Is it spring yet?

Rich wanted to make tamales this weekend. It was a toss up between a pork verde or a red chicken sauce. I can get a decent whole chicken almost anywhere. I can only get the rolled pork loin at one place that I know of - Bilka. On a normal day I simply hate Bilka. Thinking of walking into Bilka on a Saturday makes my mind just shut down. So chicken it was.

After a day in the kitchen (mostly for Rich) we were about tamale-ied out. When you make tamales you don't just make a few. Which in the end is ok, since now we have a few bags in the freezer for sometime later.


Lots of cabin fever going on, and you can only knit or play Uno so much. Unfortunately, my selection of books lately sucks. I've had How To Be Good by Nick Hornby following me around for two weeks now. I finally super skimmed through it last night. (For me - super skimming is reading only a few paragraphs and the end page - as opposed to just skimming - which is reading a bit on every page.) Anyway - I'm glad I super skimmed. It got good reviews, and maybe if you like this author you'll like his books (he also wrote Shakespeare Wrote for Money...and lots others), but it just wasn't working for me.

Cloth Girl didn't even get a super skim through. It might have made a good week long English TV drama. But it was reading a bit too much like a soap opera. So I quit on that one too.

Tonight Fred & Edie is either going to draw me in, or its getting a super skim too.

I don't mind giving up on a book if it doesn't make me want to read it. There are so many out there, why put forth the effort. My husband is the opposite. If he starts reading something, and finds out that its written poorly or is just plain boring, he still won't stop. Doesn't want to have *wasted* that initial time he put into it I guess.

Vegetarian Tamales

Last Thursday I cooked up some tamales to share with the other mothers at expat playgroup. The recipe I used was a vegetarian version from the Cooking Light website (I think). I chose it because it was vegetarian (so I could share with all at playgroup), and because I had the stuffing ingredients on hand.

The list of items was this: For the dough part - masa mixed up with vegetable broth. For the stuffing - mushrooms, leeks, one tomato, garlic, oregano, cumin, red pepper flakes, and S&P.


The recipe said to roast the garlic in the shell and on the stove top on high heat in a dash of oil. It said to do the same with the tomato. I liked this method. When done, the garlic just popped out of its shell. And the skin came right off the tomato, which was par-cooked, and easy to cut up.

Because my steamer is not that tall, I wrapped the tamales differently than a true tamale maker would. I still left one end *open* to let in the steam, but I laid them on their sides and stacked them on top of each other.

They turned out really good, even Rich was happy with this vegetarian version (mushrooms are meaty-ish). The only turn off is that the masa is white masa, and I'm used to yellow masa. So visually it was not as pretty to me.

I added some cheddar cheese to the left-over dough, made some small patties, and fried them up - these might possibly qualify as papusas? Man - those were tasty. I'm going to make them again, with some chopped up roasted green peppers...yum.


We also made fish tacos with homemade corn tortillas. But that meal didn't turn out so well. It looked good, but the tortillas were dense, and the fish (plaice) was just not all that tasty.


And Rich - he's just baking away. This weekend it was apple cobbler.