Chapter 1: What holiday tradition involves making ayakas?
Feliz Navidad Feliz Navidad Feliz Navidad Prospero año y felicidad Feliz Navidad Feliz Navidad Feliz Navidad Prospero año y felicidad I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas I want to wish you a Merry Christmas. I want to wish you a Merry Christmas from the bottom of my heart.
But ayakas are not that, like, offensive because everyone still makes them and everyone still eats them. And why do we eat them? I don't know why we eat them, but we eat them. But so I'm on board with the festive nature of making ayakas. Yeah. But anytime they start breaking out the ayakas, I'm like, oh, God. The next episode of The Commercial Break starts now.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of ayakas in Venezuelan culture?
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Chapter 3: What ingredients are typically found in ayakas?
After all these years through the tears. Well, the big holiday season is right around the corner, Chrissy, and you know what that means.
It's right here. What does that mean? Turkey, turkey?
I gotta figure out a way to get my kids gifts.
I gotta figure out a way. The kid gift thing. Yeah, there's turkey.
Listen, there's like There's this season, the holiday season is right around the corner. But for those of you that don't live in a Venezuelan household, it's also known as Ayaka season. Ayakas. This is a hot topic around this household. A hot topic around this household.
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Chapter 4: How do families personalize their ayaka recipes?
Because I have known Venezuelans for 30 years of my life, and I have been familiar with the traditional holiday dish known as an ayaca, which is essentially like the Frankenstein cousin of a tamale.
Oh, okay. I remember you talking about this before.
Wrapped in a banana leaf. And listen, we can focus on the good things about ayakas. Let's focus on the good things for a second. One of these days I'm going to wake up and there's going to be gaitas playing in the house. Gaitas is like traditional Venezuelan Christmas music. It's going to be gaitas playing in the house.
And I'm going to walk into the kitchen to find a huge card table opened up in the middle of the kitchen, everything else cleared out, banana leaves all over the place.
And then Astrid and whatever other Venezuelan happens to be within a 30-mile radius are going to be in my kitchen making an absolute mess, putting whatever edible items are left in the refrigerator, freezer, or pantry into this ayaka. Don't call it a tamale. It's not. It's an ayaka. And that could include chicken, pork, seasonings, bell peppers, onions, olives, raisins.
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Chapter 5: What challenges arise from making ayakas for the holidays?
Raisins.
Yeah.
Some people put prunes in them. This is an acquired taste, and it is not to my liking. I do not like ayakas. I love almost everything else about the Venezuelan culture, but ayakas is just something I cannot get on board with. And here's the problem.
Is it different every time, or is it a specific ingredient list?
Every family does it different.
Right, but for Astrid, she does something the same.
Yeah, it's pretty specific to, I think it's Familia. Okay. You... Make it the way your mom made it, the way your grandma made it. Maybe you put a little twist or a turn in here or there.
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Chapter 6: What is the comparison between ayakas and other holiday dishes?
You're usually making it with family. So everyone's on board with how you're going to make them. I've had them. I've had a number of them. They're made different ways. Some of them a little more spicy, some sweet, some salty. Some just have no flavor, no flavor. discernible flavor whatsoever because there are too many ingredients in them. But in any case, I don't like it.
I don't like the texture. I usually don't like the taste. I'm not on board with it. I don't like ayakas. And that causes drama in the family.
Of course it does.
And here's why it causes drama in the family. Not necessarily because I don't like ayakas. Okay, I don't like ayakas. But because the tradition is that you make 1,000 ayakas per person that may or may not be attending your house anytime during the holidays. You give them as gifts.
Chapter 7: How does the discussion shift to the topic of Iberico ham?
You get them as gifts. And by two days after New Year's, they are all frozen inside of your freezer. You will have thousands of ayakas frozen in your freezer, like every Venezuelan family I'm sure does. We, we went to, this is 2022. So like pandemic still kind of like, you know, the glow of the pandemic is still there.
And we drive out to wherever the fuck northwest Atlanta to go drop off a box that will eventually, seven months later, get to Venezuela. That's right. It's like a shipping service. And it's a Venezuelan guy. Very nice. We back up into his little garage in this little industrial area. We back up into the garage where he's got all these other boxes. And it's a little shipping store.
Yeah.
So we pull back up into his garage. We give him this box that now is being sent down to Venezuela. And in return, he opens up his freezer that was sitting on the floor of this industrial space where there were hundreds of frozen ayakas. And he starts throwing them into a box and giving them to us. And I'm like, you've got to be kidding me. We had these ayakas for years.
Chapter 8: What are the controversies surrounding Phil Mickelson's career?
They were sitting in our freezer for years. I think we just got rid of them like three months ago. No one eats them because it's holiday, and that's typically when you eat it, and then you just don't do anything else with them for the rest of the year.
Really?
Maybe on occasion I will see Astrid eating an ayaka outside of Thanksgiving.
I was going to say like dinner in a pinch one night or something, you pull them out.
But you got to like them. First of all, they got to be something that's edible for you. And like, I know we talked to Joanna Hausman about this. She says the same thing. She goes, it's not my favorite dish in the world, but because it's a festive dish that's made around the holidays, I will have my fair share.
Kind of like a fruitcake or something?
Yeah, I think maybe.
Not that it tastes like a fruitcake, but you know, people don't really love fruitcakes, but. They're festive.
They're festive. And why anybody in the world would think to give a fruitcake anymore? I don't know. You got to be a fruitcake to give a fruitcake. You know what I'm saying? I don't even know if they make them. I'm sure they do. But I haven't seen an actual fruitcake in a long time. But when I was a kid, there was a lot of fruitcake going around. And you want barf in a bag.
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