Feaster I: Hawt Chocolate

We thought about getting away for Easter weekend, but why bother? The trains would be packed, hotels expensive, and everything closed anyway. Why not take the long weekend to immerse ourselves in what we love doing most?

After recovering, we got to doing what we love doing second best: Cooking up a storm.

We've been on a Mexican kick lately, so we decided to continue the theme. Having all the time in the world, Alannah figured it was time she busted out her recipe for a pipián-inspired mole. (Pipian is a pumpkin seed sauce often eaten for Easter in Mexico.)

No mole recipe is the same. Some claim to be based on just a handful of flavors, others claim you must have exactly 38 components. Some cook relatively quickly. Others require a full day of simmering. But one thing is constant: Mole is labor intensive.

Pestel & mortar round 1: Peanuts, sesame and pumpkin seeds

Pestel & mortar round 2: Chilis and bread crumbs

My wrist and forearm hadn't gotten such an intense workout since I was single, as Alannah had convinced me to spend over an hour grinding down roasted peanuts, sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, chili negro, chipotle, and guajillo chilis. I remembered not to burn my junk this time.

Then it was time to simmer it in a bit of lard, add cinnamon and – the key component to a proper molé – bitter chocolate. The key is to put in just enough to give it a distinct taste of chocolate, but not so much that it tastes like you just felched Willy Wonka. This is the case at many a bad Mexican restaurant, unfortunately.

Mole can be used in many ways. The most common is to braise chicken in it. Still sporting corn tortilla's from the other night's Parisian Mexi-ventures, Alannah opted for enchiladas. So I simmered shredded chicken (thanks to leftovers from a rotisserie chicken we'd kept on hand) in the mole while she very lightly fried the tortillas. They were then given a fisting of chicken mole and some locally made queso from the Latin American store we recently found in the 9th arrondissement. Then they were rolled and laid seam-side down in a baking dish, covered with more mole and cheese, and baked for around 30 minutes.

Chocolate-chili tubes of lovin'

Crispy, saucey, and bursting with mole flavor. Mole has such an intense, complex, deep flavor that it pairs well with just about any otherwise unadorned item... Simple cheese. White meat poultry. Rice...

Chocolate Bunny

And, of course, conejo, a.k.a. wabbit. I'd initially gotten the idea for this when joking with an otherwise vegetarian friend in California who had tweeted that she was making lapin à la moutarde for Easter. I said she should stew it in mole and it'd be a chocolate bunny. Get it? Har. Well, my fancy wannabe haute cuisine food geek got the better of me. I passed the mole through a chinois, laid strips of rabbit filet over it, and garnished it with steamed strands of spring onion for a bit of Easter grass. To go back to Easter's pagan roots and symbolize fertility, I added a second garnish of pepitos – fried pumpkin seeds coated in lime and chili.

We didn't stay high-brow for long, though. To add some sort of vegetable to the meal, I whipped up a huge batch of guacamole. This is no big deal for a Californian, but even in avocado-rich France, it's nearly impossible to find a good guacamole outside the home. At best, you get real ingredients that have been abused in a blender. At worst, it's the powdered stuff from a bucket. Which is all very sad, considering it's easily made by simply mashing together some very commonly found ingredients... With a fork.

No blender or Cuisinart necessary

Or two forks, as I like it. Avocados, plenty of cilantro (coriander), lime juice, seeded & diced tomatoes, diced sweet onion, and a touch of minced garlic. No blender. No sour cream. And certainly no mayonnaise. (WTF, right?)

Burns so good.
Going in and out.

This being a holiday meal, one must have a classy pairing, right? Well, a good Mexican meal calls for a good tequila, and if you insist on ruining it, turning it into a good margarita. (Use lime juice and sugar – please don't buy mixes!) But being who we are, we had to veer a little from the expected terrain of vanilla and make a michelada.

¿Que?

Next time you want a cold drink to go with your chips and homemade guacamole, rim a pint glass with lime and salt, maybe some cayenne pepper if you like a little burn around the lips. Squeeze in the juice of half a lime, a dash or two of hot sauce, and pour in a cheap golden beer. ¡Salud!

El Bastardo Soup

We could go on and on about the sad state of Mexican (or, really, a lot of ethnic) food in Paris, but despite our crankiness on this subject, we recently had a very uplifting experience. In fact, we had the best Mexican meal at a restaurant anywhere in Europe.

It was at La Rotisserie Sainte-Marthe: A fantastic little hole in the wall in a not-yet-gentrified part of the 10th arrondisement, whose mission, actually, is to keep its little corner from gentrifying. As such, it serves €5 meals to local immigrants and pensioners and broke-asses at lunch time. At night, it transforms into a restaurant associatif – meaning that non-profit organizations can take it over to serve food for fund raisers. Again, to avoid yuppification and to make it accessible to all, there's a €10 price cap.

When we learned that two Franco-Mexican organizations were having a dinner there, it was a no brainer. A tenner for three courses, and beer or wine at laughably low prices. But we'd probably have paid Pierre Gagnaire prices for the food we had. Proper guacamole, a smokey/spicy salsa verde, several carnitas tacos with nopales (cactus), and a humble dessert of strawberries and cream. A simple meal, but one made with real Mexican authenticity never seen in the public sphere on this side of the Atlantic. Take your Michelin-starred restaurants and give 'em a Dirty Sanchez, homes. This shit is soul food for la raza. (Admission: Neither of us is a vato loco.)

We also managed to pick up a huge stack of real corn tortillas, a rare treat. Even rarer not knowing when the next Mexican night at La Rotisserie will be.

Fast forward to tonight. AKA fridge-clearing night. AKA soup night. We've got some quality ground beef left over from Loco Moco, aforementioned corn tortillas, some avocado, a tomato and a half, a carrot... What sort of soup dish could I bash together on this windy, wet night? Tortilla soup is always a winner. And so is albondigas (meatball) soup.  I know, let's bastardize these fine specimens of Mexican tradition.

And thus, El Bastardo was born.

This tortilla soup has three balls

Unlike myself, it's not at all a fucked up combo. In fact, people have probably done it before. I mean, why not?  They go together so well.  And it's so easy.

1) Make some albondigas. Mix ground beef with finely chopped onion, garlic and carrots. Hit it with ground cumin and a bit of salt. Then add a beaten egg, or it won't hold together. You can cook the meatballs separately and add them to the soup just before serving, or you cook them in the soup. We opted for the previous to make sure they held.

2) Make your soup. Since this was a fridge-clearing operation, we diced up some onion, more garlic, whatever tomato we had left, and coined some carrots. They were sautéed in cumin, salt and powdered dry chili, and once adequately softened, about 600ml of beef stock was added to the pot. (You can use any kind of stock, really...)  A bit of tomato paste was added to redden it. Keep that stuff simmering.

3) Slice your corn tortillas into thin strips, pan-fry them in a bit of oil, allow to dry on a cooling rack. If you don't feel like going through the frying step, you don't have to – especially if you've got stale corn tortillas. They're gonna get all soft in the soup anyway. But it really does taste better fried.

Ladle out some soup into a bowl. Lay in a handful of fried (or stale) tortilla strips. Ladle some more soup. Gently cup the balls and gingerly arrange them nicely in the bowl. Garnish with slices of avocado, roughly chopped cilantro (coriander if you swing that way), and a dollop of sour cream (crème fraiche if you swing that way), and you're set.

It's healthy. It's well balanced. And it'll satisfy you on a chilly night like almost nothing else.

Is it authentic? Well, that's relative. If you're anywhere in North America, hell no, esse.

If you're anywhere in Europe (that includes you, España!) it's better than you'll do at any so-called Mexican restaurant. Es una garantiá.

Back from ze Market/Back to ze Kitchen

This vacation from cooking has lasted long enough.

My finger is healed, the outdoor markets are irresistibly sunny, and we need to get our fill of quality, unprocessed food before going on (proper) vacation this summer. While we're looking forward to gorging on luscious foods from California and the Pacific Northwest, we'll be dealing with substandard kitchens and, dammit, we're gonna miss just going down the street to pick up stuff like this:


More or less from the top left: Lamb for grilling, gigantic French apricots, roma tomatoes, local cherries, baguette de campagne, enormous avocados, tomatoes on the vine, spiced/herb sausage made by our local butcher, farm-fresh eggs, Catalan and Nicoise olives, organic prawns (I guess that means they're farmed?), and a freakin' lemon.

We can't wait to put all of these in our mouths.

Though not all at once. That's for another site.