January 12

Today was another cooking day for team A. I don't really know much about the other dishes in the meal because I spent all of my time concentrating on the Mole and the chicken. The mole was really hard and took almost all day. We messed up at a couple of points like forgetting to add the chocolate and adding a little extra pepper. We also made some calculated changes like knocking 30-45 minutes off of the simmering time of the Mole. This was in order to make sure that the dish was finished by the time the meal was served. Even with these mistakes and changes, the chicken in Mole still seemed to be a big hit and I personally was pleased with it. I am curious to see what changes would have arisen from adding the chocolate, and simmering the the correct amount of time. But maybe I will try again someday and find out. However, what is just as important as learning how to make it, is that the next time I come across the dish on a menu, I will not be afraid to order it, because I know what it is and how it should taste.

I also learned a whole lot in terms of cooking skills. One thing that was hard for me was judging whether the color of the sauce and the ingredients matched the description in the recipe. Also, I have never used an over for anything other than bread, cookies, and cakes, so baking chicken was a new experience. Then there was other, much smaller things, like peeling a clove and practicing the knife skills that we learned about in class. The one thing that I can look back on and wish that I had done differently, is that I wish I had been tasting everything as I want along. As it was, I just tasted the chili juice and the end product. But I wish that I had tasted each component (like the tomatillo sauce, the chili sauce, the two combined, the sauce after simmering etc.) The chili sauce and the end product were so completely different that I was left stunned and couldn't figure out what had happened to change it as we went through the process. Thus, when I am cooking from now on, I will be tasting all along so that I can begin to understand the subtleties and the processes better. I'm sure that there were even more, and they will, undoubtedly come back to me when I'm back in the kitchen.

As for the other dishes, I loved some, and was presently surprised by others. The steak, the Coke cake, and the baked beans which  were all extremely delicious, and I will most definitely be trying to make those on my own sometime in the near future. There was also salad which I'm pretty sure had pears in it, which was really good! I was actually expecting to like that salad, but not the eggplant. I had never liked it before, so I was not expecting anything to change. But I did like it. It did not have much taste, but what taste it did have was mild and sweet, which was a surprise compared to what I was expecting.

The best part was that there were so much of all of the dishes that I could eat all I wanted and almost had to be rolled out of there. Overall, Team A did a great job on all counts and I now have six new dishes that I can try to make one my own.