It was about a dozen years ago, pre-kids, pre-marriage, so a little hazy on remembering those wondrous days of yore. I do remember not being like “this was totally worth all the work and time!” I turned out okay – I’d give it a 6.5/10. Reasonable for a first try. My brother made some two years ago and gave me his frozen paste, and his was like an 8/10. He is far more detailed and exacting in his approach to cooking. He also may have been using a different recipe – I can’t remember if I used Bayless’s one or a different one, but all those steps are what I remember.
Meanwhile, years later, when my daughters were in in-home daycare, the owners were from Oaxaca, so when they visited Oaxaca yearly, they would bring back some mole negro paste that was fantastic.
The thing is, I’m actually not that much a fan of mole negro, rojo, or poblano. When I make a Oaxacan mole, I make mole amarillo, if and only if I can get my hands on yerba santa, sometimes known as the “root beer plant” in English. It’s a far simpler mole, not really overly complicated, but with a wonderful herbal flavor to it. Once in a blue moon (and I mean once every few years) I can find fresh yerba santa at my local grocery. A number of years back, I grew it in the backyard. It’s not that hard to grow. But I have no idea where I bought the plants. A local Creole-Mexican-Barbecue restaurant near hear used to grow it in pots near the entrance, so the owner let me have some when I asked for it, but they’ve stopped making mole amarillo.
I prefer to spend my time on Indian or Thai curries as, for the former, I always have pretty much all the possible ingredients at hand, as far as spices go. With Thai I do have to do some shopping, though, as it’s mostly fresh stuff, and my go-to Thai grocery closed down a few years back. But I love the flavor of a freshly pounded Thai curry paste. Some of the jarred or bagged stuff is okay (and I usually amp it up with some fresh ingredients to give it some brightness, but that throws some of the balance a little off, though I don’t mind.)
I’d say it would have to be making tamales. First, there’s the effort and time involved in making the filling(s). Usually some sort of stewed meat and/or cheese mixture.
Then there’s the trouble of making the masa itself, which isn’t that bad, but it’s one more thing. Then the steaming of the corn husks.
Finally, there’s assembly. It’s a surprisingly skilled process- you have to spread out the right amount of masa, top it with a line of filling, and then roll the whole thing up in the corn husk. And all of it has to be done correctly, or your tamale will be janky and weird.
Then once you’ve done a colossal number of those, you have to steam them.
It’s a LOT of work, and a lot of surprisingly skilled work. Enchiladas pale by comparison. About the only thing I can think of that’s similarly annoying is making homemade ravioli from homemade pasta.
We’ve been texting back and forth about this. She doesn’t really have a recipe. She starts out with Cook’s Illustrated Braised Oxtails as a starting point, then goes from there using her own intuition and remembering things that have worked well in the past. The part where I am charged with (sherry?) flambe, is from one recipe. The part where everything goes outside (in the winter) and excess fat is skimmed off periodically is something she added.
pork pâté
mushroom+cheese pasties
pork+date+egg tartlets
beef+currant meatballs
devilled eggs
fish in vinegar+herb sauce
2 types of quiche (herb, bacon+onion)
2 types of meat pies(venison, beef)
sauteed spinach + bacon
spiced lentils in cream
blancmange (chicken+rice in almond milk, not a pudding)
lozenges (medieval macaroni+cheese)
2 types of salad (lettuce+herb, mint+orange)
2 kinds of sausages
garlic roast leg of lamb with pomegranate
gilded roast chicken
Icelandic chicken (chicken+bacon+herbs in pastry case)
beef+ostrich meatloaf in the shape of a boar’s head with olive eyes and turnip tusks
shortbread biscuits
strawberry tartlets
nut+date balls
medieval gingerbread (not a cookie)
cherry bread pudding
sambocade (elderflower cheesecake)
pear custard tart
poached pears
Plus assorted breads, sauces, drinks…
* a remove is something between a dish and a course.
Yeah, tamales are a pain in the ass. Like the mole, making them once was enough for me. It’s fine if you can make a party out of it with other people and just make a shit ton to freeze, but just by yourself for a couple meals’ worth. Pain in the butt. I feel the same about pierogi.
Oh, speaking of, that reminds me: Turkish mantī filled with a spiced lamb mixture and served with a yogurt and burnt butter sauce. What makes these particularly pesky is the diminuitive size of these filled dumplings. Like the size of a penny. But, holy shit, they were SOOOOOO good. That was a 10/10 meal, though I’ve only reproduced it once for all the work it takes.
Or there was the molecular gastronomy meal. Only 3 courses, but it involved spherification, reverse spherification, agar noodles, foam and an emulsification, as well as pipettes, syringes and a lot of chemicals…
Deconstructed caprese salad - tomato jelly cube, basil foam, mozzarella pearls and balsamic caviar
Steak with foamed jus, with pommes frites with garlic aioli
Chocolate tartlets with cointreau spheres and strawberry agar noodle nests
I make a pretty good Thai curry, but I have to admit I resort to the jarred curry pastes. I’ll have to try making my own from scratch sometime.
At a place I used to work a young woman used to bring in her mom’s homemade tamales and salsa and sell them at a very cheap price-- not to make a profit, just to make up the time and cost of materials. They were so tasty. I love a good tamale. I miss those.
I think I can safely say I’ll never attempt to make this recipe, but I just want to thank you. This morning I woke up not ever having heard of ‘meat fruit’, and now I have. Ignorance fought.
The most labor intensive thing was probably the time I tried making homemade ravioli.
The longest time to make, probably the time I tried making pho at home.
I think risotto deserves a mention, too, just for requiring more work and more keeping an eye on it than regular rice. Saute the rice grains. Then add hot broth. Wait for it to boil off. Add more broth. Repeat…
I love making risotto, because it allows me to hang out in the kitchen for an hour and a half drinking wine and watching stuff on my little kitchen TV, and Mrs. solost can’t accuse me of being a lazybones Jones
My most intricate is, was, and perhaps evermore shall be Thanksgiving*. I’ve done it enough times it isn’t necessarily the most challenging.
== showoffy list of what went onto the table ==
turkey
cornbread dressing
wild rice stuffing
pureed butternut squash w/black pepper
cranberry chutney
rutabaga casserole
gravy
new potatoes in crockpot with thyme
pumpkin cheesecake
fresh green beans
ratatouille
stuffed mushrooms
devils on horseback
mcmath fruit salad (apples, bananas, pecans, dressing)
wine: beaujolais nouveau, kava
pickles and olives
coffee, tea
I did farm some of that out to other people who volunteered to bring something, but I did the turkey, dressing, stuffing, squash, ratatouille, new potatoes, gravy, and mcmath salad.
This is actually “Second Thanksgiving”, a tradition we started because we were always at relative’s house eating what THEY made for Thanksgiving itself, and once year I said I really wanted to replicate the Thanksgiving menu I’d grown up with, so we invited our local friends who ALSO had hied away to out-of-town relatives for the actual holiday and did it a second time our own way.
I mentioned BBQ in my OP as something time-consuming but not necessarily complicated, but I have had BBQs for friends and family in the past that did get pretty darn involved. An example of everything I have made myself from scratch at one time, to feed around 20 people, in the past:
Pulled Pork
Beef brisket
Mac & cheese
Collard greens
BBQ bacon beans with Jalapenos
Potato salad
2 or 3 different varieties of homemade BBQ sauce
ETA: I thought that was pretty impressive, but I just now noticed @AHunter3 's TG list, which kind of puts mine to shame
ETA Part 2:
Was looking back through the thread and somehow missed this post the first time. Jeebus Christmas, you must have had several people helping you, right?
This brings back memories of the one full Indian meal I made. I toasted and ground my own spices for curry and made homemade naan (to the best of my oven’s ability). My mistake was taking everyone’s preferences into consideration, so I ended up making seekh kebabs, dal, chicken masala, vegetable curry, raita, rice, and plain and garlic naan. It took all afternoon to make, I ran out of burners on the stove and had to improvise, and it tasted…fine. Really, not bad at all, but not a patch on any one of the three very good Indian restaurants within 10 minutes driving distance of our house that offered sit-down or delivery service.
All the other really involved meals I’ve helped make were group efforts. No one person ever got stuck making the whole Thanksgiving or Christmas meals in my family, and when my mom and mother-in-law were alive, they, along with me and my brother, had it down to a precise operation. I made a solo Thanksgiving meal for my family of three in 2020 (because, y’know), but we pared the number of dishes down to what each of us really, really wanted, so it wasn’t all that difficult.
I’ve also obtained the ingredients and watched my son-in-law make Beef Wellington. Looks hard!
Nope, that was almost all me (some of the smaller dessert nibbles were 3-person group efforts with me directing - biscuits, nut balls, gingerbread.).
Took 3 full days, a lot of it could be pre-made on the first two days. I premade a lot of pastry. And on the day, I had a hall kitchen with 2 ovens, two full stoves + 2 microwaves and 2 sets of chafing dishes to work with, so cooking+heating stuff wasn’t an issue.
I generally don’t cook for medieval events with others if I can avoid it. I go into pernickety crabby cook mode, and people know to just ply me with port and ask if anything needs peeling - but I planned that particular feast to not involve root veg… nobody’s got time for peeling turnips when royalty is visiting.
I also chose a menu with very little frying, as I find that’s the most attention-grabbing activity. Roasting and baking are very low-effort in comparison.
I should add, this is absolutely the most complicated big feast I’ve ever done, I’d usually cap it at around a dozen removes.
Like the OP, I immediately thought of paella, but then thought “nah, that’s not complicated, just requires you pay attention for about 20 minutes.” I used to make a spaghetti sauce that seemed complicated. If complicated is defined as time-consuming, then I would say lumpia and my mother’s piroshki might qualify. The latter requires a raised dough that is then rolled out and turned into small packages that have to rise again before they are deep fried. It takes most of a day to make, so I seldom make them.
Lumpia requires the chopping of veggies and the cooking of ground pork with spices, soy, etc., but it’s the wrapping of that mixture in paper thin wrappers that can be frustrating (unless you’ve literally made 10,000 of the bloody things), which then need to be fried crispy. It can take a few hours to get it done, but it’s not that complicated.
Thanksgiving dinner is about as complicated as I get these days. It requires prep and timing, and if you’re doing it right (and having company) it takes a couple of days.
Oh and this cake is a lot of fun and requires some care. Really tasty.
