Tamale training

OK a looooong time ago, I posted on this blog that I wondered if I'd someday be making tamales for my Guatemalan born daughter.

Looks like I'll be making them even before actually becoming a father. Today, we bought the 2 main ingredients required for making tamales - corn husks and and corn flour for making masa. In fact, we've got 50 husks and a big bag of corn flour. This will allow us to make several batches, and hopefully get pretty good at it over time. The process is known to be difficult and time consuming - but quite fun and rewarding also. I'm pretty sure it'll be rewarding, as tamales are one of my favorite foods. Once we actually try this in a couple of weeks, I'll post our results here and on the my food blog - with differing points of view of course. More adoption news related to tamales will be revealed in the next month or two so keep in touch!

Tamales are actually are actually an ancient Native American food - common among the Maya in Guatemala. One of the major differences from the Mexican version would be that Guatemala tamales often use banana or plantain leaves. Not sure if we'll be able to find those readily, so we'll stick with corn husks for now. The meat can be made with pork, chicken, or beef, and the sauce can be red or green chili, mole, or one of many variations.

We're going to approximate this recipe for Tamales Colorados de Navidad - yup Christmas Tamales!!!