good cook herself and when I handed her a whole, plucked chicken and said "roast this" she looked completely lost. I had to show her and she understood what I was going on about the very first time, a fact pointing to a high intelligence despite her dishonesty. She still tries new things or pushes me to make stuff she read about somewhere, often dozens of things I'm not particularly enthusiastic about, usually because they require exotic expensive ingredients, won't keep at all, and make more than we want to eat in one sitting. There is such a thing as too many olives and pickles in the fridge, after all! Ahem.

Anyway, at this point in my life, finally owning a proper kitchen scale, I am now able to work my way through the CIA Cookbook, which is highly detailed and LONG. Lots of fun stuff I've never played with because well, you just don't wake up one day with 5 pounds of sweetmeats you plan to eat and go to the trouble of turning them into food instead of broth or toss them into the trash. That's an extreme example, however. I'll be cooking more stuff, using spices more effectively, working out all sorts of technical problems that would make even Alton Brown pause to consider.