zarelessons.

I almost never remember my dreams, unless they're really terrifying. Or I sometimes remember them if I'm woken up during one of them. This morning's 9am courier pickup from Nippon Express was supposed to be this afternoon's pickup (after they didn't show up yesterday, bastards), so their arrival this morning was unexpected. At the moment the doorbell rang, I was dreaming that Klary and I were trying to make her difficult maple whiskey custard, and we had just determined that my oven wouldn't turn on because it was too dirty, which could totally happen in real life.

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Yesterday I finally gave up on cooking from this Zarela Martinez cookbook. I tried the beef/masa soup recipe on Sunday, and it reminded me that, oh yeah: I've never made a recipe of hers that I haven't had to drastically doctor in order to get it to taste like something. I'm not quite sure what is being lost in the translation from her kitchen to mine, but my results have always been el blando. Maybe her oven is too clean.

















In order to fix this soup, I had to add some mole rojo that I made on Saturday, and now it's OK-tasting though there's a bit of dissonance in the concept of "mole soup": for me, mole needs to be closely bound to something with some texture.

The masa-thickening idea is interesting, though...I'm wondering if maybe this wouldn't be better as a chicken soup, heavy on the chipotle, with maybe some pureed corn as well.

ETA: Actually, we just had some of this for lunch, and by now, Day 3, it's very good, not really tasting like mole at all but quite spicy. I kind of wish I'd left the original recipe alone to see if it would have improved this dramatically. The garnishes are lime wedges and crumbled Turkish sheep's cheese, which to me is kind of similar to Mexican farmer's cheese in its mild saltiness, though the Mexican version is a cow's milk cheese.

















Regardless, it looks like I'll be returning to Susana Trilling for the rest of the week's Mexican experiments...her recipes just work for me. While I was making that there link, I found a nice Amazon list of Mexican and border region cookbooks here. Some of my favorite all-time cookbooks are on that list, so I should check out the rest.

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By the bye, I've been eating like an asshole again, so it's time to go back to writing down what I eat, and unfortunately I have to do it here. Sorry.