Tamales!!!

Since Mexican food is pretty much our only option when we go out for dinner, David and I have never really tried to make much of it ourselves.  However, this attitude is almost impossible to maintain when faced with grocery stores stuffed with ingredients to make Mexican food… and little else.  Actually, since moving to Laredo, I have come to realize that I’ve rarely eaten authentic Mexican food before (massive super veggie burritos from Taco Time don’t actually count). So for our first foray into Mexican cuisine, we decided to make tamales.  Neither David nor I had ever eaten a tamale before, which actually makes it somewhat difficult to cook.  We had no idea what the desired outcome, consistency, flavour, colour, etc. should be.  For those of you (like us) who aren’t familiar with a tamale — it is basically steamed dough (made from lard and masa harina) that is stuffed with grilled meat or beans.  You form the dough into small logs (at least that’s what I did…) and then wrap them in dried corn husks.  Of course since all the writing on the outside of the corn husk package was in Spanish, I didn’t know you were supposed to soak them first… After a few disasters, we figured it out; ie. hurray for the internet and people who do know how to cook tamales and take lots of photos of themselves doing it! Post wrapping them you steam the suckers for a debatable length of time (when i saw debatable I mean everyone and their grandma has an opinion on this one).  When they come out you unwrap and devour them with salsa or hot sauce.  After the meal we were somewhat torn by the results — they weren’t too pretty to look at (logs of beigy dough generally aren’t) but they tasted good.  The next day at school I checked with my students and apparently we nailed the texture.  Hurray! I was also told that the leftovers are really good fried.