The biggest enemy of this project is not time – though I don’t have a whole lot of that – but winter. Winter’s early darkness coupled with my unflattering environmentally friendly lightbulbs makes photographing food a pain in the booty if I decide to cook once I get home from work.
Today I tried to beat the sunset.
No go.
In my efforts to beat the darkness, I picked what could very well have been the worst recipe for empanada dough. Most of the recipes were more pastry based, calling for cold cold butter and rolling the whole mess out and letting it chill in the fridge an hour.
BUT I DIDN’T HAVE AN HOUR!
So I chose a recipe from AllRecipes.com which frankly was too sweet (1/3 cup sugar? Gross), too thick, and… not quite right.
Also? A pain to roll out.
I should have used a bigger glass.
Having seen a recipe in O Magazine for empanadas, I was hell bent on a rotisserie chicken and poblano pepper variation. Poblanos look a bit like infinities when you slice ’em. Pretty.
I chopped up some leftover rotisserie chicken, mixed it with diced poblanos and squished it in the middle of the dough, and crimped it shut with a fork.
Badly lit empanadas are badly lit.
They actually had real potential…with a different dough.
Impatience. It’ll get you ever time.
I haven’t declared the empanada a complete failure but… that dough? Oh. Ew. Gross. NEVER. AGAIN.
About sarah
Let me know if you find a good dough recipe that you end up loving. When I was student teaching in Argentina, we’d just buy the dough already made and rolled out in perfect circles. Then we’d cook up ground beef and add it to hard boiled eggs and raisins. They threw in some kind of spice and a bit of sauce, which was actually good. But it took all kinds of bravery for me to even try it the first time. I used to have a recipe that was fairly close to the real thing, but lost it. That’s kind of sad, considering getting it involved chasing down a food truck on the highway that had the word “empanada” on it just so I could get their phone number.