mole

I like mole. El Chile here in town does a good red Oaxacan mole (and holy crap I just learned they moved south of the river and the Manor location is closed. That is bullshit.) and Taco Deli does a good one too that they put in tacos. Both of those are red moles and there are a few other generally recognized varieties. Really though mole is from mōlli which means sauce and it encompasses and entire spectrum of sauces. So, that said, I’ve wanted to try making some for a while. I bought Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen cookbook because it has several mole recipes in it.

This weekend I made the Adobo de Ancho Chile paste and last night I used that and a bunch of other stuff to make the Simple Red Mole recipe. It came out ok but I think not as good as either of the places I mentioned above. It took about three hours all told but that included quartering and poaching a chicken which was also a first for me. I also dirties every single thing in the kitchen.

The recipe ended up making about 5.5 cups of sauce. I tallied up all the ingredients via the USDA Nutrient Database and I’ve decided that a batch is about 1300 kcal. A serving is about 1/3 cup which is about 80 kcal. That and 150g of chicken works out to around 350 kcal which isn’t too bad. With a serving of white rice that’s 500 kcal for lunch and you could add on another side for dinner to bring it into the 750 kcal range.

That brings me to another topic: calorie counting. A friend has been doing this lately and has lost about 40 lbs which puts to mind the days of 2008 / 2009 when I went from 217 to 175. When I changed jobs I put 15-20lbs back on in free office soda and eating out all the time and then I got the bicycle and got back down to the high 170s. However there I’ve stayed oscillating between 175 and 180, doing bicycles and weights.

Seeing my friend’s success I decided to take another run at getting down to “normal” BMI. People like to shit on BMI because athletes, people with metabolic disorders and people at the two sigma points on the height distribution don’t really fit into the BMI model. However, for the remaining 90% of the population it’s fairly well correlated to actual percent body fat. In particular, I’m built about as average as they come, my doctor says I’m 5’9″ (175cm). National average for over 20 males is 5’9.3″. I don’t have any metabolic disorders. I’m just a regular Joe. According to the BMI scale if I get to 168 lbs I’ll be a “normal” body weight where I am currently “overweight” and was “obese” before I started in 2008. So, as of this morning my scale says 172.2 lbs which is down 5 lbs from when I renewed my efforts. I decided that I was going to try to keep it up until my birthday in September as my gift to myself. A linear extrapolation puts me at 162 lbs by then but this is not a linear process so I think it’ll be more like 165 lbs. In the mean time I’ve continued lifting weights and occasionally doing some other work.

Ultimately I’d like to get down into “normal”, stay there and get my main lifts into a range I think is strong but reasonable. I can already bench press my body weight which was a goal for a long time. I’m at 1.32x body weight for squat and I want that to be 1.5x and I’m at 1.61x for deadlift which I would like to be 2.0x. I think for those second two I’m going to have to finish the weight loss and then eat and lift back a few pounds. It’s pretty hard getting stronger while you’re cutting back.

Ideally, I’d be able to do those lifts, 15 pullups, a muscle-up, ride 50 miles at > 17 mph, run 10k @ < 9 min/mile, and row 1000kcal in an hour on the rowing machine. That's a long, long term goal though and this is the first time I've even written those things down. The running will be hard because I hate running more than pretty much anything else. The rest is doable but all requires a fair amount of training. We'll see.