Muy Sabroso: Restaurante La Mexicana

For dinner, I had chicken enchiladas in mole sauce with refried beans and limeade. And then some ice cream.

Dinner was at La Mexicana in Montrose.

The mole sauce was nice, probably homemade. Moles vary a lot from one restaurant or recipe to the next, so it's always interesting to try them. In general, it's a thick brown sauce made of several kinds of chili peppers, ground nuts or seeds, and unsweetened chocolate. Theirs was a little chunkier than most, with deep savory flavors- I want to say "musty", but I mean that in a good, forest-y sort of way- and a nutty undertone that may have come from peanut oil or ground walnuts. The sauce overshadowed the shredded chicken inside the tortillas, but mole is usually about the sauce rather than the carrier protein anyway. Their beans were creamy and probably full of lard- delicious.

After dinner, we headed to Amy's Ice Cream for dessert. I had some incredibly good lavender-honey ice cream earlier this week somewhere else, so was interested in their more unusual flavors. I sampled their avocado ice cream, but it was utterly strange. It had an off-putting bitter aftertaste. I'd try it again, but it might be better mixed with another flavor. I ended up getting half rose, half Shiner ice cream. The rose was as flowery and over-the-top as you'd expect, but it was very creamy, almost custardy, and worked really well. Amy's uses real beer to make the Shiner ice cream, so the interaction between frozen alcohol crystals and frozen milkfat gave the whole thing a grainy, sandy, sorbet-like texture. The Shiner flavor didn't come through very well, so it ended up tasting like slightly caramel-flavored frozen milk. I enjoy interesting textures in my food, and the flavor wasn't bad, so I liked it anyway.