Hey, Cuz!

I have countless cousins. Well, that, of course, is not literally true. If I took the time, I could count them, thereby making them not countless. But my mother had 12 brothers and sisters that lived to adulthood, and she came from a good, Catholic family. So the 13 children resulted in many, many cousins for my siblings and me.

Most of my cousins lived in or around the area of Nebraska where we grew up. One of my mother’s brothers ended up in Minnesota, along with his large family, but the rest, as I recall, lived near us, at least as children. We rarely, however, gathered together as one group. We might gather one family at a time, but it was very uncommon for the entire family to gather, as it was quite formidable.

The one exception was our (almost) annual family picnic. We would get together, usually at a public park. Each aunt brought delicious picnic food; each uncle brought a more-than-sufficient amount of beer. Let the festivities commence! The adults would laugh and reminisce and gossip and drink and eat, getting livelier as the beer diminished. The kids would group together and run and play all sorts of games. The picnics were great fun. Even as adults, my sibs and I will occasionally talk about those picnics.

I thought about those picnics yesterday afternoon-into-evening as we were all together at yet-another celebration, this one a joint hullaballoo for my brother (with his year-end December birthday) and three of his children, with birthdays throughout January. My sister-in-law offered an amazing assortments of more unusual Mexican dishes – posole, menudo, and tamales made with Monterey Jack cheese, spinach, and green chili.

One thing about my Arizona family – if you give a party, they will come. And bring their kids. So much fun. So, the children – at least the ones joining us yesterday – ranged in ages from 8 to just over one month. Let’s see if I can get this right: one girl at 8, one girl at 7, two boys at 6, one girl at 4, two boys and one girl at 3, one girl at 1, and one baby girl just over a month. I think I’m close in those ages. You can sort of figure out how they paired up, though I did have occasion to see the 3-year-old boys playing with the 6-year-old boys. Or rather, the 6-year-olds were teasing the 3-year-olds mercilessly by keeping the ball away from them. Boys!

The weather was perfect – high 60s, so the kids played mostly outside, making up games as they went along. Later in the evening, one of my nephews lit up some logs in the firepit, and the inevitable cry, “Do you have any marshmallows”? rang out, to no avail, I’m afraid. Still, there was plenty of birthday cake to go around. For my part, I simply held my breath and prayed that none of the children would fall into the fire as they worked at finding a place to sit. Bill suggested he would dial 9-1 on his phone to be ready for the seemingly inevitable accident, which never transpired to my surprise. I missed my grandchildren immensely. They would have had fun with their cousins.

The whole scene made me think back on my days as a child with my cousins, as well as the days when all of my nieces and nephews gathered at my mom and dad’s house in Dillon, Colorado, every summer. The activities then were very similar. Cousins rock. They are like built-in best friends.

Until last night, I had never eaten posole. Posole is a soup made with pork and hominy

(basically dried corn). The photo is stock, and is not of her soup. Most posole recipes use slowly-cooked pork shoulder as in the photo, but she used ground pork, which I thought was delicious.

New Mexican Style Posole from New Mexico Cookbook by Lynn Nusom

Ingredients
2 T. olive oil
1 medium-sized yellow onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, run through a garlic press
1 lb. lean, ground pork
1 t. salt
1 t. dried oregano
2 T ground cumin
1 c. chopped green chile
1 can (#10)white hominy, with the juice

Process
Heat oil in a frying pan, saute onion and garlic until soft. Stir in ground pork, add salt, oregano, cumin and green chile, and cook until pork is brown.Pour hominy (with liquid) into a large pot, stir in pork mixture and cook, covered, over low heat for at least one hour. Serve in soup bowls with Red Chile Sauce on the side.

Nana's Notes: You may have noticed I said very little about the menudo. My sister-in-law didn't make the menudo; she got it from a friend. I love all things Mexican, but I couldn't make myself even try the menudo. The smell, donchaknow. Oh, and the pig's hoof that was floating in it -- a treat for my brother who enjoyed it with great relish. Well, it was his birthday celebration after all. As for the posole, Sami didn't serve it with Red Chile Sauce on the side; instead, she used a seasoning mix she found in the Mexican section of the grocery store -- a mixture of chili pepper and oregano and probably other spices. She thinks it was called menudo seasoning.