Christmas Tamale-Making Tired

Yes, I am so tired I am Christmas Tamale-Making Tired.  And THAT, my friends, is t. i. r. e. d.

Little Rachel Pie and I have made this year's tamales.  We spent Wednesday at the store buying everything we needed and then soaking the beans and cooking the beans and also cooking the pork.  Basically, doing all the prep work we could ahead of time.

Then yesterday we started making the tamales.  Typically, I have a group of friends over and some neighbors drop by and my s-i-l and with a kitchen full of people we knock those babies out.  But since we didn't get this planned till the last second and my s-i-l is traveling, it ended up being just the two of us.

And do you think I was smart enough to think of taking my camera out and sharing the experience with you here?  No, I was not.  I actually thought of it TODAY!  A day late and a dollar short, as the saying goes.

So visualize this in your head:  both of us in our Christmas aprons.  Rachel Pie did NOT like her Christmas apron and kept calling it a Muu Muu.  Then it became a M-apron.  Then it was Muu-pron.  Which to me sounded like a prescription drug for e.d. or restless leg syndrome or something lame.

Anyhoo, back to the kitchen.  We had the big giant silver ice chest full of corn husks soaking in water.  We had all 5 giant tamale pots out and at the ready.  There were large pans of mashed beans, shredded and seasoned pork, corn, chopped roasted Hatch chiles, cheese, and bowls of mashed chipotles.  May I just interject here that one of my all-time pet peeves is MORONS who mispronounce CHI-PO-TLE.  It is not now, nor has it ever been CHI-POLE-TEE.  Please don't say this, it just makes you look like an idiot.  Or like Guy Fieri when he says BUH-SAL-MIC in place of the correct BAL-SAM-IC.  It is not that hard to say chi-po-tle.

Anyhoo, back to the kitchen again.  Picture the giant tupperware full of the masa.  And also picture the food processor and all the masa ingredients on the other section of the counter.  What I am saying here is that the kitchen was full of stuff and looked like a tamale bomb had gone off.  And we are clean-as-you-go people.  And it still looked that bad.

We ended up with 18 - 20 dozen tamales total.  Some were pork, some were bean and chipotle, and the rest were were corn, chile and cheese.  In other years we have added in other varieties, we do sweet ones, we mix pork and venison, sometimes we put bacon in the beans, cilantro in the corn, chile and cheese (which I like to call C 3 or C- cubed)  If we had cilantro it would have been C to the 4th power, which I have no clue how to do on my lovely computer.  But that's how we label them when packing away in the freezer.

There was no set rhyme or reason as to how many we made of each.  We just started with the pork and made them till we ran out of the pork.  Then the beans.  And finally the C 3.

In case you are interested in the specifics, we started with about 5 lbs of pork shoulder which I cooked overnight in the crock pot with a little bit of chicken stock and a ton of garlic.  The beans were a 4 lb. bag of pintos that I cooked all day long with a ton of garlic.  When they were cooked well, I added in salt, chile powder, cumin and a couple cans of Ro-Tel.

I bought Chile ancho, chile guajillo, and those little Chile de Arbol (those are the hot ones) and we seeded them and roasted them and then softened them in boiling water and then processed them with lots of garlic and salt and some of the soaking water till we had about a quart of chile puree'.  This mixture got blended into the pork, and each of the masa mixtures.  I vary the ingredients of the masa to better coordinate with the filling.  When making the pork tamales I use the rich pork drippings and mix with chicken broth and some of the chile puree', but with the bean ones I use the bean juice that I strained off before refrying the beans.  Just to add another layer of flavor.  Make sense?

After all the giant tamale steamer pots were done and cooling we still had to package up the tamales and label them. And find room for them in the freezers.

Time involved:  2 people at 12 hours each, plus 2 people shopping for 2 hours, plus 3 more hours prep work.  Total:  34 woman hours.

Money spent:  No clue.  I hate keeping up with that end of things.  Plus how do you account for the baking powder and salt that was already in the pantry and used 1 tsp at a time?  All I know is that people who bitch about buying tamales for $5 or $6 per dozen have never made them.  There is no way I would do all that work and sell my 20 dozen for $6 each.  That's $120 and if you divide that by 34 hours of labor it comes to $3.50 per hour.  Isn't that slave labor wages?

Whatever.

The point was not to belittle our efforts but to show that spending that time together and producing a quality traditional food that our family loves is truly a labor of love. What other reason could there be for doing all that work?

Love of family.  That's what motivates most of these customs.

Enjoy your Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with your family.  And notice your customs.  Do them with love in your heart and a song on your lips.  Holiday beverages help, if you have too many in-law outlaws hanging around your kitchen.  : )