Tamales

It's Thursday morning, very early, and I'm waiting for my mother to come and pick me up. We're going out to my aunt's house today to help make tamales for a party my aunt is having on Saturday.

I'm having some kind of allergic reaction to something, perhaps the soap that the dermatologist I saw yesterday recommended. It's fragrance free, but somehow I'm not convinced that that is enough to make it not trigger a reaction. So my face is red and I'm debating whether or not to take part of a benadryl to calm everything down. Sigh. (I'm tempted to not take it because I didn't get a lot of sleep--well, any sleep--last night and a benadryl will probably knock me out or at least make me feel pretty draggy.)

I also had to take benadryl yesterday because my lip started to do that swelling thing again. It doesn't affect my nose or throat, so it's not an emergency, just some random facial edema that I've been dealing with for the last several years that the doctors and allergists have thrown their hands up over, saying it's common and should go away eventually. Maybe. They don't know. Anyway, benadryl calms it down, but it does make me feel like I'm moving through molasses. Which is a feeling that I hate.

Christmas is rapidly advancing upon us and I am, as ever, not prepared. (Though what it would mean for me to be prepared is a mystery. While we've been out shopping for our ordinary stuff, I did get a glimpse of what other people do to prepare. I heard a young girl, for example, telling her mother that they only had one packet of hot chocolate left and that they needed to save it for Santa. Her mother wisely said that they could always buy more hot chocolate.)

It sent me spinning down a list of random memories that The Brain had filed under "Santa."

Later:

It's Tuesday night and I came home from tamale making and got a bit of sleep. When I woke up, Dave was gone to his mothers to have dinner. His sister is in town for the holidays and he's spending some time with them.

I woke up from my nap with a sore back and shoulders (from tamale making!) and hungry. I had a bowl of berries (blueberries and raspberries) with some yogurt and cereal. (That was a couple of hours ago and I'm hungry again now.)

We got several dozen tamales made this morning, filled with pork and red chile. We also did a handful of vegetarian tamales with cheese and zucchini. Tradition is important when it comes to tamale making, yes, but so is innovation. Or maybe that's just in my family. My grandmother, one year, ran out of the corn husks used to wrap them, so she used aluminum foil instead. So every once in awhile, we use aluminum foil (usually when we run out of corn husks). A couple of years ago, my aunt saw an advertisement for a masa spreading device (normally we use our hands, of course), so she bought one and we tried that out. (It works okay, but takes a lot of time-consuming practice to get good at.) This year, my aunt had watched some tamale-making videos on youtube and had seen in one of them the trick to good masa: It should, if it has the right amount of lard in it, float. So she made floating masa. (It was good in the end, if a wee bit fatty.)

It took us about four and a half hours to burn through all the supplies my aunt had on hand (with a quick run to the store for more corn husks). By the time we finished and were cleaning up our mess, the first batch of tamales was finished so my aunt and I each had a couple for lunch. My mother had some of my aunt's Christmas cookies for her lunch and brought home two tamales to have for dinner.

I should have brought a couple home, but instead I'll have a sandwich or something.