Family Foodies

Last year I went to my mom’s neighbor’s house on Christmas Eve for a casual party and dinner. When we walked in, the smells coming from the kitchen were unbelievable. They weren’t the usual smells, though. I didn’t smell ham or pumpkin pie or turkey. I smelled something spicy.

Upon further investigation, I found out that it was tamales cooking in those two large pots on the stove. One pot held pork tamales and one pot held chicken tamales. They smelled heavenly.

When I tried them, “heavenly” didn’t seem like a strong enough word to describe how delicious they were.

I still can’t think of a good enough word. Suffice it to say, they were beyond “to die for”. They literally melted in your mouth, and had just enough kick to make you blink a couple of times, but not so much that you didn’t want more. And, oh man, did I want more.

Of course, I asked for the recipe. I found out that it takes two days to make tamales that good. Needless to say, I haven’t made them myself yet. But I plan to. I swear!

To be honest, I never wrote down the recipe that my mom’s neighbor gave me for these tamales, so I couldn’t repeat it here exactly even if I wanted to. But since I’ve brought it up and it’s actually the topic of this post, I did a careful search for a recipe that sounds most like what he told me.

Believe me when I tell you that you can’t say you’ve truly lived until you’ve tasted these authentic homemade tamales. I may have just talked myself into finally making some myself. Or maybe I’ll just call my mom’s neighbor and try to get invited over for Christmas Eve again.

And that’s another thing. If you are having people over for a holiday dinner, you might want to try this out. If anyone complains about it not being traditional, they’ll stop as soon as they taste them–I can just about guarantee it. Here’s the link to the recipe I found. I’m pretty sure that these will taste just like the ones that I had.

Don’t forget to come back here, though. I’ve been looking through some of the other posts and there are some seriously good recipes! (I threw in a couple myself on some other posts here; feel free to try them out and then tell me how good they are so I can say “Aw shucks, thank you” and stuff.)