An Ecuadorian Adventure in the Kitchen (aka Chelsea and Diandra attempt to cook like Ecuadorian Grandmothers)

Chelsea's awesome Spanish/English Ecuadorian cookbook

first you cut the corn...

Chelsea and I really wanted to try an Ecuadorian recipe from her cookbook. We decided to try to tackle humitas. Humitas are similar to tamales. My host family had made them quite frequently for me, but they had been sweet with raisins in them. The recipe that we had were for savory Humitas with cheese.

...put the corn, milk, and egg in the blender...

it comes out like this!

I of course was the master cheese crumbler!

add the cheese in with the corn mix

stir it up real well!

Making the filling was the easy part. The harder part came next...we had to make our little husk bundles to cook our mixture in. My family had used banana leaves to make humitas, but we had the husks/ that is the more traditional way. It was sort of like folding a burrito, and then it had to be tied together. 

Once we had struggled for about 20 minutes to make 6 husks, we had to pour the mixture into the husks. This proved to be a two person job (one person holding the husk open the other one pouring)!

We eventually had to use spoons. The book also said that if you don't have husks you can use aluminum foil. We ended up making little florets out of the aluminum foil to use the rest of the filling. We also decided, just to be safe, we would wrap the bottoms of all the husks in aluminum to avoid ALL of the filling leaking out the bottom...a wise choice.

The left over corn cobs are supposed to line the bottom of the pot immersed in water, and then the humitas balance on top of them to steam. However, we saw this as a potential disaster so we spread aluminum over the cobs and poked holes in it to let the steam through.

Oh wait! We forgot about the melted butter in the microwave! Even though it was supposed to go into the mixture, we drizzled it on top of each humita.

They ended up needing to steam for about an hour, but when they were done they were solid. We sautéed some green beans to go with them. As Chelsea's host sister later commented, this is the first time humitas have ever been on a plate with a vegetable. Leave it to the Gringas!

Our final dinner plate. The humitas in the husks had a different (better) flavor than the ones in aluminum foil, but they were all good!

It was a fairly labor intensive process, and I think if I were to try again I would want to use banana leaves for steaming.

Overall it was a culinary success!