Snow Day/ Tamales

One great thing about living in Albuquerque is that it rarely snows here in town.  So when it does, they close the schools and call it a snow day.  You can imagine the jubilation at our house when there was an early morning phone call telling us that school would be cancelled for the day.

Since it was so cold, and everything we would normally have had on the schedule was cancelled, we decided it would be a perfect day to make Tamales.  Julianne had written down some instructions from mom, who learned from someone who really knew what she was doing.  So Jewels brought over the ingredients and we went for it.

First we made the red sauce: Here are the chilis boiling in some water with garlic cloves, allspice cloves, and whole cloves.  I would never have guessed those two spices would be included in a red chili sauce.

Julianne's husband, Eric was awesome and went to Pro Rancher's Market to get this special prepared Masa.  He got 16 lbs of it!!!  (Just for the record, if you go to get prepared Masa, you don't actually need that much, but we felt safe knowing that we definitely would not run out. :)  He also got us a bunch of corn husks.  

Here's Emma with darling little Caleb, because I know mom and all the sisters are probably wanting to see pictures of him.

So you take the the boiled chilis and blend them up.

Make sure the lid is on tight, or it will jump out and burn you.  

(sorry, Jewels, for posting this picture, but your expression really makes me laugh.)

Here's Julianne getting the lid on very tight. 

You strain the sauce to remove the skins and seeds.
(don't actually eat that stuff.)

Meanwhile, your corn husks are soaking in some water.

So then you take a nice big corn husk, and spread a thin layer of Masa on it.  Julianne had brought over some shredded pork that she'd cooked in the crockpot a day or two before. We added our pork directly to the red sauce, and spread some of it onto each layer of Masa.  The tricky part is wrapping up the corn husk.  We started out pretty amateur but got better by the end.

Then when you have a ba-jillion tamales assembled and wrapped, you put them into a gigantic steamer end-down, and squish them in there vertically.  You let them steam for two hours.

When they are done, you take them out and eat them, or bag them up to freeze them and eat them another day.  

Here I am holding up one of our beginning amateur tamales, and then a bigger, better one as a result of us perfecting our technique. (Well, perfect enough for three white girls, anyway.)

And here we are with our beautiful bags of Tamales.  That's only half of our finished product. We made about 50 pork tamales with red sauce and 30 chicken/green sauce tamales.  They take forever, but they are TASTY!!!  So all you Albuquerque friends, if we have some more snow days, and you're wondering what to do with all your spare time ;)  Give me a call, and we can make some tamales.