Thursday, December 24, 2009

Tamales in My Corner of the World



It is traditional to make tamales at Christmas. To save time we bought a kit from the supermarket. For $30 you get everything you need to make your own tamales!


Sure is a lot of stuff here in this box! There is masa (corn dough), corn husks, cooked pork and red chile sauce, cooked chicken and green chile sauce, refried beans, salsa, and chips! You have a holiday meal in a box.


Although the kit comes with cooked meat, my lovely wife is a fan of cheese and green chile filling. We spread the dough on a corn husk, put fiilling, wrap the tamale with another corn husk and will steam it to cook.


Here is some of the red chile and pork.


First batch of 16 tamales in the steamer basket for about an hour. The second batch was only 9 tamales when I used up all the dough, so I guess we'll only have 27 instead of the 36 as said on the label.

I didn't even open the chicken and green chile packets. I'll freeze those for use on another day.

And that's what's going on in Sacramento, Calif.
Have a Merry Christmas!
Franco Rios

2 comments:

Becca said...

Those look great! We lived in El Paso last year and I so miss picking up a dozen hot tamales off the back of a truck for dinner.

Was the kit refrigerated or was it something that could be mailed? My mother in law always made tamale making sound like more work than building the pyramids, so it never occurred to me to try it.

Unknown said...

The kit was refrigerated so I don't think it could be mailed.

I've done it all from scratch in the past using the Sunset Book of Mexican Cooking. It has a very good instruction for making them.

Have a good day!