The other day, we were in a waiting room for a doctor's appointment for Tim. A Mexican man came in and talked to the receptionist. My wife looked over to me and whispered, conspiratorially, "He's selling tamales..."
Tamales are one of those wonderful Hispanic foods. It seems every Latin American country has their own version...Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, Guatemalan, and on and on. Some are wrapped in banana leaves and many different varieties of fillings are used.
I'm a Mexican style fan, with the corn meal masa cuddling a meaty filling of pork or beef (preferrably pork), chicken, green chile and cheese...even pineapple and raisins. This is wrapped in corn husks while many are additionally encompassed in paper then steamed.
Here in Southern California, you can get them almost anywhere. Every Mexican restaurant sells them, you can get them in many supermarkets...ready made or available to take home and steam. They even sell canned tamales.
Some are good, most Mexican restaurants can at least make a passable tamale and a few excel at them. Some are not good at all...see the canned tamales above. If you see a tube of tamales labeled in letters coded to say it's "excellente," keep walking.
The best, however, are made by little teams of underground entrepreneurs. Getting together at someone's house and assembling these treats of soft, moist, filled masa, they gather up piles and piles of the delicious little packets and roam out looking for a sale.
Sometimes at work, you'll find someone who's mom makes them and you can send an order in. We'll exit our church after mass and, once in awhile, there'll be a couple of ladies with a bucket for sale or, as it was today, someone will go office to office delivering a delicious and cheap lunch.
Yes, my friends, it's also cheap. While I've had mediocre tamales at farmers market costing $6.50 a piece, good ones at our favorite Mexican restaurant and cantina for $3.75...it's these home-made beauties that are the best, tastiest you can find and they're usually dirt cheap.
Back at the doctor's waiting room, after my wife asks what varieties he has, I ask how much. $1.50 each or $17 a dozen.
I get 6 red pork and 6 chile and cheese tamales, conveniently wrapped in a plastic bag, slip him $17, and put the haul in the car for later.
With an afterglow of delicious tamale dinner memories in my tummy (the tamales we bought are pictured at the top of this post), I write these words to you after our latest adventure. As good as it gets.
Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved
Southern California may be seen as a blessed-by-nature, sunny paradise but there's a darker side to that coin. We are also cursed with a range of natural disasters.
It's summer. Hot, dry, and ready to burn. With little rain in the last four years, we have millions of acres filled with dry brush, dead trees, and even shrubs that will spontaneously combust.
Walking outside and smell smoke? Well, it could be one of my neighbors having a barbecue but I glance up to the mountains behind our house to make sure I don't see any plumes of smoke.
There are plenty of natural or accidental causes to fires but the worst are the people who go up into the wilderness to either start them on purpose or do things that they should know better not to, like the three brain dead cretins who went up to have a campfire and smoke pot. They ended up starting the Colby Fire last year that burned thousands of acres and more than a few homes.
You don't want to look up and see this yellow plane flying low over your house. It's a super scooper, a plane that flys low to scoop up water from a nearby lake then dump it on a fire. This one was snapped from our driveway during one of last year's fires.
While we've been lucky so far, we did have the van loaded up and ready to go for the evacuation order that was coming until our firefighters finally stopped the advance of the Colby fire.
Fire news on our local stations also come in two flavors. In dry years..."the vegetation is super dry so we need to be very careful not to set in on fire," or in the wet years..."the rain has made everything grow so fast so we have to be very careful not to set it on fire now that it's dry."
Basically, any way you look at it, we're screwed with fire.
Speaking of wet years, after a big burn, you can bet the next big rain storm will be washing all of that burned off soil into people's homes. Mudslides are another big disaster we need to deal with on a regular basis.
In the desert, they have to be on the lookout for flash floods. In fact, just a couple of days ago, a flood took out a bridge on the main L.A. to Phoenix freeway.
While we don't usually deal with hurricanes, we do have wind storms. Every couple of years, there seems to be a major one taking down trees and cutting power in our neighborhoods. We get more damage from this in our area than anything else. In fact, my mother lost the roof to her garage several years ago to a small tornado.
And last, but certainly not least, earthquakes are our claim to disaster fame. We tend to shake 'em off...slight pun intended...because, what else are you going to do? They only last a minute or so and for the most part, people aren't really hurt by them. There are a few in concentrated areas that can make it scary if you dwell on it but it's kind of like flying. You know people crash and die but the odds are extremely long that it will happen to you.
So, living here, you need to know that you can easily get shaken, burned, blown away, or flooded but you'll get over it.
At least we don't have hurricanes.
Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved
Our traffic is legendary here in Los Angeles and the surrounding metro area. I've seen worse around the world but it is pretty stifling here. Depending on who's calculating, there are 17 to 18 million people here.
That's 44% of the entire state of California's population.
It sometimes seems like every one of those 17 million souls are on your freeway sometimes. As residents, we create strategies to minimize our time on those roads.
For example, we won't travel west of Interstate 110 more than a couple of times a year. I haven't seen the beach in Santa Monica in over a decade. Malibu? Might as well be in another state. It takes less time for me to drive to Bakersfield than Marina del Rey most of the time.
The biggest curse is to have to navigate that traffic every day. The biggest blessing is to be 'going against' traffic on your commute. Even driving to our church on a Saturday evening is a car-filled slog across the San Gabriel Valley.
One big disadvantage we have in the valley is it is bisected from north to south by a river. That the 'river' is nothing but dry dirt 90% of the time is of no consequence. There are still only nine bridges in the 12 miles from the bottom of the valley to the mountains. Three of those are freeway. Block one, and the rest are hopelessly gridlocked.
I've heard of people begging off of family wedding invitations because the 15 miles they'd have to drive would take a maddening 90 minutes or more.
Our beach drive is usually to Seal Beach because it's not only among the closest beaches to our house but there's also a carpool lane on the 605, giving us a slight advantage in travel time.
I commute to my job in downtown Los Angeles by driving not into L.A., but over to El Monte to catch an express bus that goes in it's own reserved lane on the middle of the freeway. Soon, when the next light rail expansion is finished, I can dispense with that and take a trolley from a station five blocks from my house.
When we're not cooking dinner and my wife wants me to go and get takeout, our dinner choice is limited to what is in the local area that I don't have to sit in traffic to get to.
Even our narrow, two lane street get's clogged at rush hour because it has a dubious distinction of running east to west from one end of our city to the other.
Of course, the real culprits are drivers who value a few seconds shaved over the safety of others on the road, get into accidents, and clog everything up. Even the president can get traffic snarled here, woe to those who get stuck in Obamajams.
True, we do get to live in a good climate but I admit, I get tired of the headaches we have to deal with to live here at times and this is one of the biggest.
Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved
