Hot Tamales!!

I have a complete appriciation for the hispanics now and the work they put into their cooking. We love tamales but never imagined how much is actually put into makeing them. So, I decided to give you a visual walk through of the process.
Day Before: Cook up 5 pounds of beef and 5 pounds of pork. Then shred into pieces.
8am: Start making the meat mixture. This consists of browning flour and adding chilli powder. It gives it that sticky texture that is inside burritos sometimes.

10am: Making the masa dough. This tolk us about 1 hour to get it to the right texture and look how much it makes. It almost fills up a 10 gallon bucket so a lot of the mixing is by hand...ok maybe you can say it was a full workout.
In the end, it is a paste like dough...the blender didn't work very well after a while. So then it is time to wrap them.
12:00pm: Wrapping them in individual husks, adding the meat, and sealing them. What a process. But in the end at 4pm, we completed 78 tamales.

The joys of learning something new is learning the appriciation for those that do it all the time.

Do you remember when you did this? The kids built a fort with windows and doors and love the entertainment of "the box" I don't need to buy christmas presents this year, I will just take all the boxes from everyone else.