morsels & sauces

Okay, so it's not the season for chili, but I just wanted another meal I could throw in the slow cooker and call it a day.  So, while the sun is shining and the daffodils are finishing their blooms, I am packing the All-Clad with beans and sausage and chiles and tucking in to a bowl laden with sour cream, cheddar cheese, and green onions. Growing up, I found that chili and/or nachos signified the weekend.  On Saturdays at my dad's house in northern Illinois, we would make a giant tray of nachos or a pot of chili and he would turn on a baseball or football or (rarely) basketball game.  Dad would settle into the couch, and I would sit on the floor, picking black olives off the nachos or adding cheddar cheese to my chili.  Inevitably, he would fall asleep, and I would pick up my homework.  But about five minutes before the end of a game, he would jerk awake, tussle my hair, chastise me for not watching the game, and pretend that he was watching it all along....

Adapted from Cookbook #36 :  Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen   (1996) Recipe:  Tamal de Cazuela (Crusty Baked Tamal) Every Christmas, one of the husband's fathers* hosts a small tamalada.  These tamale-making-parties carry on New World traditions, and our annual gathering is a nod to the husband's father's Mexican-by-way-of-Oklahoma heritage.  Labor-intensive and best conducted with many hands and pitchers of margaritas or sangria, this get-together often leaves us feeling a little sick because not only do we devour a good deal of the filling before we mold masa around it, we also eat way too many of the cooked tamales (particularly the tomatillo-chicken ones).  At the end of the night, we haul home oodles of them (leaving twice as many behind with the parental hosts), and those tamales that we don't immediately consume in the next week we put in the freezer to be pulled out for a March tamal or two or ten. While it would feel strange to have a tama...