1. Normally, I like to keep to myself what I'm bringing to Sunday family dinner. But, since I did the preparations for my dish today and want to write about it, I'll reveal what I'm up to.
I found a recipe for mole chicken wings. It calls for a marinade and so, this morning, I mixed tequila, limes, garlic, and cilantro in a bowl, put the party wings and drumettes in a gallon zip lock bag, and poured the marinade over the chicken pieces. I'll leave them in the refrigerator over night.
2. I had predestined today to be a domestic day, mostly cooking and baking. My next project? Bake Morning Glory muffins. To me, these are fun muffins to bake and eat because of all the ingredients in them. The recipe I use calls for grated zucchini, carrot, and apple, so I performed that task first. To these ingredients I added coconut and slivered almonds. In a second bowl, I combined eggs, applesauce, vegetable oil, and vanilla, whisked them all together, and then stirred into it the contents of the first bowl.
In a third, larger bowl, I combined all-purpose flour, whole wheat flour, sugar, baking soda, nutmeg, cinnamon, and salt and then combined the wet ingredients from the second bowl into this bowl of dry ingredients.
Previously, I had preheated the oven at 350 degrees and I had lined our muffin tin with paper liners.
This recipe makes two batches of muffins.
I made this recipe a few months ago. On that day, I didn't think it would matter if I used about 4 oz too much applesauce, but, in fact, it mattered a lot and the muffins were just a little too moist. Oh! I ate them! I just knew I wouldn't make that mistake again.
These batches turned out just right. The moisture level is what I think it should be. It's not a particularly sweet recipe, so the much of the flavor comes from the zucchini, carrots, apples, spices, and nuts.
I made this recipe in the first place because during a Tree House concert, Bill Davie mentioned how he and Ray Robertson, as they headed out to the woods to work one summer over twenty years ago, routinely stopped at the local bakery, Cinnamon Twisp, for coffee and a Morning Glory muffin. So, today, I was once again grateful for Bill's story and that he inspired me to find a recipe and bake these muffins.
3. Mole chicken wings require mole sauce. I was enjoying my time in the kitchen, so I decided to make the sauce today and cook the wings on Sunday.
I began by putting a chopped onion in hot oil and cooking the pieces until they were golden. To the onions, I added a mixture of almonds, garlic, cumin, coriander, black pepper, oregano, salt, and cloves. I sautéed this mixture for a couple of minutes or so and transferred the mixture out of my cast iron skillet into a Dutch oven.
To this aromatic mixture I added tomato paste, chopped dry and heated chiles, raisins, toasted sesame seeds, orange zest, the juice of an orange, and chicken stock.
I brought this mixture to a boil, quickly turned down the heat to simmer, and let it bubble away for about half an hour.
I then turned off the heat, added in a chopped disk of Mexican chocolate, put the lid on the Dutch oven, and gave the chocolate about fifteen minutes to melt. I stirred the sauce, let it further cool off for another 20-30 minutes, and then ladled it into the blender and pureed it for a couple of minutes or so.
I wanted this to be a mild sauce, but I think when I toasted the dry peppers, I might have coaxed more heat out of them than I intended. I de-stemmed and de-seeded the peppers, but they might be adding too much heat to the sauce. I'll see how spicy hot the sauce is on Sunday after sitting overnight.
If it seems like it's a bit too spicy hot, I will do three things: 1) have sour cream on hand to cool off the wings 2) serve celery sticks that can also help cool off one's mouth 3) hold out 6-8 pieces of marinated chicken and bake them without mole sauce, but have sauce on hand if whoever eats these pieces might want to put sauce on them.
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