I have never been one to ask if it was worth it. To me, the joy of cooking, serving and eating good food is worth any amount of trouble and effort to make it.

But last week, I decided to make a batch of mole poblano.

I had been looking forward to it for weeks. My wife, who is not as fond of spicy foods as I, was visiting a friend in Florida, so it seemed like the perfect time to make it.

I had only made it once before, and that was for a food story. But it was one of the best dishes I ever made in 12 years as a food writer, and I had been looking for the perfect time to do it again.

The perfect time would be a time that I had enough time. This dish takes hours and hours to make, and then more hours. It must have taken me close to an hour just to remove the stem and seeds from all of the dried chile peppers.

The recipe calls for 64 chiles, but I didn’t want my version to be quite so hot, so I didn’t use the four puya chilies it suggests. After stemming and seeding the remaining 60 chiles (and reserving some of their seeds), it took me another 10 minutes or more to briefly fry them and then soak them in hot water with a splash of vinegar.

I soaked them overnight, which means that was more than an hour’s worth of work the night before the real cooking began.

The recipe has 32 ingredients — though to be honest, mine only had 31 because of the purchased-but-unused puya chilies. And it requires 14 steps of simmering, roasting, frying, toasting, crumbling, slicing, puréeing and straining before you’re ready to serve the finished product on top of rice.

Ha! Rice! I knew there was a 32nd ingredient.

I’m not as young as I used to be, surprisingly, and all of that cooking took a lot out of me. When I cooked like that every week, I thought nothing of it.

This time it took a lot out of me, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was the cleaning.

I’ve made messes in the kitchen before. It’s kind of what I do.

But this time was different. This was a whole other level of mess. This was F5 tornado level of mess. This was a Category 5 hurricane. This was an 8.6 on the Richter Scale, in my kitchen.

Do you know how many seeds there are in 60 chiles? I do, because most of them ended up on the floor. Do you know what happens when the liquid you’re heating to poach chicken boils over? (Actually, you probably do.) Do you know what happens when you try to strain mole poblano through a chinois into an unsteady bowl placed, for lack of space, on your stove?

I’ll tell you what happens. The bowl tips over, spilling gobs of mole poblano all over one burner and down the side of a griddle that you don’t even use. And then more of the mole goes down the other side of the griddle you don’t use and all over the burner on the opposite side of stove.

I had mole poblano in nooks and niches that I never even knew existed.

Bowls and dishes were piled up to the ceiling. I’m pretty sure that pots were actually piled up through the ceiling. Measuring cups rested on measuring spoons that were resting on more measuring cups. I even spilled a little iced tea on the counter for good measure.

I can’t imagine how it missed the floor.

I did two full loads of dishes in the dishwasher (some were pots or bowls, so they took up a lot of space), and while they were cleaning I did another load’s worth by hand.

I went to bed exhausted after a full day of, basically, cleaning and cooking and cleaning again, with a little bit of eating in between.

Was it worth it? No. But I’ve got a whole lot of excellent mole poblano for leftovers.

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