In cooking class, we made memelitas. Making memelitas entails taking masa and forming it into circles, rounds, not heart shapes and certainly not dropping the ball of masa on the floor as I did.
It also involves blending black beans from whole bean to paste to something between paste and soup. Once the perfectly round tortillas have toasted, while they are fiercely hot, the sides need to be pinched to contain the bean mixture, cheese, and handmade salsa (my hands are still stained orange).
I am quite clumsy in the kitchen. My diced onions were too large. I dropped the masa. More tortilla looked more like something for Valentine’s Day. My arms tired after just over five minutes of using the molcajete to mash the skins of the tomatillos into a salsa with chiles and salt. As I was in charge of the liquadora (blender), I did not purée all of the beans, and so the whole batch needed to be blended one last time. I learned that I can be counted on to make the process take longer.
As we were cooking, one student remarked that it is difficult to cook “cuando no tengo hombre.” (It is difficult to cook when I don’t have a man.) She meant to say hambre. It is difficult to cook when you don’t have hunger. (Of course, we also discussed whether she was hungry for an hombre.)
After that we considered other word play, and the same woman, from Japan, asked the teacher: “Should we use jabon (soap) o Japon (as in water and the elbow grease of someone from Japan)?” Because she was washing the molcajete, made of stone, the answer was Japon.
Virginia, Vickie, our expert cooking teacher, always has us begin preparing ingredients for tomorrow’s dish. So we took the leaves, not the seed pods, off of twigs of chepil, one by one. We also boiled the skins of the tomatillos into a tea to use in the masa for tomorrow’s tamales. We also saved some of our delicious (despite my participation) beans and salsa for the bean and chepil (two separate types) recipes tomorrow. Vickie said that we could bring in raisins, condensed milk, and pineapple to make sweet tamales, too, but I am headed to the pueblo to teach the intermediate students how to say what time it is in English.
shewhodaresnothing 