Ay Caramba, Hot Tamales

My Latin love affair continues, shhh… don’t tell my husband. Actually, it’s more of a love triangle – he was there, he took part. We made tamales right after a Latin-style feast and Tomatillo Salsa! We’ve never made them before, but personally, I think they turned out great. If we’re being honest, Jake did most of the work. Also, I haven’t been to the grocery store in two weeks. Yet somehow, this girl just happened to have some masa and cornhusks handy and an hour to spare. How lucky am I?!?!

We used to go to the farmer’s market every weekend when we lived in Florida. The weather is always warm and they go all year round. And along with the weekly produce supply, fresh naans and burrata made to order, we’d pick up the variety-pack of tamales from one of the vendors. They became my late-night, guilty pleasure snack when the kids went to bed. But then we moved to Colorado, and I haven’t eaten one since we got here. Tonight, we changed that.

Mexico: Tamales (Beef)

I should preface this all by saying that I was pretty intimidated to make these. First, I am no near the caliber of anyone’s Abuela and thought this would be super hard. Second, I didn’t trust my skills enough that they would stay together when it actually came time to cook them. The hardest part of this recipe was deciding to use a pot for steaming over the Instantpot. Thirdly, I was feeling a whole lot of performance pressure trying to live up to my sweet tamale memories. Now that I’ve made my peace, please reference above where my youngest child made most of these.

Start off by soaking your corn husks, it made them a lot easier to roll and tie. While those are soaking, Jake worked the masa while I did the beef filling. (Note: He’s less than thrilled about his penguin pj’s being on the internets. One day he’ll laugh about this.)

Now that your pretty prepped scoop some masa onto the cornhusk and flatten press lightly to flatten. (Two icecream size scoops was about the perfect amount!)

Roll the cornhusks to seal the filling in, folding like a little burrito. Use a spare piece of corn husk to tie them shut. And repeat this over and over and over again until you run out of husks or beef!