Daring Kitchen - Tamales

This months Daring Kitchen Challenge was Tamales.  While I've heard of them, I had never had them and had no idea of what to expect.

Blog-checking lines: Maranda of Jolts & Jollies was our January 2012 Daring Cooks hostess with the mostess! Maranda challenged us to make traditional Mexican Tamales as our first challenge of the year!

The first thing I had to do was find some ingredients that we didn't readily have on hand and couldn't get at the grocery store. Luckily Pete's Frootique had everything I needed.

The first main filing ingredient was tomatillos.

I wasn't sure if they were spicy like a pepper, but they taste pretty much like green tomatoes.  I roasted them   and then blended them as part of the mixture for my Green Chile Turkey Tamales.

Tamales have a dough made from "Masa Mix" which is really just finely ground corn.  Which is great since it makes them glutten free and I was able to invite friends over, one of whom has celiac.

The last ingredient I needed, isn't really an ingredient, since you don't eat it.  The tamales are wrapped in dried corn husks so that they can be steamed

I made 4 tamales for each of us: 2 with Green Chili Turkey filing and 2 with a black bean vegetarian filling.

It's a good thing that the friends I invited over are great friends!  They knew that I was making tamales for the first time as part of the Daring Kitchen Challenge.  Which was a really good thing, since the tamales were HORRIBLE!   The filling tasted great (and most of us ended up scooping the filing out just to eat that) but the dough part, while it had nice flavour, was like eating paste! It stuck to the roof of your mouth and was pretty much raw, though I had steamed them for more then 40 minutes.

Luckily we had a nice Mexican salad to go with it, so no one went hungry!

Since everyone else at the Daring Kitchen was having great success with the recipes, I decided to not give up and try again.   There had been a lot of filling left over that I had frozen, so I defrosted it, mixed up some more dough and tried again.

This time I had a better steaming set up, and I let them steam for a full 2 hours (as had been mentioned by some of the other Daring Cooks).

SUCCESS!  The dough cooked through, was not at all pasty and Hilary and I enjoyed some wonderful tamales.  I've promised my friends that they can come back another day and have some edible tamales with us.

Tea Time

There is no trouble so great or grave that cannot be much diminished by a nice cup of tea.  ~Bernard-Paul Heroux

We enjoy a good cup of tea around here.  While we still start our day with coffee, we enjoy a nice cup of tea in the afternoon and finish many an evening off with a nice cup of Rooibos.  Even Liam will enjoy a cup of Chai with us when it's cold out.

The problem is that once you are labelled as "tea drinkers" it makes for an easy gift.  I've even fallen prey to that, picking up new and unusual flavours for Hilary.  Eventually though, you are faced with this:

That all came out of the tea cupboard today.  Some of them are at least several years old, and one I had no idea where it even came from or why we would have ever bought it.  These have all now found there way into the compost and we have a nice tidy cupboard of fresh tea that even had room for the new teapot that Liam bought Hilary for Christmas.

Most relaxed cat....

An Active Christmas Day

Both Granny and Grandma got Liam some great outdoor toys for Christmas.  Luckily the snow had cleared enough that he could get out and enjoy them.

Merry Christmas!!

Adoption Reading Challenge - FAIL

Last  year, Firemom who writes at The Chronicles of MunchkinLand, put out a challenge to read adoption themed books over the course of 2011.   I aimed for her level 3 challenge:  Read 12 books about adoption, 6 non-fiction/6 fiction.

I have failed with a miserable grade of  33%.  I only managed to read 4 books from my list this year.

I have two reasons/excuses for not meeting my target.

1. My reading time has been virtually non-existent. Life has a habit of getting busy and one of the first things to go is your leisure time when you can curl up with a good book for an hour.  And then my mother introduced me to the Twilight series and I was hooked.  So my limited reading time has been spent finding out if Bella was going to choose Jacob over Edward.


2. I've kinda stopped writing about adoption.  I wish I could say that I've stopped thinking about it, but it is a part of my life that is always there, sometimes closer to the surface then others.  When things came to a close with my own reunion this past summer, I needed to step away from adoption topics for awhile.  So while I still follow a lot of adoption blogs, and can't seem to watch a single TV show that doesn't have some sort of adoption topic, I couldn't bring myself to read adoption themed books.

I still hope to read some of the books on my list, and I'm sure I will pick them up at some point, but for now I'm okay with my failing grade for this year.

2011- A year in review

I don't often reflect and look back at the year as the New Year approaches.  But a lot happened this year, so here it is.


JANUARY

• Dad died.

FEBRUARY

• Oscar night. We served Thai food this year.
• The doctor tells me that I'm pre-diabetic.

MARCH

• Lice!
• We celebrated Hilary's 40th birthday in the ER with Liam's first (and so far only) migraine.
• Liam was matched with his Big Brother "D"

APRIL

• I decided to take up cooking and photography as hobbies.

MAY

• My first Daring Kitchen Challenge was to make Gumbo.

JUNE

• June was a great month for Liam!  A new trampoline, going to Monster Truck Jam and spending the night at Great Wolf Lodge.  

JULY

• My own adoption and reunion journey came to an end.
• Liam turned Nine!
• We had a new front porch built.

AUGUST

• We had an interesting vacation in PEI.
• I turned 41.
• Gary and his food joined our family.

SEPTEMBER

• I almost killed Gary.
• Liam became a Young Old.

OCTOBER

• My Mom came for a visit.
• I finally fit into my "skinny" jeans.

NOVEMBER

• Liam had eye surgery.

DECEMBER

• Liam finally started to gain weight.
• Hilary and I celebrated 18 years of togetherness.

and we still have 2 weeks to go!

Liam's auction

Thursday, December 15th is Fair Day at Halifax Independent! This is a very exciting semi-annual event. In every classroom of the school, students and teachers are busy preparing speeches, displays, models, songs, dances and much, much more. This is the students’ opportunity to shine and we love welcoming all of you on that special day and enjoying their success, together.

Fairs at HIS take place in late Fall and in late Spring. They are a culmination of all of the Theme Studies for each term, and an opportunity for all of the children in the school to present their work to parents and the school community. Students from Littles to Middle School write speeches, plays and songs based on their learning experiences. We feel that it is important for the children to be able to present their work to others in the form of public-speaking as a means of developing self-confidence and a thorough understanding of their research

This term Liam's class studied Great Canadians.  They made objects special to various Great Canadians out of clay and then auctioned them off to the parents during Fair.

Here is Liam auctioning off  a toy model space ship from Roberta Bondar, the first Canadian woman to go into space:

After some heated bidding (sometimes between Hilary and I!) Hilary came out the winner, having only spent $60.00.