My first attempt at mole sauce
I bought some fleur de sel, but it wasn't until after I opened it that I realized I had fleur de sel with cocoa, which meant that unless I was doing cookies with salted caramel, uses of it were limited.
So, a trip to Google later, I found that I could use it on top of food with mole sauce. I cringed a little because the enchilada recipes that I've seen on the PPK and Vegan Dad looked fairly complicated, but neither of them used mole sauce, so I Googled around a little more.
What I found is this recipe for Sweet Potato and Tofu Enchiladas I'm not a big fan of peanut butter or coconut oil, so I opted to leave out the peanut butter and substitute olive oil for the coconut. I also decided to leave out the cheese because there was no way I could get a block of cheese small enough for my needs. (I eat very little cheese because it's an instant weight gain for me.) Also, the idea of getting pre-diced tomatoes seemed a bit odd, so I bought fresh tomatoes and diced them. And cilantro keeps going bad in my crisper because I don't use it fast enough, so I substituted italian parsley.
I then beat up my baker's brain for the little voice telling me that the recipe would explode if I didn't do it exactly as specified. I was also hoping it wouldn't be too complicated.
Step 1 for me was to bake the sweet potato. The recipe specified either oven or microwave. After my mishap with nuking a potato for the PPK's Mushroom Stout Pie with Potato Biscuits (the outer layer became tough like tire rubber), I decided to bake the sweet potatoes in the oven.
Good news - baking a sweet potato is remarkably easy. You just line a cookie sheet with foil (don't skip this step, because the dripping from the sweet potato are like cement), stick the sweet potato on the sheet, prick it a few times with a fork, turn the oven to 425F and then ignore it for 45 mins - 1 hour. You don't even need to preheat the oven. And then when it's done...just turn the oven off and leave the sweet potato in there for at least 30 mins.
I'm still trying to get used to this multi-tasking thing while cooking (I can totally multi-task like an ace when baking), so the less I had to pay attention to, the better.
Step 2 was to start pressing the tofu - unfortunately, I didn't have a heavy enough weight, which you'll see the result of later.
Step 3 was to do the chopping of the other ingredients - onions, garlic, tomatoes. Remarkably easy to multitask this while the sweet potato was in the oven because I didn't have to check on it, unlike beans. I also finally figured out which way to chop an onion. I usually cut the onion in half and slice the halves into half moons, but that made for some super uneven cooking. This time, I cut even slices out of the whole onion and then evenly divided up the slices into 9 pieces.
And no tears of death this time! Huzzah for beating my nemesis!
Step 4 was measuring out the spices, and d'oh! I had no chipotle chili powder. I measured out an equal amount of cayenne, and I was going to throw in a half portion of smoked paprika to substitute...but I ran out of smoked paprika, too. After smacking my forehead on the countertop, I threw in some regular paprika instead.
My tiny little voice was whispering that it was getting a bad feeling about this, but I squashed in and stuffed it into a box.
And then I discovered I didn't have enough powdered cumin, either. So I tried substituting in some powdered cilantro. Little voice broke out of the box and taunted me.
Step 5 was chopping up the tofu, and yeah, not enough water got pressed out. Yugh. That meant that I was going to be on the stove for a looong time.
Step 6 was cooking up the mole sauce, and that went relatively smoothly, now that I finally chopped the onions correctly. I always burn the onions on the bottom of a standard pot, so I used a non-stick one. No burn this time, and adding the rest of the ingredients was a breeze. I did a trial taste and it seemed fine, so I breathed a sigh of relief. My blender sucks, so I decided to skip the pureeing step.
Once the sauce was done, I popped the sweet potatoes out of the oven, and the skin peeled back beautifully after I sliced them open. Scooping out the insides was super easy and then I started trying to pan fry the tofu.
Right about that point, I realized I forgot to chop the parsley. Oops. The tofu wasn't really going anywhere, so I chopped what I needed pronto. And then spent forever trying to pan fry the tofu.
I assembled it all together, and that process wasn't that hard at all. The yam-tofu filling was very easy to work with and solid, so putting it into a corn tortilla and rolling was quite easy. The recipe specified putting 16 enchiladas in a 9x13 pan, though, and that must require some crazy packing, because I could only fit 10. And I had leftover filling.
I tossed everything in the oven to bake, but since I didn't put any cheese in it, I only needed to bake for about 12 minutes. Once it was out of the oven, I sprinkled on some fleur de sel.
Final verdict - Definitely didn't cook the tofu enough. It was still a bit soft. And my cumin substitute didn't really work - the flavor wasn't as strong as I would like. The mole sauce was nice, but it definitely needed some more spice - I'm sure the cause of that was me not even having
smoked paprika to throw it. Easily corrected by adding some hot sauce on top.
It also needed some more salt - but I think that was because I didn't put any peanut butter in the mole sauce. No problems - that's what the fleur de sel was for. All in all, though, this recipe was easier than it looked and not that fussy. I definitely recommend this for a novice cook.
I do want to try a different meat substitute instead of pan fried tofu. Possibly fake beef crumbles or TVP. And I'll need to toss a bit of salt in the mole sauce to make up for the absence of peanut butter.