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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   4725 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 24, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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What are your Christmas Eve plans? Obviously not everyone here celebrates Christmas, but I live in land of fake Christmas where the busiest shop on Christmas eve is KFC and Colonel Sanders is dressed as Santa, tonight is the only important part of the season and that only because it's when families eat Christmas Cake and young people have romantic dates.

As a dad of two, I of course made spaghetti and a couple of homemade pizzas. Tomorrow on the 25th I will be making chicken with cornbread dressing and, yes, greenbean casserole. It is what it is. My redneck background is never far. Also I am going to try out an eggnog recipe. and enjoy a few days off.

So what are we doing, Mottizens? Regardless I hope all have a pleasant holidays.

Edit:

In the days leading up to now, I have watched, with my sons, the first two Home Alone movies, Die Hard, as well as the best version of the Dickens story out there IMO, the 1970 Albert Finney Scrooge.

We're planning to go to old town and walk around looking at the luminarias. Maybe we will eat tamales, as is tradition.

I have a four year old, so she's really into stockings and Santa and elves and whatnot.

Excellent! Now I want tamale. I've become proficient at making many foods from (not Japan), but never learned tamales.

I don't make them either, they're pretty labor intensive, and I don't have the right sized steamer.

If you live near a store that's selling corn husks, masa, lard, green Chile, and the right cheese to make them, you're probably living somewhere where you can just buy them.

Right. And I can barely get cheddar much less Oaxaca or whatever. It took me forever just to find cornmeal for the cornbread.

This made me curious how hard it might be to source ingredients. The pork and beef style don't need cheese, and it probably wouldn't be so hard to get ingredients for the filling. It doesn't seem like Japanese food includes animal fat, but I don't really know. The masa and dried corn husks seem like the hard part.

I wasn't sure why masa is so different from corn meal and not interchangeable, and it looks like something about soaking it in a highly alkaline substance such as wood ash or slaked lime for many hours to weaken the cell walls, which is why it's so soft.

Yes the masa and cornhusks are the hard part. Not impossible, no doubt, but a big challenge. Plus I've no experience myself making them and it would be frustrating to go to such lengths just to screw them up.

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