Well, yet again the cooking and baking brought me to the edge of a Nervous Breakdown. But, in talking to MB about why, I discovered it's not that I don't like doing it, it's that I want everyone to be as excited about it as I am. And they just can't be. But I convinced MB to help me with the tamales today, and to at least pretend that he was as into it as I was.
Son only likes cutting out, frosting and eating the cookies. Therefore he couldn't be bothered to help me mix yesterday. Also, his finger hurt. So I had to do the mixing myself, which made me testy. Why do I do it if no one cares? Later, of course, I realized they do care, but not about the same stages I do. Also, I'm the mom, which requires that I do the non-glamorous parts of the job.
Yesterday I also cooked the pork and made the red chile sauce for the tamales. Then today I shredded the pork, cooked and shredded the chicken, and prepared the chicken filling. MB did help with mixing the dough and making/rolling the tamales. He was a good sport.
Then we could finally relax while the tamales steamed. I made some rice. We bought refried beans at Rico yesterday, so we were prepared for the meal. I was going to make a salad, but I let that go.
Verdict: delicious! The fancy (golden raisins and sherry, olives, poblano chile) chicken filling was too much for MB, though he liked it. He preferred the more basic pork filling. Both were great, and we have about 29 tamales left, so I'm putting some in the freezer for our normal lives when we don't make such labor intensive meals. (I'll post some pics later)
But I'm glad we made tamales! And I'm glad we're done!
Tomorrow we eat leftovers and veggies and that salad. But now I have to make frosting so Son can do what he does best: frost his little heart out (and cover the breakfast nook in sugar, etc.).
3 comments:
Wow I am impressed. Tamales!! I just baked, with mom, over 300 cookies. I mean really who are we expecting??? But I did enjoy it and I know that your hard work was appreciated. Mom bought some tamales from a lady at work and we had some last night as well. All I had to make was the guacamole and the rice. I already did the frosting the counter thing!!! Merry Christmas.
Tamale making has driven me near the brink before too. Corn husks are slippery and the masa mix is sticky and the two are hard to force together in their arranged marriage.
They sound delicious. But mostly what I do is wait for the tamale lady to come by my work (which has the likelihood of happening in Grand Rapids of about 1.2%).
Excellent idea to have non-xmas food around xmas time--we do chinese on x-mas eve.
And interesting that we do care so much about how excited others are about what excites us. I often like to think I don't care but I do. Layering the caring thing with the mom thing and it makes sense that you would be testy and approach a nervous breakdown. The solution, of course, is to now convince MB that cooking is a manly hunting activity where he can use his new knife and binocs.
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