My Mexican Grandma..

I made a couple more batches of tamales for our October visitors: Sonya's mom and later in the month my mom. Since I had just made a batch of vegan and traditional tamales, I was low on a lot of the basics, like masa flour and corn husks. Chicago is no different than the Bay Area when it comes to getting good deals on those kinds of items, namely avoid the big chain stores and find a Mexican grocery store.

I had to get a lot of items, and only needed to get the corn husks from this particular store. I'm not too bothered being the only person in the store who didn't understand Spanish. That kind of thing doesn't bother me. I found what I wanted to get (at about 1/3 the price of what Jewel or Dominicks/Safeway wanted), and went up to pay. The cashier looked at me, and asked "what are you going to do with those?" as if there was no reason someone like me would need corn husks. I shrugged it off and said I was making tamales. She looked shocked that I knew what a tamale was, let alone that I apparently knew the ethnic secret of making them. I was starting to wonder if I'd get to leave with the husks, and said I learned the recipe from my Mexican Grandma. This seemed to be the right thing to say, though she still shook her head at me as I left with the husks.

And by the way, my tamales are amazing, but she'll never know.