Making Mole in the Modern World

April 18, 2016February 27, 2022JT Twissel 14 Comments

Traditional Mole Grinding Tool

Making Mole Sauce, Part Two (Part One here)

After giving up on the mortar and pesto, we turned to Liz’s antique Mixmaster to grind the chilies into dust. However, after five minutes of grinding the mixture looked like cornflakes and the machine began overheating. Liz unwrapped a present she planned to give her daughter for Mother’s Day: an electric coffee grinder and so began stuffing it with chilies.

Alas, it soon became apparent that between the smoking mixmaster and the tiny coffee grinder we would be pulverizing chilies until the end of days. Luckily I knew where to find a much more powerful mixmaster and a substantially larger coffee grinder.

Modern day poblano chili grinders!

“You’re not taking my babies to Liz’s house!” My husband said.

He adores his gizmos. Almost obsessively and Liz, well, Liz has no patience with a machine that doesn’t obey verbal orders. He went on to catalogue all the things we’d lent her which came back a little wonky.

“I won’t let Liz touch it. I’ll do all the grinding myself.”

He didn’t believe me but when informed no Mixmaster equaled no mole sauce, he relented. I returned to Liz’s house and we commenced our never ending chili grinding operation.

Step 2: Roasting the spices, fruits and nuts

Once the chilies were finally pulverized, it was time to work on the other ingredients: hazelnuts, almonds. raisins, pecans, cinnamon, garlic, sesame seeds, anise, and plantains. All of which would need to be roasted until they were fragrant.

As Liz roasted, I pulled apart garlic. I love garlic, I really do. But peeling garlic, oh my, do your fingers get sticky.

When we were young mothers I envied Liz. I was divorced and struggling in a community were misfortune was treated like rabies while she lived in a sprawling ranch-style house on a hill. Her husband was an attorney specializing in environmental concerns, her large close-knit family always around for family dinners and impromptu babysitting, her children were invited to all the parties mine were not. So when her family adopted me and my son as a part of their extended family, I smiled and pretended things were not as bad as they were for me. I always assumed the same women who pretended not to see me when I went to school events, welcomed Liz into their fold because, unlike me, she hadn’t caught the misfortune bug. Apparently she was as a good a pretender as I was.

Ah, the things we do not see. Until Liz was 30 she was a legal resident of Mexico, having come to this country at age 5. She graduated college and worked for the state for twenty years but, even after she got those citizenship papers, she still felt like an outsider.

“Remember Miss Crap?” she asked as we were roasting away.

Miss Crap is what she calls our boys’ kindergarten teacher. Her real name was Miss Trap.

“Sure.”

“Remember how we all had to go in and help her out once a week?”

“Yeah.”

“You know what the bitch had me doing?”

Miss Trap generally put me in charge of an art project. I always assumed it was the same for Liz. “No.”

“Cleaning the damn windows!”

Ground chili powder on top of the nut/raisin/spice mixture.

After filling the house with their heavenly fragrance, we dumped the spices, nuts and raisins into the Mixmaster and let ‘er rip. Unfortunately the raisins proved to be a problem. They don’t grind very well. We ended up with a mixture the consistency of lumpy peanut butter.

And there was another problem. The plantains were not ripe. “I’ll call Pat and have him buy some more plantains,” she said.

Pat, Liz’s husband, had been MIA most of the morning. After she reached him, he called back several times, unable to find plantains anywhere.

Our hands were chapped and bleeding. Our wrists aching from that damned mortar and pestle adventure. “Oh crap, I’ve had it,” said Liz. “Let’s have a glass of wine and call it a day.”

I didn’t argue.

Stay tuned for the final episode – will Pat find ripe plantains? Will Liz and Jan figure out how to turn raisin goop into powder? Or will their mole turn out to be mole paste?

Anyone have a suggestion as to how to grind roasted raisin goop?

Making Mole Sauce

April 15, 2016July 21, 2021JT Twissel 18 Comments

Liz and I on another of our adventures – coaching softball, something about which we knew NOTHING!

When my friend Liz announced she was going to make mole (pronounced mole-lay) I offered to help. The process of making mole takes at least a day, even in Mexico where there are special mills for chili grinding so I saw this as a chance for us to spend some time together. You see, her life is in constant flux and I’m always writing, blogging or taking care of my elderly mother so mole-making would force us each to take a day off just for ourselves. In fact, Liz is so busy I half expected something to come up which would postpone our adventure, maybe forever. But, miracle of miracles, it did not.

Here’s what a commercially made mole looks like:

It’s actually a powder which, before serving, is mixed with crushed tomatoes and freshly grated dark chocolate and then served over meat (generally turkey). I suppose it could be served over cheese enchiladas, for you vegetarians, but from what I’ve read, it was originally developed to disguise the taste of bad meat.

The last time Liz made mole was in Mexico with her aunt. At that time they’d roasted the chiles and de-seeded them before taking them to a professional chili grinder. Her aunt was from Puebla, one of the cities claiming to be the mole capital of the world.

This is a BIG bowl of roasted poblano chiles – it took us an hour and a half to slice and de-seed all these buggers!

By the time I’d driven to her house, Liz had already roasted the chiles over her gas range. The smell of burning chiles hung over the small enclave of houses on the hill where she’s lived peacefully for twenty five years.

However it wasn’t always a peaceful co-existence. The day she moved in there was a knock at the door. A middle-age woman stood on her welcome mat, a disconcerted look on her face. “You don’t look like a Mexican!”

Without missing a beat Liz fired back: “Well, let me go get my sombrero and serape! Then maybe I’ll look like a fucking Mexican.”

I think the neighbors got the point.

Step One: Preparing the Chiles:

Without much adieu we set to the task of pulling apart the chiles to remove the seeds. You don’t want to leave the seeds in as they are as hot as Hades and they do not grind properly. While we processed the chiles we gossiped and giggled and complained about our husbands, the key ingredients of mole making.

Here’s what our fingers looked like after all that work.

Luckily it washed off.

Next came the task of grinding the chiles to powder. Unfortunately we don’t have any nearby professional chili grinders. Here’s what we had:

Traditional tool used to make mole. You’ve got to be kidding Liz!

It took about two seconds before we realized neither of us had the wrist strength of Liz’s ancestors.

We had to come up with another plan. Next: Grinding Chiles in the Modern World. In the meantime – chiles are just one of the twenty or so ingredients used in mole. Without googling, can you guess some of them?

My Heart is a Map

April 8, 2016JT Twissel 35 Comments

The other day I ran into an interesting post regarding whether or not to include maps in works of fantasy and science fiction. Apparently some readers hate them. Not me! In fact, I’ve even considered adding them to my books, Flipka in particular.

Who didn’t love tracing Bilbo and Sam’s route as they tried to save Middle Earth?

The first edition I owned of the Lord of the Rings trilogy contained several maps which had the effect of further loosening my grip on reality. Thirteen years old and I still believed in elves and fairies. And there were maps so Middle Earth had to be a real place, right?

I wasn’t alone. There were thousands of us running around demanding to be called Arwen, dressed in medieval garb and smoking pipes filled with something other than tobacco. Of course, Tolkien was mortified by our behavior however it’s the price of success. Unless you’re a total narcissist, fame is a beast you can’t control.

I was surprised to read that many of Tolkien’s descendants considered Peter Jackson’s movie version of LOTR a complete desecration of his work. I’m of two minds. I’m a big fan of Viggo Mortensen but he was not my Aragorn. My Aragorn was a bit more – dare I say it – effeminate. (You have to remember – I was just exiting the Justin Bieber years.) My Aragorn did not have facial hair and looked a bit like Cary Grant, my then favorite movie star. Can you image Cary Grant as Aragorn?

The fact that we all have our own Aragorns and Arwens made it fool-hardy to try to interpret those books in film (with real humans!) and so for the most part I cut Jackson some slack. Gandalf was perfect, the Nazgul terrifying and who didn’t root on the Ents? Go get ’em trees!

Sometimes you need a map just to keep track of all the places and names in a book or television show. For example, the Game of Thrones:

Be honest, did you have trouble keeping track of the seven kingdoms? Course I probably should have read the book before getting hooked on the television series…

My real passion however is antique maps, particularly if the place in question has special meaning for me.

This is a map of Monson Massachusetts circa 1879 which is around the time my great grandparents decided to make it their home. The drawings on the bottom are of the town’s finest establishments: Greens Hotel, the Reynolds Woolen Mill and Merrick, Fay & Co. Straw Works. All sadly no longer in operation. Old Monson hangs on the wall of my bedroom and greets me each morning with a kiss from those idyllic days of ice-cream floats and evenings spent watching Lawrence Welk with my grandparents. I never thought I would ever miss all those cheesy performers or the bubbles (talk about fantasy land!) but sometimes I wish I could jump into the map and return.

Heidelberg Germany circa who knows! The inscriptions (upper right) are in Latin and difficult to read.

I bought the above map of Heidelberg Germany on a magic night long ago. We don’t get that many magic nights. Each and every one should have its own map.

If you had the chance to purchase an antique map of a special place, where would it be and why?

#ThursdayDoors: Brave

April 7, 2016JT Twissel 15 Comments

Sadly, I have no interesting doors for Norm Frampton’s ThursdayDoors challenge. Obviously I just don’t get out enough!

This open door leads to a small art gallery which also serves as a studio. The artist sits at her easel all day long as people walk past on their way to near-by restaurants. If the weather is nice, she leans her paintings against the plate glass window in front. She is good, really good. If I had the money, I’d buy as many as I could. To paint out in public where people can wander by and remark is one of the bravest things an artist can do.

You probably won’t catch me doing that anytime soon. However, today I’m honored to be featured on Colleen M. Story’s Wellness and Writing blog. Please check it out if you have the time. Colleen is a gifted writer whose focus is on helping writers stay mentally and physically healthy. I’m hoping she’ll drop by the Twissel blog and give us some tips and maybe talk about her book Loreena’s Gift (sci-fi, fantasy) which is coming out on April 12! Here’s the beginning of the synopsis: Loreena Picket is a blind young woman who lives with her uncle, a reverend at a small-town church. Loreena has a strange gift, which she’s not really sure is a gift at all.

On another note: I’ve decided that my blog is pretty blah so, one of the bravest writers I know, Duke Miller and I are experimenting with new ideas on a blog we call Tin Hats. If you’re a fan of Duke’s, there are a few powerful often controversial posts there. I may even get brave and let loose my subversive side! Here’s a video that explains the theme of Tin Hats pretty well:

My fancies are fireflies

March 27, 2016March 27, 2016JT Twissel 18 Comments

– Specks of living light
twinkling in the dark. R. Tagore

In my family Easter is more about chocolate eggs than the Resurrection. But that doesn’t mean I’m an atheist or even an agnostic. I have been to church and I have been baptized; I even spent a year studying the Bible in college. Churches can be wonderful institutions, even the ones whose beliefs leave me scratching my head but

my church is wild and uncontrolled by man.

Outside, be it deep in the woods or by the sea, that’s where I feel close to the inexplicable, all-encompassing, transcendental forces which philosophers far wiser than me struggle to comprehend.

Theories about blogging differ wildly. Some insist that you put yourself out there. Don’t be afraid to take positions on controversial subjects. Encourage debate, particularly if your platform is something like kinky sex.

Others recommend extreme caution. Stay clear of controversial subjects like politics and religion. Don’t do anything to infuriate a potential buyer!

Of course, which direction you take depends on your target audience and why you’re writing in the first place. In general I’m a bit of a wimp. I share bits of my life and only dip into controversy when I just can’t stand nonsense any more. But it’s Easter and so I feel inspired to share with you the work of Rabindranath Tagore, my go-to guy for peace of mind. I was introduced Tagore, a Bengali writer and painter, at the stupid age of eighteen by a dear friend intent on freeing my mind from convention. For decades I’ve carried a copy of his “thoughts” (Fireflies) with me wherever I go. It’s beat up and stained and the spine gave up long ago but the book is out of print and almost impossible to replace.

Tagore was inspired by Chinese and Japanese “thoughts” painted on fans and pieces of silk, thus his works are not poems or haikus or even sonnets, just thoughts. Like “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “let he who is without sin throw the first stone” and “love thy neighbors as thyself” and so many other thoughts by another great philosopher.

Murder by Cat

March 22, 2016JT Twissel 16 Comments

After spending two hours at a tax accountant’s with a 90 year old who can barely remember her first husband’s name I’ve decide my next Fi Butters’ mystery will be Murder by Cat, the strange tale of Ubiquitous K of Babylon Heights.

Synopsis: A series of murders takes place at Babylon Heights, a retirement village where all the residents and in particular the owners have skeletons in their Depends. Reluctantly former psychiatrist Fi Butters is called on scene when one of the residents, her elderly aunt, convinces the others that Ubiquitous K (a Norwegian Forest cat whose owner has recently died) is the cold-blooded murderer.

Murder by Cat, the strange tale of Ubiquitous K of Babylon Heights

“One thing I’m certain of, she was not killed by a cat!”

“She wasn’t killed by a hat?”

“No dear, a cat.”

Martha was one of those little old ladies who questioned everything she heard and thus it was impossible to get through a conversation without saying the same thing at least three times and she wasn’t alone.

“Well isn’t that the darndest thing. Killed by a hat.” Mr. Fassenbinder chimed it. He’d long since lost his hair and hearing but refused to wear an aide because “there wasn’t much good to hear in the world, so why wear the damned thing?” I had to agree.

The residents of Babylon Heights had assembled in the very same community room where holiday parties and bingo games were held. I figured there had to be at least forty folks which was fine; the room could easily hold a couple hundred. Heavy furniture provided comfy seating which meant a few in my audience would probably doze off, but regardless, after my auntie introduced me I launched into an attempt to quell the panic that rattled their aging bones.

“Nobody was killed by a hat or a cat or even a bat!” I chuckled which clued them in that something funny had been said. A few followed suit with a chuckle that sounded painfully forced. Okay, Butters, I thought, the last comedian to crack these folks up was probably Bob Hope. “First of all, despite my aunt’s kind introduction, I am not a detective. I am, or was, a psychiatrist.”

“Was a psychiatrist?”

“Yes Martha. Was. But I won’t bore you with the gory details of my many career changes…”

“Gory details?”

“Well not really gory. . . “

Okay, that’s as far as I’ve gotten on this bit of silliness. If I’m going to continue I need some appropriate character names. Do you have any suggestions? (other than – stop now Jan before you embarrass yourself any further!)

#ThursdayDoors: Chocolate Haupia Pie

March 3, 2016March 3, 2016JT Twissel 22 Comments

Beyond this unassuming door is one of the Must Visit places on the island of Oahu.

Believe it or not hundreds of people visit Ted’s Bakery every day, often arriving on tourist buses from resorts on the leeward side of the island.

Ted’s Bakery

The buses park at Sunset Beach, which is about a half-block away, and tourists stumble out to gawk at the view before wandering across the street to willingly stand in long lines in the hot sun just for a taste of Ted’s famous Chocolate Haupia Pie. Haupia is coconut cream pudding.

Sunset Beach. It was also hit by monster waves – only experienced surfers were allowed in the water.

As the saying goes: “Happiness is sharing a slice of Ted’s Chocolate Haupia Pie while sitting on Sunset Beach.” I must admit it was a little too sweet and rich for my tastes!

Hawaiian Chocolate Haupia Pie

Ted’s story is emblematic of Hawaii. The original Ted, Torojiro Nakamura, arrived from Japan in 1906 under contract to a sugar cane company on Maui. After his contract was over, he worked as a farmer until the 1950s when he and his son bought a piece of land across from Sunset Beach and set up a convenience shop.

The original Ted from the Ted’s Bakery web site.

When the surfing world discovered the North Shore Torojiro’s grandson recognized a golden opportunity and began selling donuts, pastries and cornbread. Today the menu includes pies (if you don’t like coconut you can pig out on Macadamia Nut, Peach Bavarian Cream, Lilikoi Cheese Pie or Pineapple Macadamia Nut), and healthier options such as breakfast, lunch, and dinner “plates,” all served with plenty of rice. In the laid back tradition which is the North Shore, be prepared for a long wait for the lunch plates.

Mural on the side of Ted’s Bakery

The other Must Visit eating joints on the North Shore are the shrimp trucks.

One of the fancier shrimp trucks!

You can’t beat the garlic shrimp you get from these trucks. The smell, the taste!

Please check out other ThursdayDoors at Norm’s place.

The Hukilau

February 29, 2016April 4, 2024JT Twissel 28 Comments

Ever since we left Hawaii I’ve had this song stuck in my head:

And so I thought I’d share the joy! Now you can spend all day singing “Are you going to the Hukilau, the huki, huki, huki, lau?” Even my cat has gone somewhere to hide.

Hawaii is one of the many places I’ve been to that I really didn’t want to leave. However, at times the angry sea didn’t seem to want us to stay.

WildSea — Thirty to forty-five foot waves which during high tide on a full moon night literally came knocking at our back door!

We stayed on the North Shore of Oahu, a laid back haven for surfers from all over the planet. Aside from the Turtle Bay resort, this area has strongly resisted over-development and prides itself on retaining some of the old Hawaii feel.

Sometimes the monster waves would collide far off shore and spout into the air like a geyser. A surge this large hasn’t happened for decades and so you can imagine the excitement it caused, particularly as the timing coincided with one of the North Shore’s most beloved events: The Eddie Aikau Quiksilver Invitational.

From the Eddie Aikau Website — From the Eddie Aikau Foundation web site

“Eddie” was one of the first lifeguards at arguably the most beautiful surf spot in Hawaii, Waimea Bay. He gained fame not only for rescuing people from the deadly surf but also for his skill on the long board. However it was his final, selfless act that gained him the most fame.

In 1978 Eddie joined the Polynesian Voyaging Society on a second migration attempt from the Hawaiian to Tahitian Islands in a traditional voyaging canoe. Twelve miles south of the island of Molokai the canoe capsized and it was Eddie with his long board who volunteered to paddle ashore for help. He was never seen again. Today it’s quite common to see people with teeshirts and bumper stickers reading “Eddie would go” on the North Shore – a testament to this amazing and charismatic guy.

Waimea3 — Waimea Bay during the storm surge – it looked like a washing machine with too many suds!

WashedAshore — Debris washed ashore. Who knows what it was!

So many people decided to take the trek out to the North Shore to witness the monster waves that they had to close Kamehameha Highway. If the two lane road wasn’t flooded, it was jammed with slow driving lookie-loos!

CastleAudrey1 — Since we couldn’t go out in the waves, we built a sand castle.

#WordlessWednesday: Washed Ashore

February 23, 2016February 23, 2016JT Twissel 7 Comments

Blasts from the Past

February 8, 2016February 8, 2016JT Twissel 21 Comments

For the next week my publisher is having a Valentine’s Day giveaway. At first I didn’t think I should participate. My characters are generally in such desperate plights that romance is the last thing on their mind. However, they are all young women and thus it is impossible to avoid clumsy flirtations, heart palpitations, despondency and yes, sex. Particularly for my youngest, Riley O’Tannen of the Graduation Present, a self-proclaimed klutz who misinterprets a young man’s interest until it’s almost too late.

Riley’s exploits are very loosely based on my own goof-ball adventures in Europe 40 years ago. In 2014 I came clean in a series of posts listed here: