Georgia Trend. Sept 2024.

When I walked around the Vining Farmers Market on a recent Thursday afternoon, I was amazed by the selection of prepared international foods available. Entrepreneurs were selling Caribbean ginger juices, Filipino style empanadas, lucuma fruit ice cream and ube baked goods. As I browsed through the offerings, an eager woman invited me to try samples of her Mexican tamales. She plated generous portions of warm, soft, corn-filled pillows stuffed with fresh cooked vegetables and topped it with her mother’s secret enchilada sauce. The sample filled me up for dinner, and my heart felt an instant connection to her food.

That is exactly what Noemi Espinoza aimed to do when she founded Noemi’s Tamales. Espinoza told me that she always loved to cook, and it made her happy when she saw people enjoying her food. “I came across people in the community who had survived cancer or had celiac disease and could not eat food with chemicals. My heart broke and I wanted to feed them! I wanted to create something that young families as well as older people can enjoy,” says Espinoza. She doesn’t use many ingredients in her cooking, so the dishes are clean, GMO, gluten-free, and low-sodium.

Espinoza sells two kinds of tamales – organic chicken breast with caramelized onions and garlic; and vegan, with Mexican rice with black beans delicately seasoned with cumin, chili powder, and pink salt. The tamales accompany well with her gluten-free enchilada sauce, a side of organic black beans and brown rice, and fresh red salsa made with organic tomatoes, jalapenos, garlic and salt. She recommends serving a sunny-side up egg, lettuce, tomatoes and sliced avocado to round up the meal.

Espinoza has a Hispanic heritage and grew up in Washington state eating authentic Mexican staples using locally sourced ingredients. She says her mother made all her food from scratch to feed her large family. At 5 years old, a young Espinoza would sit at the kitchen counter and watch her mother make handmade tortillas, black beans and rice. As soon as she could, Espinoza says she took charge to cook, clean and feed all her brothers and sisters, as her parents worked long hours and ran restaurants in Edison and Anacortes.

In Mexican culture, during Christmas, many families make 200-300 tamales, mainly with pork, and go door to door gifting platters to neighbors and friends ­– similar to a cookie exchange, except that making traditional tamales is labor intensive. You must season and cook the meat separately, dry the corn husk, boil the masa, lay it out and roll it up individually, and steam it – the process takes a lot of hands-on cook time. Espinoza says when she made her Christmas tamales, her friends would ask for extras so they could freeze them and take with them to different parts of the USA.

Encouraged by the response, she says she started a café in Kennesaw in 2009 where her tamales were a big hit. But she closed the space after eight years so she could help take care of her grandkids. Instead of running a fulltime shop, Espinoza decided to sell her tamales at farmers markets around Georgia, working from a shared kitchen. She cooks, packages, and sells the tamales herself, interacting with guests and educating them about the benefits of eating healthy. She says she is also working towards getting a barcode so she can sell her products at grocery stores.

You can purchase Noemi’s Tamales, both frozen and fully cooked, directly from her stand at various farmers markets. Find out where she will be by visiting her Facebook page.