Is that common? I’ve only had corn husk ones. In fact, when I go to Mexican stores, I see dried corn husks but I can’t recall ever seeing (dried?) banana leaves. But if they’re SA, I can’t say I’ve ever been to a South American store, I’m not even sure if there’s any around here (Milwaukee). I’ve also never seen them in Mexican restaurants, but they may just be based on expectations.
FTR, not disagreeing/arguing, just IME.
The most common ones are the corn husk, of course. But I’ve seen the banana leaf ones at Oaxacan and Yucatecan restaurants (where they are also called vaporcitos in the latter case.) It just kind of depends on the region of Mexico and what wrapper is available/common.
ETA: Oh, as for the banana leaves, most of the Mexican groceries around here have them, but you have to look in the frozen section. (If you’re very lucky, you might even find them fresh.) The most common brand is Goya, and it comes in a large square package, about maybe a foot and a half square? Those leaves are huge. Also essential if you want to make some cochinita pibil.
It should probably be noted that A)I tend to go to Mexican stores (of which there are quite a few in MKE) with something specific in mind and B)I really, really don’t like bananas so if something like that even caught my eye I wouldn’t have even noticed it. At best I would have thought ‘hey, I bet people buy those because they think they can get high on them’ and moved on.
I’ve never made tamales on my own (maybe I’d know about the other options if I’d researched recipes), but I’d make them with corn husks without even thinking about it. Banana/cabbage leaves would turn me off.
Banana leaf tamales are quite nice. Never tried with cabbage, but banana leaves have a sweet herbal note to them. In general, I actually like them more than corn husk tamales, but any kind of tamale is just fine with me.
ETA: I’ve also had them once in hoja santa leaves. Those were very interesting and herbal. Hoja santa is sometimes called “the root beer plant” because its herbal flavor is reminiscent of root beer. Those leaves give the masa an interesting, anise-sassafras kind of flavor.
The funny thing about Mexican Food is it’s all pretty much the same. As a (super) picky eater I take solace in the fact that if my friends suggest Mexican, I won’t have problem finding something to eat. Don’t even need to look at the menu beforehand.
Hell, even if I go to Taco Bell (shut up, I know, it’s not ‘real’ Mexican Food…it’s Taco Bell) and they get my order wrong, it’s still pretty much the same thing.
The thing is, it’s really not. Mexican food is quite varied and regional.
Bridget, was the casual place, Giacomo’s? I’ve never been, but the hype and Allison Cook’s review of the place made it sound like the sort of thing they’d offer. Their menu offers it, FWIW. The Press liked it, calling it their 89th Favorite Dish (out of 100) for 2013.
Poscol sounds like they’d offer it too; again, from how they market the place. Good luck!
EDIT: and a +1 to Mexican being really different, depending on what area they’re highlighting: Tex-Mex, Puebla’s mole after mole, Veracruz seafood, Barbacoa. I know I’m missing a bunch too.
There’s a link to the recipe for pasteles in my post. They are not wrapped in cabbage ever. They are wrapped in banana leaves or wax paper. Since I’ve never made or even eaten a tamale, I don’t know what the difference would be.
It looks like the main difference is the dough. It’s corn in tamales, yautía (starchy roots) and green bananas in pasteles. Tamales are usually steamed, and the pasteles recipe has you boil them, but I don’t think that would change them much.
I love tamales, but I don’t make them from scratch very often.
We don’t need to make tamales. There is an Hispanic man and his wife who push a cart through our neighborhood, calling out “Ta-MALEHHHHHS!! Chicken, pork and vegetable ta-MALEHHHHHS!!” They’re pretty good.
I do this too. Then you can just cut the whole batch up with a pizza cutter and you’re done!
I rarely fry anything at home. I have a small kitchen and it seems like the grease gets everywhere if I do.
This sounds dumb, but my buffalo chicken macaroni and cheese recipe is fantastic but a pain to make. Nothing is hard to do, but it’s a lot of things going on at once. And every pan in my kitchen is dirty afterwards.
Dispose of used oil? What kind of craziness is this? You’re throwing away the baby with the bathwater! 
Drain the oil out of the pan through a fine sieve (or coffee filter, or paper towel) to remove the bits. Bits go back in the pan for the gravy. Strained oil cools down until you put it in the fridge.
I keep a tupperware quart container just for the oil… and that’s bigger than I really need it. As others have said, it’s pan-fried, not deep fried. You only need enough oil to come halfway up the chicken.
I also use this left over oil just about anywhere oil is called for, like hash browns and sauteed vegetables. It picks up a beautiful flavor from the chicken. Your houseguests will keep asking what the secret ingredient is - it’s subtle and you can’t quite put your finger on it, but it’s great.
This means I use a quarter to a half of that oil before I fry up the next batch of chicken, and I just add enough fresh oil to get the level in the pan correct. I do occasionally start over from entirely fresh oil, but not very often.
I once made crawfish etouffee ravioli. It took most of a day.
Hell yeah, it was worth it.
+1. You definitely do not throw out the oil, at least not after the first use. Slightly used oil actually fries things up better than new oil. I have a big empty gallon container of oil that I put my used deep frying oil in and then throw out when I judge it to be no longer good for frying.
I made chicken & homemade dumplings once. It was fantastic but took half a day so I’ve never gone back to it.
Another time we made homemade pasta, did the hand kneading thing, then sliced it and then hung it out on wooden drying racks. It was unbelievably good, good enough that you wondered how store-bought pasta could even be called the same thing but, again, too big a pita to ever repeat. Plus, the girl with the recipe and I broke up.
Yeah, for a little while we fried frequently and did that. But neither of us wanted to fry very often, and if you don’t cycle the oil with some frequency it gets nasty.
I guess this is like when puerile ask me about using fresh ginger and ask how I store the leftover. Um, it doesn’t keep for all that long, but it keeps a couple of weeks in the cupboard, and that’s enough time to use it up.
But not for oil, at least, not in my household.
Maybe I should have kept it in the fridge. I don’t think we did that. I keep my stock of goose fat for a year in the fridge, and it keeps okay.
Speaking of friends asking about the secret ingredient… But I have to be careful about when I use it, as several friends are vegetarian. They wouldn’t want to eat something cooked in oil previously used for chicken, it contains some rendered chicken fat.
But popcorn cooked in goose fat is the bomb.
Jugged hare.
I generally don’t mind cooking that is time consuming or labor intensive. I cook nearly everything from scratch. I love (and am happy to make) a lot of things that take forever. Hell, I love to smoke meat, and that takes a long time and a lot of paying attention. With all that said, for this question I have to say sauces. (Not all of them!) Some are fantastic and totally make a dish. There are others, however, that I have made and enjoy but are not worth the effort for what they add.
I make a lemon angle pie for Passover that is fabulous, but too much of a PITA to cook more than once a year. There are several steps, but the really hard one is making the lemon curd. I tried buying lemon curd last year, to see if that worked. It “worked”, but the pie wasn’t nearly as good.
Pumpkin pie from a fresh pumpkin.