Apple Pie Tamales

Today I made a new variant of the tamale recipe. In true "old school" fashion, nothing was measured precisely, nor was any of this written down. It was a small batch, only about 35 tamales, but that was enough to keep me busy all afternoon. They turned out great (obviously!), and I'll probably make these again. As far as tamale recipes go, this one was less labor intensive. Dicing apples is much easier than dicing raw meat.

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.

Tamales

It had been awhile since my last batch of tamales, and after a late start I made a "small" batch of about 90 tamales on Saturday. They weren't my best, but other people find even my average tamales to be really good. I took some to Jason's school for his teacher. When I picked him up, I learned his teacher never saw them--the morning teachers ate them all! This is not the first time my tamales have disappeared during delivery.

Jason and I were watching Monday Night Countdown earlier tonight, and they showed a clip of one of Rex Grossman's interceptions. Without any prompting from me, Jason said "Aw, man!" in clear disappointment. He's already a Bears fan.