Futility Now

It’s three weeks into my summer vacation & I can say with confidence that I’ve been making a pretty decent showing.  This last week has involved a ton of cooking with my mother, the highlight of which was the 15lb pork butt we picked up at the Original Steer Meat Market way out in the upper Ganges of Portland (where I grew up and my mother still lives).  Half of the butt (left cheek?) went to pork chili, and the other half to tamales.

I made up the sauce for the pork — I used a hybrid of recipes for mole sauce and chipotle sauce.  That chipotle flavor is divine if you ask me, but a bit spicy for the little one (okay, for me as well).  Ingredients included chipotles in adobo, tomato puree, powders of garlic & onion, oregano, sea salt & black pepper, cinnamon, brown sugar, bittersweet chocolate, and coffee.

After simmering for an hour, it was still mighty spicy, but when I added the pork and slow cooked it, some magical thing happened.  I think the plentiful fats in the pork meat balanced out the spice somehow.  The result was very nice.

In the past when I’ve made tamales I’ve had some help with the assembly.  It’s not that it’s difficult, but it is very messy and best done as quickly as possible, so that all the tamales have an equal steaming time, and the husks don’t dry out while you are working at it.  While some may consider this cheating, in the past I have also used kitchen twine to tie them closed, since I never manage to get the husks pliable enough to stay folded without it.  Finding myself twineless, however, I developed a new technique for getting the damn things in the steamer.

I used my mesh colander and stood them vertically, tips tucked like little sleeping bird heads.  The colander sits atop a wire stand for canning jars; the water level was about three inches high.  The only downside to this technique is that it only allowed me to fit about fifteen tamales in the pot, and if you’ll note the top photo, there’s a lot of masa and pork there.

On an exasperated whim, I put 1/4 cup measures of the masa dough into a cupcake tin and baked them for about forty five minutes — the little one named them lard muffins, and they are pretty good when piled with chipotle-mole pork & sour cream.

So the tamales were a real success, but I’ll admit that I don’t generally eat a lot of lard, and I found we (jmags, the little one, myself, and our dinner guests) were bloaty and stupefied after eating them — despite the grapefruit margaritas that flowed freely for all minus the minor.  Sometimes authenticity hurts. The next time around I may have to make some sort of compromise.