Reinstituting the Chicken Ban

I spent last night learning how to make tamales with my good friend, Amy. Hi Amy! Amy is showing off her husks in the picture to the right.

We both had a wonderful time making crab tamales, pork tamales, sweet potato tamales, chicken chile verde tamales, and my absolute favorite, pineapple and macadamia nut tamales (with whip cream). Yum yum. We have plans in the works for a tamale making party soon so if you are lucky enough to be a local friend, you may be in for some tamale treats in the near future.

In addition to making one of each type of tamale--which wasn’t nearly has hard as I had expected, time consuming, yes, hard, no--we also got to eat one of each tamale. I’ve spoken already about my chicken and barbecue sauce pregnancy aversions. I should expand on the barbecue sauce aversion and say it’s really an aversion to anything with cumin in it, including chili powder. Blechity blech. Despite my “ban,” I had a few bites of the chicken verde tamale and a small nibble of the pork tamale which was seasoned with chili powder.

I’ve done a little bit of reading about morning sickness (aka pregnancy sickness) and there are still at least two competing theories as to the cause. One theory is that morning sickness is simply your body reacting to the increased levels of hormones in your system. Another theory is that it’s your body keeping toxins and, well, less friendly foods, perhaps foods harder to digest, out of your system. I had always been more of a believer in the hormone level argument, but after the horrible stomach ache I had last night when I went to bed, I’m starting to think that chicken and chili powder are evil evil toxins that should never ever be consumed and I have reinstituted the previous ban.