Christmas Tamales!

For the past few years my daughter and I have made tamales for Christmas. Years before we ordered tamales from a local Mexican restaurant, but found out we could make better ones ourselves! In the past we've also made pasties, which are meat and vegetables pies in a crust. I grew up in a Finnish community and my mother made pasties all the time ... but this year my daughter decided we would only make tamales. That was okay with me -- I can make pasties any time.

I bought about 20 lb. of pork and started cooking it at 6:00 this morning with lots of onion, garlic, salt and water.  The day before I made a red chile sauce with dried California chiles that you add to the cooked pork. It's kind of spicy, but tastes JUST RIGHT. If you want all the recipes, let me know!

So by the time my daughter arrived at 9:00 a.m. my pork was ready and shredded.

She brought her own shredded chicken, a sauce made with tomatillos, as well as ingredients to make vegetarian tamales for her friend: green chilies, olives, carrots, corn, cheese.

Here are corn husks soaking. I think we used three bags. That's a lot!

How many tamales did we make today! My guess is around 12 dozen! We started with a 25 lb. bag of prepared masa. My friend adds more lard and baking powder to hers, but we used the prepared masa as it was. The finished product was GOOD!!

Here are the finished tamales cooling.

PERFECTION!