Even as leftovers, it ain't bad

Ever have a plan in mind for dinner and once you get started, it morphs into something totally different? That's what happened to me Wednesday night.

I had a hankering for empanadillas, and since I had some frozen, pre-rolled, pre-packaged empanada discs in the freezer, I figured, why not? But, of course, then my can-do self decided that I could make a much better dough from scratch than the crap that's been chilling in the freezer for a couple months.


So I made a basic pastry dough, with flour, salt, egg, an entire stick of nearly frozen butter, and ice water, and stuck it in the fridge to rest and get cold. Meanwhile, I started on the filling.

You can stuff these things with just about anything you want, but I have a standard favorite that I use. It's not so much a recipe that I use, but just a basic guideline of what to throw in the skillet, often modified to suit my pantry.

Start by sweating a chopped onion in a little olive oil with some salt and pepper. Throw in a pound of ground beef, a generous amount of garlic, some tomato sauce, some recaito or sofrito(or both, like I did), sazon, some spanish olives, roughly chopped, chili flakes, to your taste, and some cinnamon. Yes, cinnamon. It gives it incredible depth, I promise. I usually add in some raisins, too, just a handful, for their sweetness, and the way the compliment the cinnamon, but I was out, so they weren't added. :) Let this simmer away for a while, until most of the liquid is absorbed, then set aside to cool.

While it's cooling, you're supposed to roll the dough out to these perfect circles to be stuffed, crimped around the edges and fried to a crispy golden perfection. Little meat pies! Yum.

But by the time I had the meat finished and the dough cooled, it was obvious that Jonas was done humoring me in the kitchen and I needed to get something done quickly. So... instead of empanadas, I took out my muffin tin, and I lined each of the cups with a roughly circular piece of dough. I didn't get all fancy or anything, relying on a rustic charm to take over. I tossed them into the oven for a few minutes to let them bake and brown a bit, the same way you'd blind bake a pie shell.

Once they were slightly golden, I took them out, filled each one with the meat mixture, topped them with cheese, and placed them back in the oven just long enough for the crusts to finish browning and for the cheese to bubble up.

And because I still had the store-bough, pre-packaged dough in the freezer, I thought I might as well use those up, too. So I stuffed them with some canned apple pie filling, doctored up with some cinnamon and extra sugar (yeah, so shoot me) and baked them up for dessert.

Served the little meat pies with some plain old white rice. They were simple, delicious and sort of a fun novelty. Wil was a little perplexed for some reason about why we were eating dinner out of a muffin tin. He kept calling them "meat muffins", but considering I made a dozen of them, ate two, and there were only three left over, they must have been pretty darn good.

My only criticism is that I didn't pre-bake the crusts enough, and they were just slightly under-done on the bottoms. It really was much easier to stuff the crusts into the muffin tin rather than taking the time to cut out perfect circular discs to fill and crimp, and you still have the portability factor, should you want to take these with you for lunch or whatever. That's the biggest appeal of the empanada- they make a great lunch/snack since they're all contained within the crust.

So that's my kitchen adventure for the week. I know, it's not all that exciting or anything, but it's not all that often that I break away from the tried and true recipes.

It was also great since, for the past few weeks, I've been on sort of a personal challenge to cook from the pantry and use up some of that "stuff" that's lying around. You know how it is, you have stuffed cabinets, and still feel like there's nothing to eat in the house because everything requires work. Yeah, I'm out to prove myself wrong there.

I'll add some pictures just as soon as I figure out where I left the camera. :)