Prima cena messicana della settimana

This week we have been invited by two dear Mexican couples, our friends and guests of some of our dinners.
The first dinner was held on Monday. Our hosts cooked for us Pollo Mole. Apparently, Mole is the name for different types of sauces made with many types of peppers, seeds, and chocolate (although, I later asked to my Mexican student and she explained to me that not every Mole recipe calls for chocolate). Mole Poblano is the most typical, but there are many others, as you can see in this picture:
(taken from this website, unfortunately I can't understand it..:) )
According to different people, the time needed to prepare Mole varies from one to two days. In any case, the complexity is due to the fact that you need to remove all the seeds from the peppers, roast them, roast all the other seeds, and make a paste out of all this. So, our friends said that for that night they had actually used a base for Mole that you can buy premade, and add sugar and spices and chocolate as you like.
Still, they said that if you make it from scratch it tastes better.
Mole can be used in many ways, like just on rice, or on some meat, like chicken. We had it with chicken and rice, and corn tortillas and a nice piece of Avocado.
I didn't take my camera, unfortunately, but you can see how it looked like more or less in this picture taken from a website that gives also the recipe for it.
It was very good! You can in fact taste the chocolate and the spiciness of the peppers altogether..
After this main course, we had a very nice ending dish: slices of monterey jack cheese together with slices of guava paste (a thick jelly made of guava). It tasted very good too.
And our conversations were also extremely interesting, spacing from Mexican politics to Italian politics to science.. We really enjoyed the evening.. I promised next time I invite them, I'll make a real Italian dinner, to explore each other's cuisines. :)