Month 2 day 16: Pork Lover's Tamale Pie

Today I made:
Pork Lover's Tamale Pie, Every Day with Rachael Ray March 2012
served with salad

This tamale pie is "pork lover's" because it has 3 forms of it-- bacon, chorizo (Portuguese, in our case), and ground pork. Or in the case of one of the reviewers of the recipe linked above, Italian sausage and ground beef :-P I always think it's bizarre when people make tons of modifications to a recipe and then still review it. Sure, play around with the recipe, but then you've renounced your ability to review it!
The filling is all cooked in a single pan, so that makes things nice to clean. It's just the meats, some garlic and onion, and spices. If I make this again I think I would add some corn and kidney beans. I'm not sure why; I just really felt like kidney beans would be good in it. We did not add beer (!?!?!) to ours. Meanwhile, the corn meal is cooked in a separate pot, and it gets kind of stiff and hard to work with, but then it just gets spooned over the filling, sprinkled with cheese, and broiled.
G's reaction when he saw it was "it looks really greasy, but I guess we know that going in." Yep. But when he tasted it, he said it was "superb." It really was good-- I think from the chorizo. I think we will make this recipe again.
We chose this recipe over the tamale pie in the March issue of Cooking Light (for some reason, all the magazines were doing all the Tex-Mex recipes this month). We were curious how this could ever possibly be modified to make it light. That one had just 8 oz of ground beef, mixed with lima beans and some other things. I think we chose the right one to make! I think we should start picking a best recipe each month; G says this one is a possible contender.