Hot Tamale

From time to time, I let you know a bit about my past. Below is a story that was in the December 26 edition the Fort Worth Startlegram Star-Telegram.

However, before you read the story, let me give you some background and also explain how Str8 Up With A Twist fits into it.

My parents grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. Helen is my mother and Joe is my father and I actually call them Joe & Helen. It's confusing to people because most people don't call their parents by their first names but the reason I do it is a long story in itself and it isn't done to be disrepectful.

Anywho...Helen has a longtime friend named Virginia aka Virgie. They've known each other since childhood. Joe has a longtime friend named Joe P. They've known each other since at least their teenage years if not longer.

Helen married Joe and Virgie married Joe P. and to this day they are all still friends. This is definitely an example of how friendships CAN last a lifetime. So...when Str8 Up With A Twist was born, Helen & Joe asked Virgie & Joe P. to be Str8 Up With A Twist's Godparents and they said yes. So...I have known Virgie & Joe P. for as long as I can remember.

Virgie's mom had a small restaurant in a neighborhood in south Fort Worth. This family owned hole-in-the-wall has received accolades for its food. Friends and former co-workers of Str8 Up With A Twist have continuously thanked Str8 Up With A Twist for introducing them to Mi Cocinita.

So here is the story.

Kennedy: A mother, three daughters and lots of love and tamales
By BUD KENNEDY
bud@star-telegram.com

For Virgie Martinez, like her mother before her, December always meant long days in the kitchen rolling tamales for the hundreds of customers who come to Mi Cocinita, their tiny backyard cafe behind a house in south Fort Worth.

For almost all of her 70 years, since she was a little girl helping her mother in the same kitchen, she swore that her own little girls would never have to work that way.

But two weeks ago, with dozens of orders yet unfilled for Christmas, she looked up tearfully at the youngest of her now-grown daughters, standing beside the hospital bed.

"Call all my customers," Martinez said.

"Cancel the orders. Tell them I can’t do it. Tell them I’m too sick to make tamales."

Daughter Adrena Martinez had taken time off from an oil company to see her mother. Another daughter, Cecelia, is a school clerk. A third, Jo Anne Nilo, is an office manager.

For a moment, Adrena didn’t know what to say.

Then she knew exactly what to say.

"Don’t worry, Mama," she said.

"We’ll make the tamales."

Two weeks and 600 dozen tamales later, three exhausted daughters wheezed to the finish line on Christmas Eve afternoon.

Most Christmases, Mi Cocinita runs on Virgie Martinez’s sheer will and energy. She cooks lunches and serves the customers who remember her late mother, Betty Mendez, honored by the Star-Telegram in the 1970s for the "Best Mexican Food in Fort Worth."

This Christmas, Mi Cocinita ran on three daughters’ love.

It was about 1:30 p.m, on Christmas Eve when Adrena Martinez slapped down a foil-wrapped dozen tamales on the counter. She shuffled through the pages on a giant yellow legal pad, then drew a line through the final name on the last page.

"That’s the last order, right there," she said, as Cecelia wiped up masa in the kitchen and Jo Anne started running the tally. "That’s all the orders. Plus all the people who were on standby."

Mi Cocinita’s tamales are so popular that the family keeps a "standby list."
"It took us all to do it," Adrena Martinez said.

"We don’t know how Mama ever did it. She has always said that she didn’t want us to work this hard. Now we know what she was talking about."

Across Bryan Avenue in a tiny parlor bedroom, a pale Virgie Martinez lay with the covers pulled up tight.

She usually shouts customers’ names happily as they walk down the driveway. But on this day, still recovering from a six-hour stomach operation, she could barely whisper.

"The girls did it," she said proudly. "They did it. And I didn’t ask them. They did it on their own."

But then she frowned.

"I don’t want to deprive them of their own lives this way," she said. "They took time off their jobs. And making tamales is hard work."

She held up her hands and frowned.

"Every one of those girls has such beautiful hands," she said. "Now, their hands look like mine."

A brother-in-law, Jesse Martinez, a Lockheed administrator and former Fort Worth school board vice president, was parking out front. He landed one of the last orders.
"This is one of the great family businesses that mean so much to Fort Worth," he said.

Coming to Mi Cocinita, he said, is "like visiting somebody’s personal home."

"You have an honest, positive personality like Virgie who runs it, and a great husband and daughters. This restaurant is filled with their love."

So are the tamales.

Bud Kennedy's column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. 817-390-7538


And just so you know, Helen & Joe received three dozen tamales and one dozen is sitting in my fridge here in Houston, Texas.