Chile Today ~ Hot Tamale...

We have been eating a LOT of Mexican food (and reading about it and drooling about it while reading recipes) since Sam came to the realization that *this* was the kind of food he wanted to be cooking and researching and learning about.

Tamales is a favorite of ours, and we had them last night. We used the cheater kit version last night. We once made them from scratch, and they were no better than the kits that we find in the grocery stores, and the kits don't dominate our entire day (we will make them from scratch again some day, but for now, there is too much life to be living to spend that much time on them!).

We use Melissa's Authentic Tamale Kits that we find in Wegman's grocery stores. We have made various fillings, and last nights were extremely yummy.

This photo is the stuffed tamales, all standing at attention in the steamer bucket, ready to be covered, not to emerge for an entire hour, when they will be gratefully consumed!!!





We bought some anaheim chiles and roasted them (I think we had 8 of them). We steamed them by putting them in a bowl and covering it with plastic wrap, which makes skin, stem and seed removal VERY easy. Sam chopped them up.

We had some chorizo sausage, so we chopped some of that up into small pieces. You could also just use some canned chiles.

For the carnivore tamales, we spread some of the masa, added some roasted chiles and some chorizo. For the vegetarian ones, we spread some masa, added cottage cheese (yes!!...believe me!!...it's PERFECT and delicious!!), and some chiles. We topped them all with a tomatilla salsa recipe that was in the kit.


This salsa is VERY different from the tomatilla salsa I usually make because the tomatillas are cooked. But it was PERFECT for the tamales.

1# tomatillas
jalapenos (fresh or jarred)
sugar
salt

That's it!! Boil the tomatillas (and the jalapenos if you have fresh ones) until they appear to be *cooked*, but not falling apart. Put them in a food processor with the jalapenos...add salt and sugar...and that's IT!! Easy Peasy!! It tasted like a green enchilada sauce. Yummy.

We also had some fresh, local grilled corn on the cob. And I made some yellow-cilantro rice...I made brown rice, added some turmeric, and fresh cilantro. Yummy. (Did I say that already??)

EnJoy.