We finally made it to Oaxaca. I had heard so much about Oaxaca growing up, my dad had always talked about how great it was and it did not fail to live up to expectations. One of the highlights of the trip was taking a cooking class. Caitlin and I have taken classes in a few different places and have found that the chef’s personality usually determines how enjoyable the experience is. We chose to go with Casa de los Sabores with pilar. Pilar is a professionally trained chef and was very kind and welcoming. She started the class by discussing the differences in moles and the menu that we were going to prepare. We then headed to the market to purchase the ingredients needed for the meal. In addition to grabbing what we needed for the meal I took advantage and bought some chiles and chocolate for a beer I’m going to to try to make.
After collecting what we needed from the market we headed back to Pilar’s house and began making the dishes. The first dish was flor de calabaza soup, which was delicious and surprisingly she used no cream to thicken it. We then worked on the fillings for the memelitas which I’ve always called sopes. We used huitlacoche and mushrooms to make two different fillings. While working on making the soup and the filling we started making the homemade salsa in a molcajete. I had always wanted to try making salsa in one of these and now that I have I see why I will not be doing it very frequently. The amount of work necessary is ridiculous, but it definitely made  a better salsa. The last dish we made was mole verde which unlike the mole verde I’ve had in other parts of Mexico did not have any pumpkin seeds in it. At the very end of the meal we made tortillas for the memelitas.
After we had finished prepping the meal we sat down and tried 3 different mezcals as Pilar explained to us the differences in each based on the type of cactus that was used. She also went into the recent boom in popularity of Mezcal and what it meant for prices and changes in production.
The overall experience was awesome and we finished very full.

Chiles. The Pasillas from Oaxaca have a unique taste to them compared to other regions of Mexico.

Pilar buying ingredients.

Fresh cheese.

More ingredients.

Because whats a trip without chapulines.

I hadn’t realized that they eat them at different stages. It was the season of small ones.

All the ingredients nicely laid out.

Flor de Calabaza soup.

Huitlacoche getting cooked up.

Finished Huitlacoche.

The finished mushrooms.

Toasting up tomatillos.

Caitlin making mole. We didn’t grind it by hand as we wanted to eat sometime today.

Green mole.

Mole all ready to eat.

Caitlin grinding salsa and making it look good.

Grinding salsa.

Memelitas with criollo avocado. The skin is thin enough that you can eat it.

Flor de Calabaza soup.

Guava cheesecake for desert. We made this as well, the rest of the food was so good I had forgotten about this part.