Last week at work one of the young ladies took orders for fresh tamales made by her mother for $1 apiece. I asked if they could be made without meat; sure! So I actually ordered ten, as I'm crazy for tamales but commercial ones all seem to have meat, and I certainly don't know how to make them.
Came Friday, and by pure luck or the grace of God I'd brought a ten dollar bill with me, because I'd completely forgotten the day of the tamales. So in comes Lia with the steaming, warm bag of fresh tamales, and I'm thinking, "Oh, boy!"
At lunch I get out the first tamale and open up the corn husk wrapping. Corn meal, delicious, warm, and wrapped around . . . nothing. No beans, no sauce, no vegetables, zippo. I guess she figured that if no meat, I didn't want anything in them.
I was telling the other nurses about this later in the day, and we started to wonder about Lia's mom, making ten empty tortillas, one after the other, and imagined what she must have been thinking. "What kind of a moron wants ten empty tortillas? Oh, well, these vegetarians . . . eight, nine, ten . . ." We laughed so hard I almost peed my pants.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
While a good laugh is always welcome, there is such a thing as a sweet corn tamale and also a green corn tamal. When I lived in Mexico, tamal de elote were not at all unusual so there's nothing really peculiar or funny about making a tamale without a meat or bean filling. BTW, since you are vegetarian, you might want to be aware that authentic tamales are made with lard.
Yeah, I figured that out later: by the flavor, by the action of the tamales on my digestive system, and by later remembering that this type of authentic cooking usually involves lard.
Post a Comment