Back in the day, one of my friends would bring pozole to work for lunch. I would beg her to have her mom make extra for me. It was rare that I got so lucky and was able to have some with her at lunch. They just never had a lot of leftovers. My solution was to get their recipe and make it whenever I wanted.

It took me a while to get this soup just right. I had a lot of back-and-forth questions and a ton of trial and error. Meals are perfected after making them over and over and this soup was very labor-intensive. Even though I loved the soup, I only made it a few times a year. Until one day a perfect stranger in the grocery store set me straight.

I was shopping for my ingredients and sometimes it's hard to find the dried chillis. I asked someone who worked there if they had the chilis and as he took me to the section, he asked me what I was making. When he found out I was making pozole from scratch, he told me not even his Mexican family makes it that way anymore. Instead of taking me to the dried chilis, he gave me a can of red chili sauce. He told me nobody will know the difference.

The can of sauce cuts out about half the work for this soup. I couldn't tell you the last time I made my own sauce and now we enjoy pozole more often.