Friday evening was Miss CutiePie's annual Mexican dinner. Usually she bakes up a big giant pan of enchiladas, but she and Miss KnowItAll decided to do tamales...from scratch!! Somehow we were able to boil the chicken, make the mole sauce, and assemble the tamales in corn husks and have dinner on the table in two and a half hours. Whew!!
Miss KnowItAll has a hand written, two page recipe straight from a Mexican friend who barely speaks English, and it is a beaut. That sauce is killer!! You simmer chilies in water and then blend them up with TONS of spices. Every Mexican family has their own recipe and knows that theirs is the best and they would be right.
After the chicken is cooked and cooled, you shred it with two forks, which isn't as easy as you would think. Then you make a dough with masa flour and spread it very thinly and perfectly on soaked corn husks or Miss KnowItAll scrapes it off and makes you do it again. It is an art form. I only had two scrapeages before I got it down and then I had to do at least a thousand of those babies before they were passed on down the assembly line for chicken and sauce, and then each tamale was properly folded and tied. Then you stand them up in a big pan and steam them for an hour. Then you eat them. Heaven on a plate!!
And my great co-workers pitched in for a $100 gift card from the garden center and $25 for my cruise fund. Will the retirement parties ever end? I hope not. I plan to buy two new sprinklers to replace my old ones that just squirt here and there, if at all. Then I'm throwing those old things on the ground and stomping them into a million pieces for making me crazy.
No comments:
Post a Comment