So this is a meal Julie and I had last night that consisted of tamales, carmelized carrots, and salad. Everything except the butter in the tamales and some of the ingredients in the salad dressing were grown in my garden. The tamales were my first experiment with grinding my own masa from the Abenaki flour corn I grew in my garden last year. I treated the dried corn with pickling lime before grinding it in my new hand-cranked mill. This is the nixtamalizing process I talked about in a previous post. The masa did not grind up as finely as I'm used to, but I liked the texture and they held together just like tamales made from finer masa. Even the corn husks are from my garden. They were the same husks that covered the cobs of the flour corn. We dipped the tamales in salsa made entirely from ingredients I grew in my garden as well.
