Aztec Lasagna

Lovers Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatepetl in front of the mountains that bear their names. These mountains divide the Valley of Mexico (City) from the Valley of Puebla. Read the romantic legend at Inside Mexico. My first encounter with mole was on the flanks of Popo in 1989.

We recently revisited a favorite recipe for friends we had not yet cooked for. We could tell they were a bit trepidatious about champandongo -- a dish that has meat, hot peppers, and cocoa, among other ingredients. But they were brave, so we took the opportunity to prepare one of my favorite weekend (i.e., long prep time) dishes.

Champandongo  is one of the lesser-known menu items in Like Water for Chocolate, in part perhaps because its preparation is not detailed in the movie version, nor is it associated with any magic realism, as are so many of Tita's other creations throughout the story.

As we've reported on this blog, mole (pronounced MOH-lay, not like the rodent) can be prepared in quite a variety of ways. I used the champandongo recipe found and followed by Pam's students in 2011 as a starting point, modifying only the way the sauce itself is prepared. I used ordinary tomato sauce in place of the tomato soup, and of course roasted my own poblano peppers, rather than using canned green chiles. I used poblanos because both this recipe and the peppers originate in Puebla, where Pam and I spent a memorable summer in 1989, and it is where we discovered mole -- a taste I enjoyed right away, and that Pam acquired over time.

Champandongo kit: meat filling, tortillas, mole. 

In place of the cocoa powder called for in the recipe, I used a package (2 disks) of dark chocolate from Taza. I would have used one of the other varieties with chili, but the regular dark was fine. I simply powdered it with a cheese grater. I then used ALL of the mole I prepared. I am not quite sure why the recipe calls for making a lot of mole and using only a small amount. The more, the better!

Don't skimp on the Manchego cheese!

The result was quite good, especially served with a bordeaux, which I had read as a recommendation with another mole recipe, and with Negra Modelo, a brown beer that I first encountered during that Puebla summer. Our friends enjoyed their first mole encounter, though their reaction to its spiciness suggests that I could have skipped the cayenne or the jalapeno that I had slipped into the sauce.

After preparing this and bragging about its Aztec roots -- the first people who prepared this for me, after all, did not even speak Spanish, only Nahuatl -- it occurs to me that flour tortillas are quite a departure. True Aztec lasagna probably needs corn tortillas. Perhaps next time I'll try them, at least in one side of the dish.

Lagniappe

Since we were serving this at our seaside Whaling House, our friends brought us a whale cake to share. It was delicious! (And no whales were harmed.)

Champan-Hayes-Boh

For a small honors seminar this semester, I decided to hold the final exam as a discussion over food at Casa Hayes-Boh. I decided to make champandongo the main course, as I have been thinking about this mole-based (MOH-lay) dish ever since we had it here with a group of Pam's students here three years ago.

In that case, Pam had made the food of Coma Agua Para Chocolate a major theme of her Spanish course, and had secured an undergraduate research grant to facilitate having the class make most of the dishes from Laura Esquivel's book (see my posts on its revolutionary context and on Latin American films).

We have cooked several of the dishes from Esquivel's work before -- most notably chicken based on her quail-and-rose-petal recipe, but Pam's class project was far more ambitious, especially since it involved students, many of whom had little if any cooking experience. Working in pairs, students created both a fabulous meal and a permanent record of their culinary efforts. Each post on the CAPCR blog explains how a dish was prepared and how it is connected to the story. All of the dishes were shared at our house during this 8:00 a.m. class. Most were then served again -- either remade or thawed from leftovers -- at an undergraduate research colloquium open to the entire campus.

I must admit that I know the movie far better than the book, and so was unaware of champandongo prior to this adventure with the students. I have been a huge fan of mole -- a complex chocolate-chile sauce usually associated with poultry -- since Pam and I spent the summer of 1989 in Puebla, Mexico. The sauce is properly known as mole poblano, meaning "sauce of Puebla" and represents one of the several ways cacao was used for centuries before people thought of it as a candy. Its use in this lasagna-style dish was simply amazing, and it is hard to believe I have not yet attempted it myself.

In planning my own version, I of course began with the description by Sullivan and Laura. (Incidentally, Sullivan is the only student in this class who I knew previously, both as a student and a long-time family friend.) As complex as the dish was, however, I knew that authentic mole is much more complicated: Campbell's soup, for instance, was rarely available to the ancient Aztecs. I turned to the Hispanic Kitchen blog for more authentic versions, and quickly found an impressive recipe for chicken mole.

Cooking in the Car

Although it was published -- by Miramax Books, of all things -- almost 20 years ago, we only recently learned that Laura Esquivel has a cookbook. We have cooked so many great things from her novel that an actual cookbook is very promising indeed!

I learned of the book when showing the film version of Like Water for Chocolate to my Geography of Latin America class this summer. Searching for other books by the author whose work inspired the movie, I found An Appetite for Passion.  (Note: IMDb users have given this film only 7.3/10 stars, proving that there is an exception to the general idea that crowds get things right. But I digress.)

We have loved Como Agua and its food since we saw the film in its original art-house run. Pam even participated in a class about the book and its food at our church back in Tucson, and a few years ago incorporated the food into her university Spanish class. The results of this creative undergraduate-research experience are on the CAPCR blog she created with her students, and which we consult frequently.

For this project, Esquivel collaborated with cookbook author John Willoughby and translator Margaret Sayers Peden to put together a volume dedicated to the enjoyment of food with all the senses.

So much for the appetizer -- on to the main course! For our first foray into this volume, Pam suggested a salmon dish, and since I was headed out for my weekly "whaling" voyage in New Bedford, I knew it would be convenient for me to pick up something fresh at Kyler's. I had also come to the market prepared, because I had read the recipe carefully before setting out. I don't always remember to do this, but this story is a lesson in why it is a good idea.

The recipe entitled Marinated Salmon with Warm Leek-Ginger Vinaigrette calls for imbuing the salmon with ginger in two stages, implied by the title. It is to marinate in a concoction of ginger, garlic, soy sauce, orange juice and brown sugar for 2-4 hours before broiling. For the broiling itself, it is to be coated with a vinaigrette -- more like a relish -- of ginger, shallots, leeks, lime, vinegar and soy. (See page 44 of the book for all the details.) Based on this description, I selected a wild-caught salmon with a gamy flavor that would stand up to the ginger. Knowing that we would not be eating until midnight if I followed the recipe after getting home, I prepared the marinade and vinaigrette beforehand, and brought the former to the fishmonger, along with a glass dish and the cooler I always bring. It was then a simple matter to put the fish in the marinade right there in the parking lot, so it could meld while I rowed and drove. When I got home, I put the vinaigrette on, and we enjoyed this along with some home-brewed pale ale and a delicious salad Pam had prepared.

What our "prep kitchen" looked like 187,000 miles ago.
Our 2004 LW300 may have been the very last wagon
sold by Saturn in southern New England.

The results: extraordinarily delicious! The whole family enjoyed this, and Pam found the one leftover fillet to be even more delicious two days later. The recipe calls for far more vinaigrette than is actually needed, so I am saving that for use with chicken in the next couple of days. I think it will be fabulous.

The introduction to this recipe describes the global infatuation with ginger and its association with passion, fecundity, and Paradise. It also makes for a simply delicious dinner.

The Wait is Over!

Chicken in Rose Petal Sauce

Our November 1 post about Jersusalem artichokes gave a teaser about a new blog Pam's class was creating based on recipes from the novel and film Como Agua para Chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate). We continued the stroking with our November 18 post on Champadongo Magic. The blog "Como Agua Para Chocolate Recetas" is now up and ready with photographs, recipes and commentary. Like the "Nueva Receta" blog, although the title is in Spanish, the posts are in English. However, we did happen upon another blog of the same title, that is written in Spanish, but it does not appear to be based on the story.

Champandongo Magic

Hispanic Kitchen

We did not even know there was a contest, but the winner has been chosen. The best casserole in the world is -- without doubt -- Champandongo. Much of this blog is about eating healthy, local, environmental-friendly food. This post is a bit of departure -- a cross-cultural culinary experience that is pure indulgence.

This particular experience began almost two decades ago, when we saw the film Como Agua Para Chocolate in an art theater in Tucson. Around the same time, Pam read the book, whose title in English is Like Water for Chocolate, referring to a temperature -- literal and figurative -- just below boiling. More recently, Pam showed the film to her Spanish 101 students.

Laura Esquivel's story is that of Tita, whose love of cooking is intertwined with her forbidden love for her brother-in-law, Pedro. Every twist of the plot turns on food, whether it is the longing induced by teardrops in a wedding cake or the burning of the loins engendered by chicken in rose-petal sauce. The magic in this tale of magic realism comes from the food, so Pam assigned her students recipes from the book, which they prepared, wrote about, and then shared at a gathering in our home last week. (This aspect of the assignment seemed a bit odd for an 8:00 a.m. class, but the food was so delicious that we hardly noticed we were eating a rich and savory dinner for breakfast.)

Chicken with rose-petal sauce:
Best shared with someone you love.

Most of the dishes were familiar to us, but the champandongo is a lesser character in the story, known only as a fancy meal Tito serves on a special occasion to a fiance she does not love. It is based on mole (pronounced MOL-lay) sauce, a complex concoction of chocolate, sesame, and chiles that we knew from our long-ago summer in Puebla. Unlike highland mole that is simply ladled over roasting poultry, however, the champandongo incorporates the sauce as one of many ingredients in what is most comparable to lasagna. We were very impressed with the example prepared by Pam's students, particularly since one of the team who made it is a vegetarian but nonetheless went to the trouble to prepare the mole from scratch, something that not even we have attempted. He did not get to experience what turned out to be quite a satisfying meal, and one that inspired us to follow up with our own version.

Pam found the recipe on Hispanic Kitchen -- a delightful social network for foodies. The recipe is fairly simple and clearly written, though a couple of the ingredients are a bit tricky. Most confounding at first was the Manchego cheese, a sheep's-milk cheese from the part of Spain from which Quixote's Man of La Mancha got his name. This was available from our local grocery store, and resembles Parmesan but with a sweeter flavor. We took a short cut on the mole sauce, using about half a jar (about three times what the recipe calls for) of the Trader Joe's version.

The result is pure indulgence -- cheesy, complex, sweet, and spicy all at the same time. What completed the experience was a perfect wine pairing. The recipe suggests a "smoky red wine," so we decided to try one of two red wine we recently purchased on the Coastal Wine Trail. Good red wines are rare in New England, where the growing season is too short for them to develop, but we had recently encountered two. Of these, we are saving Sakonnet's the peppery Cabernet Franc for a steak dinner, so we chose the 2006 Elms Meritage from Greenvale by default. Imagine our delight when we read the tasting notes: "wonderful aromas of berry, smoke and subtle spice."

A meal perfectly paired with its wine, and
even the glasses match!

Not exactly "nueva" but worth mentioning nonetheless

James turned 48 on Tuesday, which means his birthday was on Wednesday (to find out more about that please see my Attainment Day page). To celebrate this auspicious occasion we made one of the most romantic dinners ever invented - Quail in Rose Petal Sauce. This recipe was made famous by Laura Esquivel in one of my favorite books: Like Water for Chocolate, and movie by the same name. Anyone who has seen the movie will not forget watching the lovely, naked, Gertrudis riding away on horseback with a revolutionary after eating the dish that her sister Tita prepared to inspire the passion of her unrequited love, Pedro. We have made this recipe before, although we have never actually used quail, but chicken instead. There are many flavors, and textures, and a special sweetness that comes from the honey. It is really not that hard to make, although be sure you have a clean kitchen to start, this will generate a lot of dishes.