I love to cook, I love to take pictures, I just never remember to take pictures of WHAT I cook

I have a love/hate relationship with this time of year. The fall makes me a tad melancholy but, it’s also a big family time because my family has about a million birthdays in the first part of November. Including mine – but that’s another post for another day, making Halloween the unofficial start of the holiday season. I don’t like the days getting shorter, and I have mixed feelings about the cooler weather, but the one thing I look forward to all year is the fall SOUPS!! Yep. I love fall cooking. My mother is still having me tested to see where this cooking gene came from, but I give my iron cookware a workout this time of year. So far I’ve made butternut squash soup, cream of chicken, beef stew, and some other mixed vegetable soup. With he exception of the last, they were all pretty good. You will have to take my word for it. I don’t have pics, there is no recipe to follow along with at home, nothing. Sorry, I’ll try next time I promise. Everything I make is gluten free and homemade. I don’t do fast food, I don’t do processed foods, and I don’t feel like I’ve missed anything but the 42 lbs (and counting) I’ve lost.

I DO, however, have pics of the tamales I made last week. See I’m not just a good cook, I’m also a bad one. A really bad one at times.

It all started innocent enough:

Make a little masa dough, soak some corn husks, I had leftover pork I wanted to do something new with. So I made them according to how I’d seen on a few tv shows.

Things were going well, or so I thought. They were almost coming together TOO easily. I don’t know if you’ve ever made tamales yourself, but they are a lot of work. Funny thing, I had no idea what a tamale was (other than the Mike & Ike variety) until I was 27. Now I can’t live without them.

So I get them all together, even used some leftover pork juice that I had frozen, to make the masa and to steam them in.

They were beautiful and I couldn’t wait to wrap my teeth around them. And I took pics of the process to remember how I did it, because I knew they were going to be epic. And they were…

About 20 mins before they were done, I smell something. Something not pleasant. Then the captain asks “What’s burning?” words that will get just about any man slapped, but this time it was true. What WAS burning? Then I remembered. I was not keeping track of how much water was in the bottom of the pot.

All that pork juice I had cooked the meat in? Had the fat, the Pepsi, the brown sugar and other spices in it was now concrete on the bottom of one of my good pans.
So to recap, the meat itself was leftover, but it took eight hours to cook when I did it. The tamales took forever to make and then an hour to cook. I hand rolled them all. So when they are done, I figure, well they better be good! They were not. We had to drown them in salsa.

The moral of the story is, I am not afraid to fail obviously. When it’s bad, the worst that could happen is I have to wash extra dishes. ……. Or, boil them with vinegar and really scrub to get two inches of burned pork juice off the bottom of my good pan. That works too.
I’m glad the Capt will try almost anything I feed him. It’s not always good, but I do try new things just to see if they work.

Enjoy the fall! Happy Cooking!