It's 9 a.m. Saturday and more than 300 tamales are steaming in two big steel kettles atop gas burners in the Las Margaritas Mexican food stall at the Bellingham Farmers Market.

Except for the roar of exploding kernels at the nearby kettle corn booth, the market is quiet. Farmers arrange their displays of plant starts alongside the meager vegetable offerings that a cold, wet June has produced. Craftspeople make small talk with neighbors. The first swarms of shoppers are still an hour away.

At the Las Margaritas booth, Liliana Macias has some free time to exchange greetings with friends as the market enters the first stage of its morning bustle. But it took hours of relentless activity to get to this point. Tamales must be made one at a time.

Las Margaritas (the name means "daisies" in Spanish) is a budding cooperative of Hispanic women who know what it's like to work in the fields. Besides the food they sell in the market, they provide catering for special events.

The women of Las Margaritas are partners with another group, Cooperativa Jacal, that grows organic vegetables on acreage off Loomis Trail Road near Blaine. Both cooperatives have been organized by Community to Community Development, a local nonprofit agency. Insiders call it C2C.

On Thursdays, the women of Las Margaritas meet in the C2C office to plan their Saturday bill of fare, which presents some challenges. They don't have the equipment they would need to cook meat dishes at the market, and cooking them beforehand for reheating is prohibited by health regulations. So the tamales – corn meal typically stuffed with pork or chicken – will be vegetarian.

They also want to support Cooperativa Jacal by featuring its produce in their dishes. This year, Jacal doesn't have much to show for its efforts besides kale, a member of the cabbage family with thick, wrinkly green or purple leaves that flourish even in dismal weather.

Macias, 37, has lived in the U.S. since 1999. She agrees that back in her native state of Jalisco, kale tamales would probably bewilder people. She doesn't even have a Spanish word for the vegetable. But she and her colleagues want to be true to C2C's vision of food justice, which means using local ingredients.

On Friday night at 9:30, Macias and volunteers from C2C mobilize for tamale making inside the small kitchen at Boundary Bay Brewery, where the owners have agreed to let them share space. As Macias and her friends chop chile peppers, carrots and kale, a rock band blasts in the bar. The bar's own kitchen staff bustles around at the end of their shift, turning out one last pizza for bar patrons while they cook up huge pots of stew and pasta for the next day. Both groups manage to get their work done without stepping on anybody else's toes.

The key ingredient for tamales is corn meal dough. Macias fills a big stainless steel tub with stone-ground dry meal and stirs in baking powder. She melts vegetable shortening on the stove and adds it to the tub, then begins adding water a little at a time as she and C2C staffer Erin Thompson work the thick mixture with their latex-gloved hands.

They knead the dough for about half an hour until it reaches the right consistency. While this is going on, C2C staffer Rogelio Montes chops kale by the bushel. He watches, bemused, as some of the chopped green leaves are kneaded into the dough, called "masa" in Spanish.

"Are you a vegetarian?" he asks. "Me neither." Mexican cheese and poblano chile pepper will also go into the tamales, providing gustatory links to more traditional Mexican fare.

Meanwhile, dry corn husks have been softening in a pot of warm water. Thompson and other volunteers go to work grooming them, removing brown strands of corn silk.

"We have to pick off all the hairs because people think it's human hair," Thompson explains.

Finally, at about 11 p.m., with all the ingredients ready, everybody starts making tamales. Some of the volunteers are doing it for the first time.

They flatten a wad of soft masa into a thin sheet on a corn husk and sprinkle on some cheese, chile and kale. Then it's rolled up and folded into a little bundle for steaming. It's after midnight before the last tamale is wrapped and ready. Macias and another member of the group, Aleida Mondragon, are at the market at 8 a.m. Saturday because it will take as long as two hours to steam the tamales.

Before noon, marketgoers are lining up to sample the results. The mildly seasoned tamales are served with a side order of refried beans. Fiery carrots, pickled with serrano peppers, are available as a relish. The kale tamales taste better than they sound. The leaves have a chewy, almost meaty texture. Kale may look a lot like spinach, but it's far less bitter and not so mushy.

Also on the menu for a recent Saturday were tostadas, a simple Mexican staple in which a whole tortilla is fried until crispy and topped with beans, cheese and whatever else is available. Today, "whatever else" means kale, enlivened with a relatively mild red chile sauce.

The tostadas are available in the market every Saturday, but those labor-intensive tamales are only prepared for the second Saturday of each month. The next opportunity to try them would be July 12, when ingredients other than kale may also be available.

Today, Las Margaritas is a small group, but Macias and Rosalinda Guillen, C2C's executive director, have big dreams.

Their most cherished dream is to make authentic corn tortillas from nixtamal, the traditional corn dough made from dry corn kernels cooked in lime and then ground. Virtually all tortillas in U.S. restaurants and markets are made from dry corn flour.

"They taste very different," Macias says.

"They're really bad," Guillen adds.

They hope that their friends at Cooperativa Jacal can find suitable corn varieties that will grow well enough here to enable them to make Whatcom County nixtamal some day.

"We want to find the corn and grind the corn and make tortillas the way they're supposed to be made," Guillen says.