I was craving tamales, one of my favorite foods and was taking stock of the ingredients in my cabinet. Unfortunately, I had run out of the all important Maseca flour needed to make the batter. And a trip to the supermarket yielded no results. But I did have  several cans of hominy in the cupboard. So I asked myself if I could turn canned hominy into the masa needed for a good tamale.

Since I searched for this question and found it asked all over the internet but never found it answered, I’ll answer it here. Yes, you can make tamales using canned hominy ground in a food processor.

If you’re not familiar with the different kinds of corn used for various Mexican foods (like tortillas and tamales) a good primer is this section of About.com. Understanding the nixtamalization process and the resulting products will help make sense of my recipes below.

I reasoned that the main difference between masa and hominy was the amount of cooking and therefore the  amount of water in the corn. The canned hominy was definitely wetter than fresh masa. But since tamale dough is really a batter where the masa is mixed with water or a broth, I figured the extra moisture present in the hominy wouldn’t hurt. I would just have to cut down on the broth I added when I mixed up the batter.

I experimented with a couple of dough mixtures until I got the recipe right. Here’s my recipe.

Basics

I usually make my tamales in two parts, over two days. I follow a basic recipe for the batter that is a cross between the recipe found in my old copy of The Joy of Cooking and in Rick Bayless’ Mexican Kitchen.

On day one I make the filling, which is usually some form of stewed meat. I use the broth left from this phase to flavor the dough when I make it on the second day. I typically prefer chicken and pork for the filling and use whatever cuts I can find that are on special.

The Filling

Chicken With Jalapenos and Black Beans

Ingredients

• 2 Split chicken breasts with rib meat.
• 2 T Chili powder
• 1 T Kosher salt
• 4 – 6 cloves garlic
• 2 t Cumin
• 1 t Black pepper
• 1/2 – 1 can black beans
• 2 medium jalapenos, seeded & de-veined, chopped fine
• 2 T Goya Recaito
• 1 medium lime

Method

1. Place the breasts in a stock pot and cover with water.
2. Add the chili powder, garlic, salt, pepper, and cumin.
3. Bring to a boil, cover, and simmer for 1 – 2 hours, until chicken is fully cooked.
4. Remove the breasts and allow to cool.
5. Strain the remaining broth and and reserve 2 – 4 cups.
6. Remove skin from breasts and shred meat.
7. In a mixing bowl, (or in the bowl of a food processor if you like a finely ground tamale filling) mix chicken meat, black beans, Recaito, chopped jalapenos, and juice and zest of the lime.

Chipotle Pork

Ingredients

• 3-4 lb. pork roast (loin roast or whatever cut you prefer)
• 3 T Chili powder
• 1 T Kosher salt
• 4 – 6 cloves garlic
• 2 t Cumin
• 1 t Black pepper
• 1 can chipotle peppers in adobo sauce
• 3 T Goya Sofrito seasoning

Method

1. Place the roast in a stock pot and cover with water.
2. Add the chili powder, garlic, salt, pepper, and cumin.
3. Bring to a boil, cover, and simmer for 1 – 2 hours, until fully cooked.
4. Remove the roast and allow to cool.
5. Strain the remaining broth and and reserve 2 – 4 cups.
6. Shred the meat.
7. In a mixing bowl, (or in the bowl of a food processor if you like a finely ground tamale filling) mix pork, chipotles (use a number based on your taste), and sofrito.

The Tamale Dough

Ingredients

• 2 15 oz. cans Goya hominy
• A few ounces masa harina
• 4 oz. lard (chilled). Shortening may also be used
• 1 t baking powder (double acting)
• Up to 1 C broth (I use whichever broth came from the filling I am making the dough for)
• Salt to taste

Method

1. Grind the hominy to a fine paste in a food processor.
2. Using a stand or hand mixer, cream the lard and baking powder together.
3. Begin to add the hominy, 1/3 at a time until filly mixed.
4. Once incorporated, add broth as necessary to create a spreadable texture. How thick you make the batter depends on how fluffy you want the final tamale texture. The wetter the batter, the fluffier and softer the resulting tamale. (Until the batter is too wet and then it will never set up when cooked.) Some people like their dough the consistency of modeling clay, while others (like me) prefer a spreadable, cream-cheese or even lighter texture. I like the consistency shown in this video.

After this, it’s a matter of filling and steaming.

I was impressed with the hominy version. The texture is a little coarser or rustic than dough made from dehydrated masa, yet is is also fluffier or less dense. I encourage you to experiment.

Recaito

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that I thought Late Blight had already begun to affect my garden this year. Thankfully, the crisis seems to have been averted.

The main help was several bright, sunny, warm days in a row. I was able to get the plants into the ground and prune off anything showing signs of discoloration or disease. And I think the sunlight worked its magic and killed off any remaining pockets on the leaves.

So for now I remain blight free. Though we’ve had several days of rain lately and the slugs are coming out in force and devouring everything!

For several years Symantec’s Norton products have made my life a living hell. Three years ago I bought my 70 year-old mother a Dell computer to replace her nearly 10 year-old Gateway that was finally too old to run Windows XP. (It actually lives on running Debian Linux in my basement.) The system arrived with the full complement of Dell bloatware, most of which I spent a couple of hours uninstalling. But since she has DSL service, I figured she should have some sort of virus protection, so I left the copy of Norton 360 installed.

Since that fateful moment, every single problem I’ve had to troubleshoot on her computer has been the result of Norton. This is not an exaggeration. My mother lives an hour away from me, so an onsite troubleshooting session is a minimum of two hours of commuting hassle. And Norton has required at least four onsite visits as well as several remote troubleshooting sessions (thank you Team Viewer and the free for personal use policy). The bulk of the problems have come after automatic updates and upgrades. Usually what happens is that the update wouldn’t successfully complete and there would be a constant security warning box that freaked my mother out until I could download an updated version and install it. Other times the problems came at the annual subscription renewal time where my mother could never get the system to take her order and the subscription would run out and the product would flash all kinds of warnings.

But the final straw happened about three weeks ago when another upgrade failed to completely install, and it caused a constant BSOD, which meant I couldn’t remotely troubleshoot it either. So into the car I went, fighting Boston traffic the whole way. Using the Windows Task Manager I confirmed that a Norton process was running when the BSOD happened . So, after the third reboot, I managed to start the task manager fast enough to get in and kill both Norton processes and then verified that the computer would actually stay running, which it did. So I started uninstalling Norton, but as anyone who had tried knows, Norton can’t be uninstalled easily. Using the uninstall option in the Norton program group left enough crap on the system that the upgrade process actually started itself and the incomplete update warning box popped up – after the program was supposed to uninstalled! So I had to download a special uninstall program from the Symantec website, because, well, because why the hell should the uninstall option actually uninstall the program? Fucking hell, Symantec, how do you assholes live with yourselves?

So I am officially done with Symantec – I’ve moved into active boycott mode. I have run Kaspersky antivirus on my own systems since it was a freeware program for Linux and I have had only one technical problem in all those years due to a bad upgrade that they posted which caused a major Windows security conflict. But they published a patch within a few hours. So my mom is now running Kaspersky too.

And I am D-O-N-E done with Symantec and Norton products.

For Bar-B-Que That Is

If you’ve decided to tackle bar-b-que, particularly spare ribs, you will eventually run into a problem that has vexed many a home cook. That is: home cookware wasn’t made to deal with large slabs of meat. A trimmed St. Louis cut rack of ribs is more than 22 inches long. That’s wider than a half sheet pan (a large cookie sheet) which is only 18 inches edge to edge. So if you intend on seasoning a rack of ribs and giving them eight or more hours in the refrigerator, you need something substantial to hold it. And if you want to do two or three or even four racks at a time … well, you’re into commercial equipment.

My favorite container for large slabs of ribs or multiple shoulders or bellies is a commercial 18″ x 26″ x 6″ food storage box. I have a clear Lexan version but you can also get them in white polyethylene. The whole rig cost me $43.99 including shipping from EBay. The only downside is that these boxes are actually 26¼” wide. That’s a problem for me because my second refrigerator is exactly 26″ wide inside. So I need to put the box in a little slanted to fit. When something drains liquid this can be an advantage, but it is a pain in the ass. So I suggest you measure your fridge before you go and buy something like this.

But in the end, it is really convenient to have a container large enough to accommodate full racks. I recommend a little EBay shopping of you have a refrigerator big enough to hold one of these tubs. It’ll make your life easier.

Over the holiday weekend my Dash 3G simply stopped connecting to the network. No data, no phone, no bars, no nothing. Don’t know exactly when it happened, but when I picked up my phone to go to work on Tuesday morning, I had nada for signal strength. And no matter how I tried to reboot, pull the battery, pull and reinstall the SIM, nothing helped. I began to suspect there was a widespread outage in the Northeast, but nope … it was just me.

I called T-Mobile to check and the phone tech was helpful. I was pleasantly surprised at their ability to troubleshoot a Windows Mobile phone. We tried to reset the network settings, but nothing helped. The phone tech was the one who suggested that perhaps the SIM had failed. This had never happened to me before – a bad SIM? A SIM failing for no apparent reason? I mean, it’s not like I remove it from my phone. I hadn’t opened the back in months – how the hell could it just fail?

I didn’t believe it. I searched the web and one of the first hits to come up was a thread on XDA-Developers by a couple of people running the same 3VOlution modified ROM that I am … uh-oh. Maybe a ROM problem? But the ROM shouldn’t affect the radio I reasoned – those are separate programs. But you never know … So like an idiot I hard-reset my phone and wiped everything to go back to a fresh ROM installation. It didn’t help.

When my wife returned home that night I finally got to test the SIM theory. Sure enough, my SIM was bad. If I swapped my wife’s SIM for mine (she has a Dash 3G also) she had no bars and my phone was fine. So I put them back and resigned myself to getting a new SIM first thing this morning.

When I got off the train I dropped into the T-Mobile store on Lincoln Street on Boston (near South Station). I walked in and someone asked if they could help. I told them I needed a new SIM. He asked if I was sure, I said yes, and he asked for my phone number and ID. Then he took one out from behind the counter, put the number into the computer, and told me I was good to go. Total time took less than 2 minutes from when I walked in the door. And there was no charge. I plugged it in while in the store and sure enough, my signal came right back.

After spending a couple of hours rebuilding my phone (because I had reset it like an idiot) I did notice one improvement. It seems that I now get a better signal in many places than I did. I’m not saying that I get a dramatic improvement in strength, just that I am able to hold a 3G signal in places where I used to drop to EDGE speeds. On my train ride home (thered to my MacBook where I am writing this) I’d say I’m seeing a 30% improvement. I drop out of 3G coverage less than I did. Who knew that the SIM itself could have such an effect on signal.

Anyway, T-Mobile Customer Service was very good to me again, reminding me why I stay with them as a carrier. And I’m glad my Dash is working again, even if I did have dreams of getting a new My Touch or HD2 if it was my phone that was dead. But I’m happy I saved the money.

Thanks T-Mobile.