New recipe #1

So today was 'Mole' Day in down-town Darlington. The first of my new recipe attempts for the week was the Pulled Pork with Mexican Almond Mole served with homemade corn tortillas and avocado and radish salsa. Sounds like something off a fancy Mexican restaurant menu, and rather delish, right?

Basically you slow cook pork shoulder (outdoor reared and Freedom Foods endorsed, naturally!) in (homemade) stock, orange juice and cinnamon, then add to the shredded pork and cooking juices this mole sauce (which, by the way, will smell more like mulled wine at Christmas than it will a meaty Mexican casserole). The mole sauce is made by dry frying onion and garlic, then blistering some cherry tomatoes, frying some flaked almonds, coriander and cumin and sultanas and throwing in a fried corn tortilla. Then you blitz that with some chipotle chillis and that's it. You warm it all together and serve. Oh, and you add some chopped dark chocolate before you blitz the mole sauce.

Result? Well..,it was a bit weird. Not at all inedible, but ever-so slightly weird. It smelt more like nutty chocolate cake than a meat-based chilli mixture, which was a bit off-putting but it was fine. I added a small can of red kidney beans to the mole too - I liked the added texture and I'm all in favour of using more pulses...makes meat go further and adds protein and fibre, so that's a win win. Um, I don't know really. It was an awful lot more faffing about than I'd usually bother with, and I'm not convinced the results were worth it. Perhaps it'll be fantastic tomorrow after the flavours develop a bit more? I think it'll be much nicer on rice with a big blob of sour cream on top, rather than served buritto style. Good to have tried though. And, as suspected, I got a look of unwavering horror from the boy when he was told there was chocolate in the dish (horror followed by a minute or so of muttering under his breath about the sanity of people who put chocolate in meat dishes. Hehe!)

The homemade corn tortillas, on the other hand, are very easy. The hardest part will be getting hold of masa harina (corn flour) to make them. This is proper ground maize designed for Mexican cooking - don't use polenta or cornmeal or the white powdered stuff they sell as corn flour. You need masa harina. I can get this in my local supermarket in the "ethnic" food section (honestly, 'ethnic'?? I loathe that term in almost every usage, but that's another rant for another day). If I can get it in the Darlington supermarket, I'm confident you'll have no trouble elsewhere.

Basically you just mix 250g masa harina with 330ml of warm water. You leave it to rest 15 mins and then knead into a ball before breaking bits off, rolling out and frying. I also added a healthy tsp of salt this time. I've made them once before without salt (since no recipe I've found calls for it) and they were sooo bland and in desperate need of a salty kick in the pants! The dough is funny feeling...really springy and hollow (that sounds odd, but if you make them, I'm sure you'll agree!) The rolling out process is the trickiest part and if you're a regular maker, you can apparently buy a tortilla press to quickly do this for you. Clearly that's not something most people will have, and nor do I. After a bit of experimentation, I've decided this is the best way to do it, sans tortilla press: cut open a large freezer bag, roll a lychee-sized piece of dough into a ball then press flat and place in between the plastic and roll with a rolling pin. Turn a 1/4 turn after each roll and you'll get a much more circular shape. You want them about 1-2mm thick. Then you very carefully peel the plastic back and dry-fry in a hot pan on both sides until sealed. Warm slightly to eat and you're away laughing.
If you prefer a crispy taco (which, according to my web-research is something unheard of in Mexico, but hey - I like 'em!) then you can shallow fry them in a couple of tbsp hot oil once you've cooked them. You can chop them into wedges and make chips the same way. I suspect that you could bake them in the oven to achieve a crispy tortilla too, but I haven't yet verified this suspicion...

So. Not a failure, but not a resounding victory either. Plus I have loads of mole leftover so I suspect we'll be eating this uninspired dish for quite a few days yet...score! :-P