the turkey of Costa Rica

One tradition that I had heard a lot about, but didn´t know too much about was the making of Tamali´s. They are super important here in Costa Rica... maybe in other parts of Latin America too, but I don´t know that... My host mom described it as important as having a turkey at our Thanksgiving meals. To them it wouldn´t be Christmas without Tamali´s.

LEFT: this is my host mom's sister and my host mom Emiliana (the one on the right)
To make the bready dough part of the tamoli you have to mix a lot of things together to get it just right. One ingredient is the juice from the meat that they cooked. In this process they don't wast anything!
After the dough part is made, you bring it to the table where all the ingredients are. You lay down two pieces of banana leaves, and put a big spoon full of the dough in the middle of the leaves (pictured RIGHT).

LEFT: this is what the tamoli looks like with all ingredients in it, the ingredients include a piece of meat (pork usually), a spoon full of rice, a red peper, a green olive, a prune, 3 peas and I think that's it. The olive makes it sour, and prune keeps it sweet.
Then you wrap them all up to the size of an envelope, ad about 3 inches thick. You plac two like that together, and tie them like the picture on the RIGHT. Then you boil them in a big pot, and then you indulge!!
We made close to 200 tamoli's!! it was so crazy!
Very cultural, and fun to experience.
The ending result is that they really don't taste good to me, but boy do they enjoy them!