holiday tamales

I've been itching to learn to make tamales and on my last trip to Albuquerque I was able to find some organic masa. Gathering other organic ingredients was pretty easy here in Alamosa...well, except for the lard. I had to use the standard non-organic variety. (Is there such a thing as organic lard? I doubt it!) I used the recipes found in "La cocina de la frontera: Mexican-American cooking from the southwest"

In the first batch of meat filling, I used some chilis grown by my sister Donna. After the chicken went into the chili marinade I thought... "well, maybe I should try this". I had less than a drop on my finger, touched it to my tongue and within a minute I thought my whole mouth would blister. I quickly drained off as much marinade as I could. Not being willing to throw it out, I saved it for a tamale adventure. Into the freezer it went. I sent Donna a text asking what kind of chili it was. Habanero was her reply. Ha! She thought it was a sweet chili. Er, no... it seems to be one of the hottest on the Scoville scale!

My next batch of meat filling used a mild "chile ancho" in the marinade. Very nice! After mixing up the masa and soaking the husks, I was ready to roll (so to speak).

This picture shows how I placed the masa and filling on the husk.

Below are the mild tamales getting ready to steam. They steamed for about 90 minutes.

Since I had a whole bunch of masa left, I thawed the habanero-based filling and made a batch of those. I rolled them differently so there was no chance of mixing up the two varieties. No, I did not taste them (I'm no fool!). I'll be taking these in to work on Monday for those young and adventurous taste buds to try out.

While the habanero batch was cooking, I had the luxury of testing the mild batch. I must admit, they were glorious! I was pleasantly surprised by how non-greasy they were. I used the minimum amount of lard and it seems to have been just right. Yay!

I enjoyed this cooking adventure and look forward to making it again. Next time, I'll have to make it a group project. Hey, this would be a perfect wau to use up leftover turkey. :D