Saturday June 14th, 2014

The first day of our summer vacation was spent making tamales. Our branch had a tamale fund raiser to raise money for girls camp and scout camps this summer. Since I am going as an adult leader to girls camp, the only leader from our branch, I decided I should help. (Even though, funny thing, the fundraising didn't help the leaders at all--these kids better be grateful!!!)

This was actually Friday night, we had to do the prep work, so we all crammed into the Vazquez house and cooked and shredded chicken and pork. I was there with the kids until 9, took them home, left them with Ben, and went back and shredded chicken with Maria and Sonia until 11. And these crazy kids:

Maria & Sonia were the masterminds of the whole thing, and worked harder than I have ever seen women work in my entire life!!!

The next morning, we met at the church at 6am to start the tamale process. They initially told us to come from about 8-4 to help. All the people who ordered tamales were told to pick them up at 4 at the Evergreen building. Well, it wasn't until we got there that we realized we had sold 212 dozen orders of tamales. Chicken and pork. That is over 2000 tamales. It was insane. We ended up starting early to make sure we had enough time to finish, and then with all of the orders, we ended up calling the people to see if they could come at 6 to pick them up.

Jackson with his friend Starling:

Our two young women who are going to camp along with some other helpers:

The men making the maseca for the tamales. Yes, they used a drill to mix the dough:

Sonia & Maria; I love these two women!!!

Our assembly line. We scooped up a scoop of the maseca, pasted it into the cleaned and dried corn husks, put some meat into the middle of it, and folded them over, and folded up the bottom. It was actually pretty simple. (once the meat was cooked, salsa was made, and maseca was made, of course)

My little helper. She was such a good little helper and willing to do whatever was asked.

Once the tamales were made, we had to cook them. It was kind of hard, because the tamales had to be cooked for an hour or two. And we just had all these gas burners that members had brought. So we had about 8 or 10 pots full of tamales cooking. And it was hard because then we never jsut knew exactly how many we had, or were cooking. We definitely learned a lot and what to do different next year.

It was a fun day though with most of the members of our branch, though. It was LONG and tiring, but great. We ended up being there until 8pm waiting for people to show up to get their tamales. I had several people tell me that they were the best tamales they had ever had. And they were. I ordered a few dozen.

My friend Melissa and I were there the whole day and learned a TON! We now know how to make it more organized for next year. We had people telling us that next year they want to order more, but I'm not sure we could handle making more. It was a TON of work.

I love our branch so much! And we raised enough money to send our youth to camp for like the next 10 years! :) woo-hoo!!!