Cooking With Silvìa

Silvìa is quite the cook, and promised to show us how to make mole while we were in Oaxaca. In October each year she prepares the paste (or pasta in Spanish): she roasts various types of chilies (chihuacle, pasilla and more), onion, garlic, sesame seeds, almonds, and peanuts, then heads to a local mill to have cinnamon, sugar, chocolate, oregano and other spices milled together with the roasted ingredients, and finally fries everything in pig fat, stirring constantly to produce the final mole paste. We set to work making mole sauce on our second day with Silvìa. She started by boiling chicken pieces to make a chicken broth, then blended tomatoes (red and green ones, called miltomate) and boiled them before adding the mole paste and the chicken broth. Finally she prepared rice and we had a meal of mole over chicken with rice. Each part of the process was done carefully and well, very much unlike Holly's multi-tasking cooking, and the result was delicious! We chatted about the family and more about typical Oaxacan food over our tasty meal, then headed out to work off the meal by biking up the 7 km and 300 m of elevation to Monte Alban, a Zapotec archeological site. We took in the peaceful atmosphere and excellent views of the valley below at a site where archeologists think that child sacrifice rituals may have been routinely undertaken. The ride down was much more enjoyable than the grunt up and took us back to eating more delicious food with Erika and Silvìa, hurrah!Read more