WHAT TAMALES?

I’m really tempted to just say that and let it go. Sigh. Can I just say things didn’t turn out quite the way I’d hoped?


And leave it at that?

I guess not. That’s what I get for announcing to the whole world that we’re making tamales. Now, I have to actually tell the story.

Ay Caramba!!!!

My only comfort is that in these last busy days before Christmas, my small readership has dwindled to tiny. So, I don’t have to out myself in front of a whole lot of people.

Things began fairly well, I’d say. I had everything prepared and thought out…I thought.

The first job was to prepare the red chile sauce.

Actually, the first thing we did was eat. And I might have known, right then, how things were going to go for the rest of the day. My green chile casserole did NOT turn out impressiviely beautiful and wonderful, like it did last time I made it. But, we ate it anyway. I intended to take pictures of it, but as it wasn’t impressively beautiful and wonderful, I didn’t.

Back to the sauce.

First, after a brief roasting in the oven, all the chiles got broken up and as many seeds as possible removed and fed to the birds. Merry Christmas, birds! I wore gloves. I’m not completely stupid. But I certainly showed symptoms of stupidity before the day was over.

After a little more preparation, the chiles and all the other ingredients went into the blender. It looked good. It tasted……..muy picante! Very hot! Spicy hot! But I remember Nelda saying the sauce needed to be very strong in all flavors as the meat and the masa would soak up all that good flavor.

Next, some of that spicy sauce went into the massive amount of meat to stew for a while.

Say "HI" to my friend, Lori.  She's camera shy. 

I’m feeling pretty OK about everything up to this point, even though my Chicana friend, Nelda, has not been able to join us. So, it’s just two inexperienced gringa cooks going at this tamale thing.

'Things', however, were about to take a decided turn South…and I don’t mean South, as in down Mexico way. I mean South as in

OH  $*^#!!!

I was, as yet, in blissful ignorance of the upcoming southerly detour.

Next job was the masa dough. Prepared masa dough. Not masa dough from scratch. PREPARED!!!! Are you getting that?

We mixed in some of our chile sauce because I am not a fan of plain, bland masa. I want my masa spicy, too. Other than that, we added nothing whatsoever to the masa, because it is

HELLO PREPARED MASA!!!!!!

The particular brand of masa we had obtained had not one word of instructions on it.

Somehow, every on-line article I read about making masa for tamales failed to make much of an impression on my brain.

Somehow, I totally missed asking Nelda about the masa making process during our several recent discussions of tamale making.

Somehow....Somehow!!!

Still ignorant of the enormous error of my ways, we proceeded to the next step, which is spreading the masa dough onto the corn husks, putting in the meat mixture and wrapping those babies up.

I might mention here that most of our tamale babies were somewhat deformed and were not of a really uniform size, as they should be. Oh well. It doesn’t have to look good to taste good and after all, we’re rank amateurs!

We used up all our masa dough, but we still had a lot of meat left. So, we got one batch into our make-do steamer and sent hubby to the grocery store for more masa.

The ‘make-do’ steamer filled, I realized I couldn’t even make the lid fit down snugly as our tamales were sitting too high in the pan.

Sigh. More ‘make-do’ resulted in this.

Keep a lid on it!

It worked.

My sweet husband returned and handed me a bag of masa which I saw actually had INSTRUCTIONS on it!

My blissful ignorance ended right then and there.

We had lard because I told Lori we needed lard when she called me several days ago from the grocery store wanting to know what we needed. Unfortunately, when she called, I was not quite awake and my brain was absolutely not engaged. At some point, I wondered why did I tell her we needed lard. After all, we’re not making our masa dough from scratch, we using PREPARED MASA DOUGH!!!!!!!!

Our masa was supposed to have melted lard, salt and baking powder added to it, according to the recipe on the back of the package.

I’m going to make this very long story a whole lot shorter and just tell you that we finished off the remaining meat and got another ‘make-do’ steamer full of tamales on the stove.

I wanted to surprise Lori by ordering JULIE AND JULIA on pay-per-view for us to watch after we’d done all this hard work. We settled in with a glass of wine and turned on the tv expectantly.

Forty-five minutes into the movie, she got a phone call from a friend in need. If you’ve read my story of a particular Thanksgiving spent with her, you know exactly what she did. She flew out, tires screeching and left me with steaming tamales and Julie and Julia.

She returned, before too much longer, just after I’d taken the 2nd pot of tamales off the stove scant seconds before they burned because my make-do steamer ran out of water. I swear, I had checked it not 5 minutes before I smelled the unmistakable odor of burning corn husks!

Thanks to hubby's efforts, my very favorite big pot is just fine now!

The question is this:

Which was the most disappointing, the way the tamales turned out or the much touted JULIE AND JULIA?

As for me, hands down, it was the movie.

I had tamales for supper and while they are nothing like I intended them to be, I know I will enjoy eating them anyway….for a long time…because we have a massive amount of tamales. But…………


We still have a LOT of masa dough left…so hubby and I are going to guess what?



Make tamales today.

More tamales.

Tamale terror.

Tamale torture.

P. S.  We opted for putting all the extra ingredients into the freezer as I'd pretty much had it with the whole tamale making thing.

Instead, I made a cornhusk doll.

I am GRATEFUL for all these tamales we will have in the freezer. Really, I am. Really.