Chicken Mole

On Monday, we thawed out two chicken breasts with no plan of how we were going to turn them into dinner.  Unfortunately, Hubby went home from work sick early that day, so we didn't use them.  I ate leftovers.  On Tuesday, we ate other leftovers, because that's a night we go to martial arts class....just no time for real cooking.  I tasked Hubby with figuring out what we would do with the chicken tonight (Wednesday) and he came up with this recipe for chicken mole.  We, as usual, changed it a bit to suit our own tastes.  Here is how we did it....

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• 2 boneless chicken breasts
• 1 bay leaf
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon paprika
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 onion, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 pound of fresh tomatoes, seeded and chopped
• 2 teaspoons brown sugar
• 1 cup chicken broth, homemade
• 1/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips

Procedure

1.  Heat the vegetable oil in an enameled Dutch oven over medium-high heat.

2.  Cook the chicken pieces (we simply butterflied them - but you can chop if you like) in the hot oil until browned. Remove from the pan and set aside.

3.  Reduce heat to medium, and stir in the bay leaf and other dried spices until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add the onion and garlic; cook and stir until the onion has softened and turned translucent, about 5 minutes.

4.  Stir in the tomatoes, brown sugar, and chicken broth, and bring to a simmer over medium-high heat. Once simmering, stir in the chocolate chips until melted.

5.  Remove the bay leaf, and puree the sauce.  Put the bay leaf back in.

6.  Return the chicken pieces to the pot. Reduce heat to medium-low, cover, and simmer until the chicken is tender and no longer pink, 15 to 20 minutes.

7.  Serve with homemade corn tortillas, and on my plate tonight, mashed peas with butter.  Mmmmm.

Review

This was pretty yummy.  Right before we ate it, though, we decided that it needed....something more, so we added additional chocolate and some salt (why the original recipe didn't ask for salt I am not sure).  I do think that if there was simply a bit more of each spice (especially the cloves) it would have been fantastic.  I also thought it was weird that the original recipe didn't call for the sauce to be blended, and I wonder how it got to be so smooth in the pictures online given the (textures of some of the) ingredients that went into it, so that's why we decided to blend it.  Finally, Hubby doesn't like raisins, so we left them out; I don't know if the final taste would have been better or worse with them.  We will definitely use this recipe again, perhaps making a couple small changes/additions next time.

Bonus

Today is 3/14, so of course we finished dinner with pie.  Get it, Pi (3.14)?  Lol.

Chocolate Cream Pie from our local supermarket.  Very good.