Manteca!

Okay, here is my official holiday post. It will be followed in a few weeks with my post holiday post. That doesn't sound right, but I'm rolling with it. Moving on. So this year, I decided to make cookies for Christmas. I don't know what came over me except that I am sick of going to the wine store and tying ribbons around wine that I pick by price and foreign-ity of label, because I don't really know how any of it tastes. I know foregin-ity isn't a word, but I like it okay. Anyway, this year, I endeavored to actually use my oven, which I bought on craigslist for $75 bucks. I figured I should get my money's worth.

So I called up my mamacita and asked her how to make polvorones, aka the mexican wedding cookie aka the thing that makes me fatter every year especially when combined with tamales. She found a recipe from my cousin and so I was off to the store to buy the following:

1 5 pound bag of flour
1 5 pound bag of sugar
2 pounds of manteca aka lard
cinnimon
anis
1 cookie sheet and one xmas bell cookie cutter because I don't cook

+

=

I got home, opened a beer, put on The Notebook and I was off to work. I mixed my 8 cups of flour with my 2 cups of sugar with my whopping 1 1/2 pounds of manteca together with my hands. It was gooshy. It smelled like refried beans. It was gross. I made some anis and cinnamon tea and put that in there with a questionable egg that was in my fridge. Do eggs go bad? I don't know. But it didn't smell bad so I went with it. Let other people get sick. Who cares.

I rolled out my dough and I started to cut the cookies. I put them on the sheet, baked them, rolled them in the sugar and voila - I had polvorones! Wow, who knew that baking could be so fulfilling? It was crazy. People should use their ovens more often.

Then it was time to taste test the polvorones. I took a little bite. Flakey. Sweet. Mixed with a little bit of....what is that taste....I can't quite tell....um.....animal fat. My polvorones tasted like dead pig. All I could taste was the manteca. I ate two and my stomach was a mess the rest of the night. I'm not used to eating all that manteca. It was really upsetting. I asked my mom to taste her polvorones. Do they taste like dead cow? No, she said. They taste like cookies. Maybe I was missing something because mine tasted like I was eating a dead pig rolled in sugar. I was angry.

I tried one the next day. Nope. Still tasted like dead animal.

I asked my mom what I should do. Should I go buy Shortening? The fat of the white people? Mexicans keep it real with Manteca. White people buy Crisco. She told me to try it.

So the next day, I opened another beer, turned on The Notebook again, and tried the process over, this time with shortening. It worked. My polvorones were fantastic. They didn't taste bad. They were delicious. So delicious that I wanted to eat them all. But I restrained.

I guess I'll just call my cookies polvoroneys because they have a little bit of white people in them. But I promise to never eat out of an Ortega Taco Kit. Then I'd be in trouble.

Stay tuned for next week when I give the recap of My Big Fat Mexican Christmas. Let's see who gets drunk by noon, let's see who doesn't show up, let's see who only brings 2 liters of sodas to the potluck. I hope the baby jesus doesn't cry.