the rest of the mole

So, I think I was at the point where I sauteed onion and garlic when last I finished writing about making this mole.

For a chocolate mole typically one uses tomatoes as a base for the sauce, so you want to have five or six vine-ripened tomatoes and put them into a pot of boiling water. You need to have a big enough pot to accommodate all of the tomatoes and to make sure that there's enough water to cover them. Otherwise, the boiling water will spill out when you put the tomatoes into the pot and/or there won't be enough water to cover them and while this is not a disaster really it's a pain in the ass. You're putting the tomatoes into boiling water so that you will not cook them, but so that you can skin them. Tomato skins don't really work in sauces because they won't break up even if you food process them. the skins roll up into strings and are unsightly in a sauce that you'll want to be smooth and uniform in texture. Hot water will make a tomato's skin crack and separate from the tomato's flesh, and then they can be peeled. But, in order to make sure that the tomato you want to use in your sauce doesn't overcook when you're boiling it, you want to get it to the point (i.e., them, since we're talking about multiple tomatoes here) that the skin cracks. Immediately remove the tomato from the boiling water and submerge it in an icewater bath. As you can see this all requires multiple steps. So, when you set your pot of water to boiling, then you peel the stickers (if there are any) off your tomatoes, get a big bowl and fill it with ice. Once your water's boiling and you put in your tomatoes, add water to your ice-filled bowl. Then, finally, after your tomato skins have cracked, and you've submerged them in the icewater bath to stop the cooking process and cool them down, peel the skins and throw them away, and chop up your skinless tomatoes and add them to your simmering onion and garlic.

So by now you've got your pepitas and onion and garlic and tomatoes taken care of. Did I mention the chiles? I think I forgot the fucking chiles. Ah shit. This is another huge prep thing that you can do ahead of time. You're gonna want a few dried chiles, and some fresh ones. You can buy these in most grocery stores because--thank god--Mexicans want to live with us, but if they're not in your grocery store you can probably find a nearby Latino market or something that will have what I'm talking about. You'll want a dried pasilla chile, a dried ancho chile, and two dried chiles de arbol. The heat comes from the chile de arbol, so it kind of depends on how hot you like things, and I like things pretty hot (hence 2 chiles de arbol), but you can kind of adjust the heat as you want and if you want things hotter you can always add fresh jalapeno or serrano peppers. If it's too hot, well, at that point I would say that tough titties, you're kind stuck with it, but you can do some things to try and alleviate the heat like adding tortilla and making sure that you and/or whomever you're dining with has plenty of beer.

But with the chiles, you'll prepare them thus: just rip away the stems with your fingers and break the chiles open. scrape out the seeds and get rid of em. some people think that the seeds are what makes chiles really hot, but that's bullshit. Capsaicin, the chemical compound that makes that hotness, is found in its highest concentration in the pitch around the seeds. It's not in the seeds at all. Anyway, probably when you're boiling the water to skin your tomatoes, you'll want to take up the ripped flesh from your chiles and put them into a bowl. Then ladle enough boiling water into the bowl to cover the chile parts. Cover the bowl with a serving plate to retain the heat and let those chiles sit for a while.  

At this point you want to add to your onion-garlic-tomato sautee the pepitas and some raisins. Yes, raisins, In fact, it's not bad if you've got some other dried fruits, like dried pineapple or mango. I usually end up using the dregs trailmix for my mole. It's a good way to use up that stuff that's just sitting around. and, this might sound like a weird ingredient, but I'm not kidding: it makes for an amazingly complex and delicious sauce. If you've had mole before, you know what I'm talking about.

All right. I'll pick up on the rest of this later. I'm not kidding: this is a serious fucking recipe. It's even exhausting to write about.