Kitchen Creations of Lizinda- Mexican and Nigerian

"Lizinda" is the name I will be giving to the cooking team of Liz and Linda, my great and fabulous godmother. Who happens to be one of the most crafty and creative people I've ever had the pleasure of knowing. And she is just all-around wonderful. I've been very privileged over the years to eat many of her delicious international creations; it's always an adventure to have dinner with her and her husband Jim!

Now that I've collected a few international recipes of my own, we've started what I hope will be a continuing tradition of teaching one another recipes from different cultures. Our first adventure back at Christmas was me teaching her a Malaysian curry and her teaching me how to make bread (it's not international, but I have a HUGE mental barrier for bread-making). This time around I taught her Nigerian red sauce and she taught me a Mexican mole. Quite a crazy combination of flavors to eat at the same meal, but really fun to make together.

I hadn't the slightest clue about how moles are made, but she taught me lots of good stuff. Turns out they're pretty much a whole bunch of ingredients toasted, blended together, and fried. Not so hard, but you have to have the ingredients, which for this one included tomatoes, corn tortillas, (homemade!), toasted day-old bread (who would've thought?), garlic, dried guajillo chiles, ancho chiles, toasted sesame and cumin seeds, cinnamon sticks, and cloves. Here are a few of the ingredients:

We toasted most of it on the comal, which is a round cast iron plate that Mexicans use for a lot of their cooking. Jim made this one, because he does cool blacksmithing stuff like that!

Then we stuck it in a blender with some chicken broth and made it into a sauce!

Finally we fried it a bit, and then we had our mole! There are a few other steps involved- like taking the seeds out of the chiles, which I did, but then forgot about and rubbed my eyes. Oh. My. Word.- but this was the basic idea.

Since we were having chicken with the Nigerian red sauce, we ate the mole over chilacayote squash, though Linda said it's great over pork or chicken as well.

Then we were onto Nigerian red sauce, which is soooo tasty. It's essentially tomatoes, onions, and red peppers (I used bell) chopped up and fried with some Maggi (chicken bouillon powder) and Nigeria pepper (pronounced peh-peh).

I boiled some chicken, cooked some rice, and we had our red sauce!

What a delicious meal, and a fun culinary adventure!! Hopefully many more Lizinda Creations to come!