Our back door neighbors left a box on our porch with a Christmas card. The box contained three pasta packages with snowflake, snow men and sleds shapes and directions of what to do with them. I was a little hesitant about doing pasta kits but I have tried two now and they were pretty good. One was chili. I hoped it wasn't going to be a version of Cincinnati chili. It wasn't. That was a couple days ago. Today I got some frozen tamales and steamed them then topped them with some of the left over chili. The other one I tried was a chicken noodle soup. I used up most or the left over turkey with it.
While I was eating some, I was thinking about the time when I was growing up on Strawberry Hill. It was a working class neighborhood. Most people worked in the nearby stock yards or in railroad maintenance yards. We lived in a second story apartment and my bedroom window over looked a tavern across the street. Every night a guy with a tamale push cart would go around the neighborhood and stop at the taverns in the neighborhood. (there were three in a block and a half on our street) Dad would get some for us from time to time. I can still hear him calling loudly HOT..MALES HOT ..MALES .
