Cookbook # 36: Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen
Adapted from Cookbook #36 : Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen (1996) Recipe: Tamal de Cazuela (Crusty Baked Tamal) Every Christmas, one of the husband's fathers* hosts a small tamalada. These tamale-making-parties carry on New World traditions, and our annual gathering is a nod to the husband's father's Mexican-by-way-of-Oklahoma heritage. Labor-intensive and best conducted with many hands and pitchers of margaritas or sangria, this get-together often leaves us feeling a little sick because not only do we devour a good deal of the filling before we mold masa around it, we also eat way too many of the cooked tamales (particularly the tomatillo-chicken ones). At the end of the night, we haul home oodles of them (leaving twice as many behind with the parental hosts), and those tamales that we don't immediately consume in the next week we put in the freezer to be pulled out for a March tamal or two or ten. While it would feel strange to have a tama...