Tamale Party!

Big spoon!

About a week ago Rocio called the house in the morning and told Isaac that I should come down because she was making tamales.  Of course I ran down right away, not knowing that Isaac failed to tell me before I left that I probably wouldn't be back until sundown.  If you know anything about tamale making you would know that it is an ALL DAY thing, not just a couple of hours (which is what I thought).  Also, let me start by saying that Rocio had just spent the previous day making 1000 tamales in 12 hours with about 25 people for a fundraiser at Diego's school.

Colourful ingredients

I got down to her kitchen to find her mid-tamale making (she had started at 5am, and by this time it was just after 8).  I helped out by mixing up the batter in a HUGE pot, which we then poured into an even bigger pot on the fogon (wood stove) that was full of boiling meat juice (maybe lard?).  We stirred it all with an enormous wooden paddle, and when it was done Pancho and Jose had to come and take it off because it was too heavy for both of us to lift.

Ready to wrap

Then we headed out to the pagoda and got ourselves all set up.  All the fillings were already out, along with a big stack of cut banana leaves for wrapping (hence the 5am start). (The banana leaves are also the story behind why she was on a tamale making marathon for the second day in row - the school was going to get rid of the extra banana leaves, so she brought them home to use herself!).

Stockpiling...

Muchos piñas!! 

The first step in tamale making is to spoon some batter into the center of two banana leaves stacked on top of one another (that was my main job!).  Next, I passed the leaves down to Rocio who put 1 spoonful of rice, 1 piece of carrot, 1 piece of red pepper, 1 piece of green bean, and 1 piece of pork (and nothing more) carefully in the middle.  Once all the ingredients were safely in the middle, Rocio pulled each side of the banana leaves up, rolled it down, folded up one end and then folded up the other.  This makes one tamale - but tamales come in piñas, which are two tamales back to back, and then tied in a special way with some string.  So, I spooned batter, Nina (Rocio's friend) put on the rice, and Rocio did the rest.  Once we had our first 100 (so 50 piñas), we put them in a big pot over a fire and let them cook.  And we continued...240! We made 240 tamales, cooking the last batch at around 4pm.  It was a long day, but a really wonderful experience.  And so worth it because fresh home-made tamales are DELICIOUS!  It wasn't long before Rocio had Adrian hollering at passing cars that we had fresh tamales for sale!

Ready to eat!