Empanadas

Last night my friends Caley and Lorien came over and we made vegetarian empanadas from stratch. They were delicious. We used a recipe from "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food" by Mark Bittman. The recipe, Bean and Cheese Empanadas with Twice-Cooked (Refried) Beans, was listed as vegan, but contains milk and cheese. I'm not sure how that's vegan, but it's definitely vegetarian.

With two of us working the prep took a total of about 30min with one person making the dough, one making the refried beans. The recipe for the empanadas says about an hour (20 min. prep., 20 min. setting, & 20 min. baking) and the recipe for the beans 20 minutes. We didn't have a food processor while making the dough or a potato masher for the beans, but thank's to Caley and Lorien's tremendous upper body stregnth I think it was still pretty easy.

You end up with 12 empanadas about 4-5 inches long. I was in charge of rolling out and filling the dough, but if I redid I'd only make about 8 empanadas because the dough was tearing it was being stretched so thin. That's my excuse for how sad they look, anyway.

I picked this recipe for two reasons: 1.) Lorien is a vegetarian who doesn't eat mushrooms so Jamie Oliver's mushroom risotto was out (from his book "Cook with Jamie") & 2.) I really miss buying cornish pasties at Victoria station in London and empanadas sounded a lot like a pasty to me. In the end the recipe was just as good as Jamie's risotto (yeah, we're on a first name basis) and I think I could definitely get away with using the same dough and filling it with meat and potatoes or what have you.

My only other note on this wicked yummy food is that Caley insisted on pronouncing the "n" in empanada with a tilde above it making it sound more like en piñata. A delicious surprise inside a tasty case? Close enough.