Recipe | Tamale Pie {made with real ingredients} - Weed 'em & Reap (2024)

Published: October 12, 2016 | Last Updated: September 18, 2021 19 Comments

I love tamales & I love pie.

So today I combined them into a tamale pie and I’m telling you, this is going to be a staple in our house!

One of my passions since switching to a real food diet has been recreating recipes with whole ingredients. Problem is, there are just some dishes I don’t want to tackle.

Take tamales, for example.

Technically I *could* get some lard from pasture-raised pigs, get some masa harina from a local market, then figure out how to make tamales.

But, honestly, this tamale pie makes it SO much easier! And the benefit is that we can use up our tomatoes,fresh herbs & onions from the garden. Next year I hope to have avocados as well to grab from my front yard!

Comfort food vs. Whole food

If when you hear “comfort food”, you think “bad for me food”, you might want to rethink your approach to a healthy diet. While it’s true that stuffing our bodies full of junk, eating out, or buying lots of packaged foods aren’t the picture of perfect health, we need to realize how cooking with real ingredients changes everything.

In our home, we eat an insane amount of fruits & vegetables. We grow a lot of our own food, raise our animals organically, and really try our best to rarely go out-to-eat. We even take healthy snacks with us when we go out so we aren’t tempted to buy a “snack” out on the road.

But, when we cook dinner, we keep things hearty and comforting.We cook with butter, use cheese, and throw on a dollup of sour cream happily. We make things like tamale pie. (mmm)

The love of a whole food diet includes a love for balance. So, while we might snackon carrots, snap peas, and fresh pears throughout the day, we also eat our share of comfort foodsaround here, being careful to include real ingredients that our bodies can recognize.

This tamale pie recipe includes a homemade enchilada sauce, and trust me, it’s SO worth it!

You might be tempted to just purchase a can of enchilada sauce from the store, but what you’ll find in those are lots of polyunsaturated oils, soy fillers, artificial flavors, and not to mention, you are exposing yourself to aluminum when eating from canned foods.

In my firsthair mineral analysis, my aluminum levels were off the charts, even though I use an aluminum-free deodorant. My doctor asked if I regularly ate canned foods or cooked with aluminum baking sheets. I sheepishly admitted to doing both of those regularly. Getting aluminum exposure down was really important in giving our bodies less of a toxic load to detox from. So in addition to stop eating canned foods (I stick with jarred foods only), I now cover my aluminum baking sheets with these silicone mats.

Here on the farm, eatingclean means (most of the time) making our mealsfrom scratch. It’s so much better for us and it tastes AMAZING. And you’ll be pretty proud of yourself knowing you’ve done this all by your little self. I’m pretty proud of how this turned out, can you tell?