Dave Alvin and Butternut Squash Tamales

Dave Alvin and the Guilty Women

Listening to Dave Alvin's, "Rio Grande", I suppose it's fitting that I'm munching on butternut squash tamales. The challenge is keeping the salsa off of the keyboard. I've never been a big fan of tamales, until now, because the proportions just never seemed right: way too much corn meal and never enough filling. And with food, like life, let's face it, proportion is everything. I'm sure Dave Alvin knows this, as do The Guilty Women. Maybe they've even done a song about it.

The point is who would have thought butternut squash could possibly work in a tamale? Usually they're filled with something that "runs away from you", as some friends point out. I guess the folks in Sonoma, who presumably came up with the idea of squeezing squash into a corn husk, had it right - no need to picture the process, even vegetarian tamale making can't possibly be for the faint of heart. Trust me I've read The Jungle.

So why a conversation about tamales? I mean this isn't Twitter where the brief and inane are the norm. I just had to get the word out on these squash tamales, my new favorite food.

Now if only there were a few more in the fridge.