On a boring Easter Sunday, I had gotten up early, cooked beef for empanadas and realized I did not have the dough. I usually purchase the dough at a Latino market, but that’s a trip I do once or twice a year because it happens to be too far from where we live. Not wanting to waste the meat I had prepared, I decide to make the dough myself. I enlisted the help of my son, who is crazy about empanadas.
Empanadas are a very popular Latino dish made of flour dough. This dough can be filled with beef, cheese, guava, fish, seafood, and pizza filling. The sky’s pretty much the limit as to what you can put into the floured disk.You can easily Google a recipe, and if done with a group, the process is easier and faster. Because I had already prepared the meat to stuff the dough beforehand, my son Nate and I just had to make the dough, roll it into round disks, stuff them with the beef filling, deep fry them, and enjoy.
It took us almost two hours to mix the dough by hand, roll it with a rolling pin, stuff them, and close the edges with a fork. The hard work was well worth it. The empanada making allowed us to enjoy some quality time together, something we don’t get to do often. We played Latino music together and told stories of when he was a baby, we just had a blast! And that made the empanadas taste even better.
