Merry Christmas from Masa Stewart

On the Saturday before Christmas we awake "Early" to avoid the phone calls from Dad G. (We told him we would be over early. We meant 9ish. He meant 5ish.) Today isn't just any day, it's the day we make tamales with the whole family. (anyone willing to help) Tamales are the traditional Christmas Eve meal at the Garcia's Family Function.

If you have not ever made tamales it's a lot of work. You are crazy if you venture into this feat with out more than four willing helpers So we get in the car and head to Roy. As we are driving on the snowy roads I look down and find that I have quite an interesting array of items in my lap. Two sharp knifes, a masa spreader, knife sharpener, coffee, and of course ginger snaps. I just hope we make it safely all the way there because I don't want to have to explain to the nice officer that we are just trying to get to mom and dad's to make Christmas Eve dinner.

We make it there and we start it's a lot of fun and it's very fun to visit with the rest of the family who are there helping. After what feels like hours of spreading masa on corn husks we start filling them with chili and putting them in the pressure cooker. We finally have on full pot and are so ready to start pressuring so in 45 minutes we can all indulge in the best thing on earth. We would love to start the pressure cooker, but the important part, the pet cock is missing. (thats the part on the pressure that makes the chhhh chucch chuchhh chhhh sound) So everyone starts looking for the bag it was in. Checking the back room. Checking the drawers. Checking high and low. Finally Vince decides to go to his house for his pressure cooker. After a while we decide to empty the one pot into pot number two. At least we will be able to cook one pot full. Tim and Elena start transferring the tamales into pot 2. When the last tamale is out they lift up the grate in the bottom of the pan and find the missing piece. We call Vince back. We start working on filling pot one, again. We started joking about how people spread masa. Everyone has their own preference. Some people like tons of masa little chili. Some like little masa tons of chili. I happen to be one of those folks. So we start joking about the masa spreaders (of which I was one) Tim decides that the masa award goes to me for spreading the perfect MASA. Which in turn becomes the "Masa Stewart" award.

After a long 45 minutes of pressuring while the smell of great food waifs through the house, it is time to get the good out of the cooker. That means wait until the steam is gone. One way to hurry the process is to run water over the top of the pot. Being that the pots are huge we decided against it. So the next best thing was to take it out side and put snow all over it to cool it down. Every one enjoyed a sample of Christmas Eve food on Solstice Eve. I don't think it is possible to get enough of the great food around on Christmas Eve.