POLLO CON PIPIAN VERDE, ARROZ CON CHILE ANCHO

Classic Mexican fare tonight. For those of you unfamiliar with Mexican food, pipian verde is a thick sauce of hulled pumpkin seeds, green serrano chillies, epazote (a plant native to Mexico - which I am now growing here at home) and various other spices. (There's a good recipe for pipian in Zarela's Veracruz - link below.) The rice is from a Diana Kennedy recipe, which in turn is based on a recipe published in 1877 in a book called La Cocinera Poblana - the Puebla cook. It combines Mexican and Spanish ingredients - rice and saffron from Spain with ancho chillies from Mexico. I cooked the chicken in a Schlemmertopf. That's a proprietary name for a lidded clay pot made by the nattily-named Scheurich-Keramik company in Germany. Lots of cuisines have clay or terracotta cooking vessels. The great things about these is that the moisture in the terracotta keeps the chicken or whatever else you cook inside it moist.

POLLO CON PIPIAN VERDE, ARROZ CON CHILE ANCHO