Thanksgiving taco bar

I'm no genius chef, but I'm also not all that bad at roasting turkeys. We usually buy our Thanksgiving bird from a nearby farm, then I shove a mixture of butter and herbs under the skin and roast the thing in accordance with a recipe that has proven fairly reliable over the last decade. We complement it with the typical Thanksgiving dishes that we began preparing three days earlier and the result is generally tasty. Of course, it's also accompanied by the less-tasty sides of kitchen stress, overflowing sinks and creative invectives that should not be uttered around elementary schoolers.

    Last year marked a turning point in the Thanksgiving song-and-dance routine. My old reliable recipe unaccountably failed and the turkey was horribly underdone. Then the boys made it clear that they do not like Thanksgiving foods: not stuffing, not potatoes, not cranberry sauce, not gravy. After all the time Will and I spent cooking, neither of us wanted to be told how bad the food was. Least of all the gravy -- I am somewhat proud of my gravy and I have friends who still talk about The Gravy of 1997 -- so for the boys to pan it was somewhat of a blow.

    That was when Will suggested tacos for our next Thanksgiving.

     Now, when Will said "tacos," and when I heard "tacos," I suspect we were thinking different things. He probably meant, "let's buy some tortillas and mix some seasoning into ground meat," something that would not have involved a lot of swearing, timing dishes or work. His idea was a stress-free meal. But no, I have to do things the hard way.

    See, I make a decent flour tortilla. And there was this mole recipe I've been wanting to try, but you don't just make mole for the fun of it. And after all, it's still a holiday meal...

    This may have remained under control and stress-free, except my parents, younger brother, sister and sister's boyfriend were coming to dinner. This is one of the drawbacks of being the only sibling with a house: I end up hosting a lot of holidays. I like cooking for a lot of people, but it is a lot of work. Since we were having guests for dinner, I couldn't in good conscience serve them salsa out of a jar, could I?

     The menu ended up looking like this: shredded chicken, mole sauce, salsa, crema, tortillas, sangria, tortilla soup, frijoles refritos and rice. Most were familiar recipes. All were from scratch.

     The mole was the big one, and one of the few I could -- or must -- prepare ahead of time (the other being the crema, a simple matter of adding buttermilk to heavy cream and leaving it sit on top of the fridge for 24 hours). The recipe I used was adapted from "Cocina de la familia", a Mexican-American cookbook given me about 10 years ago.

     The recipe calls for partially cooking chicken breast in water to make a broth, then using the broth in the mole sauce, and finishing cooking the chicken in the sauce. This would be fine, except the recipe also highly recommended letting the sauce sit for a few days to let the flavors blend before finishing the chicken.
     Yeah, like I was going to do that. Aside from it being more work than I wanted to put into it (stress-free, right?), or the qualms I felt about having undercooked chicken sitting around for three days, I wanted people to have the option of not using the mole if they didn't want it. So I subbed in a very large container of chicken broth.

     I also had to adapt on the key ingredient of chocolate. My sister, just returned from Mexico, was bringing me Mexican chocolate, but wouldn't arrive until Thanksgiving morning. So I used some unsweetened cocoa, Ceylon and a handful of semisweet chips for good chocolaty measure.

    Making the mole was easy, but did have a lot of steps. Toasting dried chiles (above), then soaking them. Toasting peanuts, almonds, pumpkin seeds, plaintain, garlic and crackers. Pureeing them (right). Pureeing the chiles and their soaking liquid -- and misreading the directions and pureeing them all at once instead of liquefying them in small batches, thereby leaving chunks of ancho in the sauce. Cooking the whole mess together in a large stockpot with some chicken broth and chocolate and wondering why it made so darn much... and fearing that it might be just a little too spicy.

     When Thanksgiving rolled around, I did not get up obsessing about turkey. Instead, I tossed some ingredients in a pot for tortilla soup, then employed my favorite cooking method for the salsa, chicken and refritos:  hand them off to Will. They were pretty easy, actually, and I would have done them myself except I was busy with tortillas. For those, I mixed flour, baking powder, shortening and water, then let the dough rest for 30 minutes. Then I rolled out 24 little taco-sized tortillas and quickly cooked them in a skillet.

     It was in the midst of this, including the rewarming of the mole, that we realized we were in the middle of the get-everything-on-the-table mad rush we had been trying to avoid. Still, it wasn't nearly as bad as the usual Thanksgiving frenzy. And we got everything on the table in good time ... except the tortilla soup, which we somehow forgot and ended up having for lunch the next day.

    THE VERDICT: The mole was spicy, but much better after mellowing for a couple of days in the fridge. It was also better with chicken than on its own. It was a little much for Alex, but everyone else seemed to like it. Would I make it again? Maybe -- or maybe a different version.

     Will I skip the turkey next Thanksgiving and make tacos again? Definitely... unless we come up with another festive, but even lower-key idea.