one hot tamale party

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Once upon a time, many many many years ago (before digital cameras!), a friend and I threw a tamale-making Cinco de Mayo party. It started with tamale-making (not surprisingly), progressed to tamale-eating and eventually ended as a Latin dance party. Depending on what sort of dancers you and your friends are, this can be a great kid-friendly fete as well. Here’s what a learned from my foray into tamale-making.

• On your Evite invitation, establish two times: an early time for tamale-making (we said 2 pm) and a later time for tamale-eating (5:30 for us). There will likely be only a handful of people that show up early, but that’s all you need.

• Soak those corn husks in advance.

• Offer different types of tamale fillings and have them prepped before the crowd shows up. Your friends should only stuff tamales — they shouldn’t have to cut anything. My cohost and I cooked, shredded and spiced up chicken, drained black beans, cut peppers and set out different cheeses so tamale-makers could create all sorts of tamale variations. Here’s an in-depth guide to tamales (which my friend and I did not follow, but it probably would have helped), and here’s a potentially less intimidating but picture-less tamale recipe.

• Keep in mind, smaller tamales cook faster. We made ours roughly cigar-size.

• Here’s a very important and easily overlooked step: Be sure you have enough giant pots. The top of the pot must be taller than the tamales.

• When you steam the tamales, place them in the pot so they stand upright, but don’t cram too many together or they won’t cook properly.

• Keep an eye on the liquid at bottom of the pot — it can boil out and then your tamales will taste like smoke. (I may know this from experience. As it turns out, smoke-flavored tamales are not yummy.)

• Have plenty of extra food in case your tamales take longer than expected to cook. (This, too, I may know from experience. I blame the too-small pasta pots. And just to defend my party honor: Even with all the hiccups, the party was a big dancing success!) You can offer refried beans, salsa, guacamole (in fact, we had an unofficial guacamole competition that helped morph Guac Bowl into the worldwide sensation it is now), Spanish Rice-A-Roni (I can’t make any claims of authenticity, but I can claim I like it, and I do), fruit salsa with cinnamon chips (this recipe is very similar to mine), frozen taquitas and whatever other frozen Mexican foods you like, super-easy Mexican wedding cookies and quesadillas, which you can make with any of the leftover tamale fixings.

• And don’t forget your Mexican cervezas and cocktails: Corona, Dos Equis (cut up limes in advance) and margaritas.

Viva tamales!

Comments

Jarritos (mexican soda) is a fun drink option for non-drinkers.

A big time-saver: Go to the Mexican supermarket and buy some "Masa Preparada" (Prepared cornmeal dough) rather than going through the effort of mixing it yourself. You'll thank yourself.

They sell it by the pound, and around holidays, they have it all pre-bagged and ready to grab. You just decide on the size of bag.

When cooking the tamales, you can place a small dish at the bottom of the pot cover it in foil paper, nadd the water,then place the tamales standing up and they won't burn at the bottom, that is how my grandma use to do it, and they came out good every time without burning.