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Tamales
Spent most of my Saturday over in Tijuana with ma', making great quantities of tamalas: pork, chicken, cheese and peppers, and pineapple-cinnamon. We wrapped them up and froze them, ready to be put in the tamalera on Xmas Eve. The whole eating, present opening and partying happens on the 24th, which is pretty convenient, because then we cross the border Xmas morning to spend that day with family and friends in San Diego. My family mostly spends that day eating leftovers in their PJs, so not being around is perfectly acceptable.
Perhaps for the first time ever I'll be able to make and share some tamales of my own on the 25th. I plan to cook some on Saturday as an experiment, although we already have gingerbread men baking planned for that day. Might be too much to even think of making a pound of masa, a tiny amount by any Mexican cook's standard, but still we're talking tamales here. Is there another Xmas food that takes as much time and can be so thoroughly fucked up?
There is also the possibility of pozole, but that is going to have to be on my mom's shoulders this year. No way am I crossing the border again until the 24th. It took me 2 hours to get through.
Perhaps for the first time ever I'll be able to make and share some tamales of my own on the 25th. I plan to cook some on Saturday as an experiment, although we already have gingerbread men baking planned for that day. Might be too much to even think of making a pound of masa, a tiny amount by any Mexican cook's standard, but still we're talking tamales here. Is there another Xmas food that takes as much time and can be so thoroughly fucked up?
There is also the possibility of pozole, but that is going to have to be on my mom's shoulders this year. No way am I crossing the border again until the 24th. It took me 2 hours to get through.
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Clearly you need to post proof of all that. Lots of proof. Yum. :)
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6 dozen? Holymoley! Are they already cooked? Hmm, my guess would be yes, safer that way. But yes, reheating that many tamales in one go requires the special equipment. The tamalera my mom has only gets used once a year, so it sits around all year gathering dust, only to be brought down from it's lonely corner that one time. The thing is *huge* and I can't think of a single other thing that you could use it for.
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And yeah, the pot we use is enormous. It's our canning kettle, and it works pretty well -- though there's always a challenge in keeping the tamales off the bottom of the pot; I line it with cookie-drying racks, but that doesn't really work 100% of the time, you know? :-)
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I know what you mean about keeping the tamales off the bottom of the pot. The tamalera has a thing that does that, with wholes, but the wholes are still large enough that stuff could get wedged, so we use the leftover corn leaves as an extra layer. There is a whole thing about how you put the tamales in when they're freshly made, but that lesson will have to be learned some other way, because we made and froze ours in advance. I do worry that they might dry out in the freezer and will not taste as good as the "test" tamales we cooked.
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