Remembering My Grandmother

It was 10 years ago this past Tuesday, December 16th that cancer took the life of a precious woman, my Grandmother,

Olivia.

Grandma was an amazing woman. Always smiling, energetic, creative, encouraging and had such a love for life and the most positive attitude of anyone I have ever known. She was a living example of the Proverbs 31 woman.

She was a Godly God fearing woman, daughter, sister, friend, wife, mother, grandmother and would have been the Greatest Great Grandmother in the world!

To celebrate her love of baking and cooking we put together a cookbook in her honor with her most famous family recipes and added some our families favorites too. Over 100 pages of recipes later we finally have our cookbook completed!

Because one of Grandma's favorite things to make was tamales, I have been asking my Aunt Libby to teach me how to make one of my Grandmothers specialties. Well, today was that day.

Here is our meat.

Here is our masa.

Here is our bean ones.

Here is our meat ones ready to be steamed.

And finally here are our tamales being steamed.

There is nothing like eating a tamale right from the pot. It took about 5 hours to complete and we made 22 dozen total of meat, bean and jalapeno bean tamales. These tamales came out delicious and I will be serving them Christmas day.

Thank you Aunt Libby for your time and for my lesson today. Thank you also to Uncle Anthony for your help and TIPS, and thank you Dad for your help.

Emily can't wait to help out with my next batch of tamales. The traditions of my Grandmother will be passed on from generation to generation!

It was a beautiful day as we looked though albums and pictures and reminisced about a wonderful woman, my Grandmother, Olivia.

We miss you so much and look forward to the day we see you in heaven.