Twas The Night After Christmas (Tuesday)

We tried to go out for Christmas dinner, but everything was closed (except for the place serving a turkey dinner, which excited none of us) – so we went back home and ate there (none of us were really that hungry after that guacamole-fest lunch and so we made a random vegetarian sushi roll kind of thing: nori around quinoa mixed with chiles with a center of cucumber, sweet potato, avocado, carrot, etc. – it was really good (!) and nice and light and spicy).

But we were committed to eating out tonight. We had it narrowed down to three restaurants and chose the one with the nicest garden – Los Adobes de Todos Santos. It was a beautiful rock lined succulent garden and we ate on the deck overlooking it all.

We all decided to have soup and a main dish (and I insisted on flan for desert – I wanted to compare it to my earlier effort). I ordered the Caldo Pepito soup, which was basically a cilantro chicken soup with pumpkin seeds and little corn meal balls (4 of them varying in size between a marble and a ping pong ball). It was good. My mom’s soup was amazing! It was described as a cream of Mexican beans and chilis, which hadn’t excited me, but it was truly ethereal.

For my main dish, I had the Chiles en Nogada(some random guys on the street mentioned that this dish was invented as the Mexican national dish after Mexico declared independence – the colors, but most websites seem to name mole poblano as the national dish). It was a perfect blend of sweet and spice. Basically, it’s stuffed peppers. But the pepper is a poblano (instead of a green bell pepper – which is one of the very few foods which I truly don’t like) and the stuffing is meat (for their version a mixture of pork and beef with raisins), then there is a walnut cream sauce and the red pomegranate jelly (green pepper, white walnut sauce, red pomegranate).

I got my flan for dessert. It was a lot more flan-y than the one I had made (which was closer to crème brulee); by that I mean it was heavier and more solid. The sauce too was slightly more burnt tasting than mine had been, but I mean that in a good way. So, it was totally different, but very good (though on a regular basis, I probably prefer mine (as does my Mexican friend C by the way)).

The margaritas were nice as well.