It made me

Full and happy

How I did it: This was actually one of my first goals I ever listed on 43Things - so I'm quite excited to be able to go through the how-to's on doing this.

First things first, I love Tamales, and I was pretty convinced that I could make them.  After some interneting and checking out a few books at the library, I began to understand why the tamale party was such a huge part of the process.  For the work you're going to do, getting the ingredients for a large batch is just as easy as doing a tiny batch.  Tamales are awesome and having a bunch in the freezer are great, so you do want to make a bunch so you don't have to do all the prep.  But making a ton at once is a lot of work - so you need friends.

Outside of that, I knew that I'd need an entire weekend to do everything - because I'd be spending the Saturday prepping the meat and getting the sauces started.  Sunday was the day that everyone came over to help out with Tamale construction and steaming.  Of course, there was that day of grocery shopping...yet another reason you do this party-style AND you want to do a huge batch all at once.

Before this sounds super-expensive, let me tell you that this is going down as one of the cheapest food-based parties I can remember in a long time.  I even had a ton of meat left over because I had grossly over-estimated how much I'd need (I could have halved it and still had leftovers).  But it basically went down like this:

- Masa $5
- Pork Butt $10 (on sale @99cents/lb) - could have had 1/2
- 2 whole chickens $10 (on sale) - again, could have had 1/2
- 1 small can Crisco $2.50
- 2 bags Corn Husks - $6 (only needed 1/2 though)
- Tomatillos - $4
- Cilantro $1
- Ancho Peppers - $4
- Tomato Sauce $1
- Onions, Celery, Garlic - I already had

For less than $50 I had all the makings of tamales that not only fed everyone, but I had POUNDS of leftover shredded meat to give away to everyone, leftover cornhusks and everyone went home with plenty of tamales to freeze.  We ended up with the bulk of the tamales and could eat for a month of lunches on them.  Not to mention, the shredded pork and chicken that we've got to make a few dinners and/or lunches.  Did I mention the homemade chicken broth and pork broth that I made?  And the 2 pork butt bones I have frozen for batches of Navy Bean soup?

And this doesn't even count the good time everyone had.  We ended up with an assembly line for the tamales and made them pretty fast around the kitchen island.  The steaming obviously took a while, but we had a plan to kill some time with football and Wii.  Outside of that, we waited to eat our spoils with some good Mexican Beer.  (Okay $8 a six pack!) Read how I did it… 3 years ago