Mole Chicken (Foods of Love)

This dish was served at the Foods of Love dinner, and is based on a couple of recipes.

Mole Sauce

I used this Pati Jinich recipe.

I omitted the almonds (because of an allergy) and anise seeds (because I couldn’t find them in any of the four shops I went to). I used peanut butter instead of peanuts. I also used a range of fresh and dried chillies and tinned chipotles in adobe sauce. Because I was worried about it being too hot (cooking the sauce was making my eyes water) I removed the chillies before blending and it ended up being quite mild. I made the sauce the day before and it was very, very earthy and quite bitter. I googled ‘how to fix a bitter mole’ and basically determined that mole’s need a lot of sugar and salt to taste good so i kept adding agave syrup and salt until it tasted ok. Approx 1/3-1/2 cup agave syrup and 1-2tsps salt.

Chicken Mole

I then cooked the sauce and chicken according to this David Lebovitz recipe.

I used about 1.5kg of thigh fillets instead of a whole chicken and only used about half of the mole from the first recipe.

I served it with fresh limes, basmati rice and roasted vegetables. I roasted sweet potato, red onion, zucchini and corn with some oil and dried oregano.