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!

Sweet Little Bunny

Eating rabbit can be problematic for people. To many, it's an adorable woodland creature deified in Disney movies and Looney Toons cartoons, and very often kept as a (copiously poop producing) pet. To others, it's a rodent, and as such probably carries disease and shouldn't be touched, let alone eaten.

My problem with rabbit... is that it's insanely hard to bone. Or is that de-bone? (And you would've thought boning is the least difficult thing for us...) Granted, it was my first time, so it was messy, bloody, and a bit frustrating. But I eventually got my half-rabbit into nice, boneless chunks, leaving the legs intact, because really, without a visual identifier to know that your dinner is rabbit, you might think it was veal or turkey.

Which brings us to the choice of cooking style. As our first bunny, figuring out what the hell to do with it was half the battle. Roasting or braising it seemed so missionary... so vanilla. With the weather having turned from the "Paris in the Springtime" of musical fame to nearly bone-chilling wind and rain, a blanquette seemed in order. No, that's not a pun. A blanquette is a stew in a creamy white sauce, generally made with veal, and excellent for warming up when something nasty blows in from the North Atlantic.

Not actually being big on blanquette - for something that looks so rich, it's often very bland - we opted for a little sweetness, in the form of vanilla. (Just when we were trying to avoid "vanilla...") It may sound odd, but after having a Tahitian-inspired shark steak in vanilla sauce recently, it seemed like a brilliant idea.

And boy, was it. After stewing with onions and sand carrots on top of the stove and then in the oven in cast iron, the rabbit meat and legs were tender and moist... The vanilla blanquette sauce (made with butter, milk, and egg yolk) was poured in the pot and mixed in about 10 minutes before serving. Regretfully, the sauce curdled a tiny bit during the few minutes of broiling (to brown the legs), but it didn't affect the finger-lickin'-goodness of the taste.


Going with the sweet theme, we had cardoon 'n prune salad on the side. Sliced cardoon blanched in saltwater and lemon juice was mixed with an orange vinaigrette, basil, and slivers of prune. Served chilled and topped with a bit of orange zest. The whole looks-like-celery-but-tastes-like-artichoke trick of the cardoon went hand-in-lucky-severed-paw with the mindfuck of vanilla flavored rabbit.

It was like a Miracle Fruit party, without the Miracle Fruit.