A Christmas Tradition

My bride grew up in South Texas.  Corpus Christi, to be specific.  In her family, they had a Christmas tradition - making tamales.  One of the first times I visited, we made them.  Everyone lined up in the kitchen with a job to do.  I didn't know a thing about tamales other than how to eat them, but I'm always anxious to learn.

Although we don't make them every single year, we try to make them as often as possible.  This afternoon, as a family (Tricia, me, Russ & Benjamin) spent the afternoon making them.  Laura Lee wasn't here, but I assume she'll be involved in helping us eat them.  I'll show you what we did.

First, Tricia mixed up the masa with spices and broth and stirred it all together.  It smells really good!  That's a lot of masa - 10 cups.

For the meat, we used beef (a chuck roast, shredded) and chicken (thighs, deboned and shredded).  The meat was heavily seasoned and then broth poured in to keep it from drying out.

The corn husks are put into a sink full of warm water to soften them up a bit.  They need to be soft in order to roll up the tamales.

Normally in the past, to spread the masa on the corn husk, we'd use a butter knife or a big, flat spoon.  This year, we were trying out a new tool - a Masa spreader, made in Corpus Christi.  You simply scoop up roughly half a cup of masa on the edge...

And the nifty gadget smoothly and evenly spreads the masa onto the corn husk.

Tricia's assessment is that it makes the task of making tamales go by quicker.  I was spreading masa and she was adding the meat and rolling them and stacking, and she said she couldn't keep up with me.  As you can see, you add roughly a tablespoon of meat to the center of the corn husk.

Then you roll them up and bend the end of the corn husk over.  Then we stack the tamales in dozens.

When we were done, we had made 13 dozen!  We put a bunch in the freezer to freeze and we'll be cooking and eating some this week.

The masa spreader is going to take some practice.  I was probably putting the masa on too thin, so our meat ran out before the masa did.  Not to fear.  We devised a way to use up the extra masa.  We made some "refried bean and cheese" tamales!  A vegetarian option, I guess, even though we aren't even remotely vegetarians.

We had a good time together, laughing and visiting while we worked.  We'll have a good time together eating them, too!  It's a nice tradition.