In which I can’t fucking cook AT ALL anymore?!

Yesterday, I hurt my back walking across my kitchen. Just walking. (After doing several other things, chores, window cleaning, and dropping something and startling so hard I somehow actually caught it: that was probably when the twinge really began. But we’ll say I was walking. Because I was.)

It was fine by bedtime, but sleeping fucked it up. Getting out of bed hurt, a lot, and would have looked ridiculous had anyone been present to see it. Sitting on my chair through CCP exam prep hurt like hell, so halfway through I texted work and asked if anybody could come pick me up (because I doubted I could get on my bike, and didn’t want to have to walk).

They told me they didn’t need me and to just take the day off, since I have to work Sunday anyway. So I did!

Lying down hurt, I nearly died trying to get up to pee, and sitting hurt too. But standing was okay, comparatively, so I decided to make tamales. Tamales! Yay!

I’ve had the ingredients for literally a year, because I just kept not making tamales. The cotija was nicely aged and really delicious. I put it in the mini-chopper because fuck grating by hand when you’ve got electricity.

I doubt it was the same can of artichoke hearts; pretty sure I made some dip and replaced those once or even twice, but the masa is definitely a year or two old—I had to sift it to get the clumps out.

Soaked the very dry corn husks in hot tap water for two hours, but they probably could have used three. I don’t really know, because I’ve never used corn husks before (this is maybe my third attempt at tamales, and the other times I just used parchment paper).

I made sauce from scratch from dried chiles and garlic! Because I’m cool like that! And I know how!

Except I very nearly reduced it all the way down to ash, but luckily walked back into the kitchen just in time to take it off the heat and add a little water to bring it back. Thank God.

Get you a friend who gives you an entire set of Pyrex bowls that once belonged to her grandmother because she “doesn’t use them, and you will” like I did, and then you too will have an entire set of kick ass retro Pyrex bowls! Look at that shit! Nesting bowls! Pyrex! Retro! Free!

It’s been two and a half hours, but I’m all ready now! Inexpertly assembled my artichoke and cotija tamales with masa that I suspect, from my extensive watching-Mexican-chicks-on-YouTube tamale training, was just slightly too runny. But still viable! Husk, masa, cotija, and diced artichokes. Yum! Gonna be so good! Got them all more-or-less upright on a mat of additional corn husks, on a trivet, inside the Instant Pot, over two cups of water. Yes.

They spent 40 minutes in the pressure cooker, and when I let the pressure off so I could open the Instant Pot, it didn’t smell deliciously corny and savory with cheese and artichokes. It smelled ever-so-slightly of… Playdoh.

So here’s the thing. We all have bad habits, right?

Well, one of mine is occasionally using oil out of the fryer. Do I know this is stupid? Yes I do. Do I do it anyway? Yes I do. Has it ever come back to bite me in the ass? No it has not.

Not until today.

My masa recipe calls for six tablespoons of vegetable oil, and since I keep my vegetable oil in the back of a floor-level cupboard, and my back is fucked, and I didn’t know if I could get down onto and up off of the floor without crying, I opted to just use the oil in the fryer instead.

It’s relatively new because I recently replaced it, the oil, that is, and the color was fine, so I genuinely didn’t think twice about it. I do this shit all the time! All I ever use the fryer for is falafel anyway, so the oil might actually add some subtle flavoring to my boring, lard-free vegetarian masa recipe. Win-win, right?

Wrong.

Turns out the oil is rancid. All my work (and not-entirely-unrelated pain!) was basically wasted. Well, not really, I mean, they’re edible. I ate two. But only just barely.

If that oil were an hour older, these things’d cause cancer from all the free radicals.

So, now I have a dozen tamales, which normally I’d freeze with pride for future fast and super delicious dinners, that took hours to make, and to which I was looking so very forward because it’s taken me over a year to get around to making them, and I got an unexpected day off and needed to stand up anyway, that taste pretty bitter and bad.

Oh, and Monday I made dal makhani, but for some reason added nearly an entire teaspoon of methi powder, so even with a Hail Mary addition of sugar and extra cream it’s still bitter overall and fairly disappointing. Why the fuck did I do that?!

Conclusion: I can’t cook anymore.

I used to be able to, but now I can’t. I will now be forced to survive on salad and freeze-dried Indian food from Cumin Club.

—
UPDATE: It’s the next day and it wasn’t the oil. It was the masa itself. I tried to eat another tamale, it was gross, and the bag of masa flour was sitting right there, so I opened it and stuck my hand in and smelled it AND IT’S THE FLOUR, THE FLOUR IS RANCID. So I tossed it. And all my tamales. So sad.