A Little Chocolate Never Hurt

I love Mexican food, and when I say that I mean the spectrum. I love chips-and-salsa Tex Mex, I love taquerias and Taco Bells, I love chicharrónes, tripa, birreria and menudo, and from the little bit that I've had, I love the traditional regional dishes. 

I did a home stay once in Oaxaca  Mexico when I was in high school. The first night we were there our host mother prepared us a soup complete with a gigantic fish head per person. It was fantastic and not something you will find at any Mexican restaurant I know of in the States. The next night we had pizza, not exactly a traditional Mexican dish, but my host family introduced me to putting Tabasco on it. I won't eat pizza now without hot sauce. 

A specialty of Oaxaca are their savory moles, those intricate sauces that often and famously contain chocolate.  I am a decent home cook but I've only tried making a mole from scratch once. They are complicated affairs, with a rather long grocery list and take hours to make. Since I don't commonly have all day to spend in the kitchen, every variation I have tried since has been short cutted, and I should say, been an abject failure. Some things cannot be rushed. 

So what do Mexican moles have to do with fire escapes? Does it matter? It's my blog and so far no else is reading it.  The reason I've discussed this though is to bring up corrections. After making my one batch of proper mole I would frequently add a bit of chocolate to a savory dish that needed something. That something was never ever chocolate so inevitable I made a number of not-great dishes into legitimately bad dishes by including it. Sadly, the only acceptable remedy for a dinner ruined by chocolate is to break out the Tabasco and order a pizza. Since most of my food turns out well, however, it took me several months to figure out if I was reaching for the chocolate I should just stop.  Live and Learn. 

Similarly, I often feel my black and white photos need something. That something is almost always more contrast and you can add as much as you want in Photoshop. The approach has its limits though.  It's much easier to ruin an OK photo than to elevate it to greatness by manipulating it on the computer. In this case I pushed the contrast laughably high, in a move akin to adding a dash of chocolate in a last ditch effort to elevate dinner. I think it worked though, this is pretty close to what my initial vision for the photograph was.