Ok, making homemade tamales is a CHORE! It’s a delicate balance of cooking and art. There is most definitely a learning curve to it. I fiddled and fussed with the first few till I figured out my masa dough wasn’t wet enough. After adding more broth, it softened up and was much easier to work with.

When you watch these YouTube videos that demonstrate recipes, you have to remember the people being recorded have done this a million times. They make it look easy. You can follow every step and yours still doesn’t look exactly like theirs. It was fun…and they are pretty tasty. If I make them again, I’ll wait till I have the ingredients for the red sauce she made from dried chiles. I think they would be more flavorful. The tamales will go in the freezer and we can pull them out as we want over the winter. I didn’t count, but I think there were at least three…maybe four dozen of them.

You can watch Rosanna of Villa Cocina make these lovely Homemade Red Pork Tamales on her YouTube channel HERE.

After I finished with the tamales and cleaning the kitchen for the 4,987th time this year (insert eye roll and heavy sigh), I went into town with Mr. FixIt. He had an errand to run. I’ve been thinking about getting my hair cut, so I made a rash decision and went to one of those discount hair salons. I don’t know if it’s because my hair has been straight with nothing but a braid or a ponytail, or if it’s a really bad cut, but I can’t do anything with it. I’m hoping with time and some deep conditioning, it’ll be better because I hate to cut it all off. As it is, she cut fourteen inches off! So the upside is, I donated it to wigs for kids! That made me feel a tiny bit better.

The last couple of days have been unseasonably warm so I slept in the camper and that was really WONDERFUL! My happy place is in the camper. We actually had a thunderstorm Tuesday night which is highly unusual this time of year. Listening to the rain on the roof was so soothing. 

This is a bit of a hard time of year for me. The hard push of Thanksgiving is over but the Christmas rush hasn’t really started. I always have this little “slump” for about a week to ten days. Add to that…Tuesday is the first angelversary of my dear friend Sparky’s death. It’s hitting me harder than I care to admit. I’ve missed her every day. There isn’t a day I don’t think of her in some way and I still miss her texts and calls. So, I’ve been a little introverted and pensive this week. 

I’m so blessed to have my sweet Mr. FixIt. He waited in the car for me while I got my hair cut, even though I was in there for an hour. Because he knew I’d feel better knowing he was close. I don’t get like this often, but if there’s anything we’ve seen over and over in the last ten years of writing this blog…grief is entirely unpredictable and it’s ok to not be ok for a little bit. I’m just sad. I can’t run away from it. I can busy myself, but it just puts off the inevitable. I have to make myself sit still and feel the pain of her absence…remember the good things and keep moving forward. 

I am doing some positive things to honor her memory. I’ll make a donation to her favorite animal rescue. And, I’m meeting a mutual friend of ours next week for a biscuit baking lesson and tour of his beautiful Victorian home. Richard has been a longtime friend of Sparky’s. He’s the one who called me to tell me she had passed away. We’ve shared our grief over the loss of our friend and I think she’d be happy to know people who loved her gathered to remember her.

“A burden shared is a burden halved.” T. A. Webb

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“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”

Galatians 6:2 ESV