The hotel has set up this room to give a cooking class for mole poblano.
Each person gets their own set of ingredients.
Kimberly slicing up her plantain.
Some of the ingredients are spices and chocolate, which we just dump back into the main pots.
The chef is making chicken stock including vegetables and this chicken.
After cleaning our baskets of peppers, Kimberly starts frying the peppers.
The room includes this closed-circuit camera feed at the back, so everyone can see.
The plantains are fried in the same oil that the peppers were fried in.
Kimberly sampling one of the chile-spiced plantains. It was tasty.
All the fried chiles are added to this huge pot, and Wade and Michael manually
crush them down to allow them to be mixed.
Of course we wear gloves for this part.
They assemble a grinder that has a rotating stone inside of a fixed stone.
In the meantime, the chefs are mixing up all of the ingredients and cooking them down.
The mole mixture goes into the top of the grinder...
...and one person pushes the mixture through the top hole while another rotates the grinder.
The finely-ground mixture extrudes out around the rotating stone, where Kimberly grabs it with a spatula.
The process is painfully slow, so the remaining mixture is brought down to the main kitchen
where they have motorized grinders. We will have the resulting mole with our dinner later.
Next we are making red and green salsas to go on our lunch.
These little tortillas are fried up into chalupas, ...
...then we add some red or green salsa or some mole...
...and a couple of chicken strips with onions.
While we wait for our mole to cook all afternoon, we go out walking. This department store
sells everything from clothes to motorcycles, right next to one another.
Look! Woolworth's still has a store here.
That evening, we meet back up on the roof of the hotel.
In the background you can see the active volcano Popocatepetl ("Popo").
The sun goes down with Popo and this church in the background.
We have "successfully" completed our mole class...
...and we each get a certificate of completion.
Another view with Popo on the left, and Pico de Orizaba on the right.
Another treat: an opera singer serenades us on the roof with the church in the background.
Down for dinner where we get to try the mole we made in the morning.
They have hired a violin student from the university to serenade us.
Chips with black beans on the left.
We each get some red rice, and chicken with a large helping of mole on the side.
To finish off the night, and after-dinner drink of a liquor made from the poblano pepper.
That will clean out your sinuses.
