Three Days of Hell: The Tamale Process

Listening to: "Chasing Pavements"- Adele

Reading: "The Scarpetta Factor" - Patricia Cornwall

It's tamale season in my household!
Haha. It's a long, tedious and painful process, but its such a tradition I both look forward to and dread it.

What has sucked this year is I'm sick! Arrgh. (And I'm a pirate). Never fails. I'm always sick around Christmas.

But since I went through this hell of a three day process, I figured I'd share it with everyone.

Day 1:
So the first day is probably the least time consuming over all. It takes a long time because all you do is cook the meat. But once it's all been seperated and put on to cook you can leave it alone on the stove. (Or rather, you don't have to stand with it. You should probably still be in the house obviously). Cooking the meat doesn't sound too bad, but when you make as many tamales as we do, ( I think we're at around 12 dozen right now. We might be making more!), there are at least 3 pots of meat cooking at any time during the day. And you do have to make sure they have water and are getting tender enough.

Day 2:
Making the chili takes a while but it's a pretty brainless process. We use red chili and it really just takes a lot of boiling, blending and draining. The chili often has to be thinned before it's added to the meat.

Day 3:
The by-far most time consuming, though fun, part is definitely the process of putting the tamales together. It definitely takes its toll though. My mom and I always get sick the next day, usually from having our hands soaked in water for hours at a time. This day just takes adding the masa to the husks and putting chili in the husks. My mom used to do this by herself (and after the first thirty tamales you want to kill yourself, imagine doing 100!). Its a day long process. With my help, we can get it down to four hours-ish. Then we put them in the cooker and wait.

We give them out for christmas thankfully because by the time we're done, we don't want to see a tamale for a whole year.