Mole: "this is like food porn"

I (L) met mole at Rosario's (possibly not the best, but always my favorite Mexican restaurant in San Antonio.).  Rosario's is where you took visiting family when you could get them away from the River Walk and into the more interesting areas of SA (in this case, the King William District).  I would rave about the sweet, tangy Enchiladas Suizas, complete with a white wine sauce and crema fresca, and inevitably the guest in question would order them and fall madly in love, promising candy and sunset walks to the plate if only it would give up one more bite. 

If you operate under the same restaurant rules as I, it's forbidden to order the same thing as another party of the table, so I'd only stare longingly and order what I perceived to be daring: the chicken mole, or enchiladas de mole ("Chocolate!" the staid guests would say in fascination, horror, and awe at my 19 year old bravura.  I think).

Their mole sauce had none of the one night stand delights of the suizas: this was a stormy, passionate, long term relationship where you realize what your previously detested is now endearing, and vice versa (sweet, spicy, salty).  We had another encounter at Boca Chica in St. Paul, MN, during my very long grad school winters - I was introduced by a friend, I was very homesick, one thing led to another....

Mole is many things, among them a small mammal, a unit of measurement, and a variety of Mexican sauces (poblano, black, yellow,  and red among them).  It was likely a happy accident of a recipe, given the number of ingredients, but the traditional legend is that nuns in a convent in Puebla de los Angeles concocted it (with heavenly intervention) to serve to a visiting archbishop.  One must assume those nuns occupy a very special place in the Hereafter.

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Similarly inspired, R and I started the nearly 3 hour journey to make our own mole, a combination of Emeril's and Tyler Florence's with a dash of Rick Bayless, depending on availability of ingredients.  I should note that their recipes rely heavily on a blender; I only own a small, unprepared, currently very pissed off food processor with one speed. 

There was much toasting and frying and grinding and leaking all over the counter (why must all ingredients be fried individually, one might wonder).  The mole I made combines tomatoes, garlic, onions (so far, so good) with sesame seeds, nuts (hmm) , raisins (what?), chiles, various spices and unsweetened chocolate (wait a minute) in a way that suggests an Italian ragu running off with a chocolate bar and suddenly taking up a crunchy, granola lifestyle, all the while having an affair with a serrano.   There were several ingredient mishaps and cases of neglect--we should really care about the number, size and type of chiles we used, but I chose the package in Spanish Safeway helpfully labelled "dried chiles"; left out the raisins, plaintains and subsituted peanuts/pecans for almonds; used tomato sauce instead of fresh tomatoes; discovered our only chocolate was not only not Mexican, but milk; quartered, sixthed, halved and guesstimated to cut down the serving size with abandon and somehow neglected to have "lard" in my cupboard--but the result was pretty fantastic. 

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