Argentinian Empanadas

I have made Empanada a few time already with my friends from Latin America. We made the dough from scratch twice. One time it was flour dough(Click here for the post) , another time it was corn flour dough(Click here for that post).

And another time, we made them with already made dough disk. And this time, since I was making it for the first time by myself, I decided to use already made frozen dough disk.

I can find those frozen Empanada disk at my local supermarket frozen food section. There is this brand called "Goya" and that is what I bought.

I love those frozen disks because I am not good with making dough and especially bad at rolling them out.

Anyhow, I made Argentinian style Empanada which has green olives, boiled eggs and ground beef.

I think normally you would put the ingredients separately into the dough and close them but my friend mix them all together and it is much easier and faster and in my opinion it blends the flavor better that way so that is what I did.

I sauteed onion and browned ground beef in it then added chopped green olives and boiled eggs.

I used fork to help seal the empanada edge. Then before baking, brushed some egg to make it shiny when it is baked.

Baked in the oven for about 20mins.

I forgot to take a picture of inside. I am sure that I will be making this again so I will try to take picture of each process next time and post it here :-)

I bought two package of frozen disks and one package has 12 disks. I used all of them and froze half of them in the freezer. This way, I can just take them out whenever I want to eat empanadas and bake in the oven and have my empanada fix.

I think Empanada is also great for kids. The other day, I had this palydate at a place which is like an indoor play ground and we all decided to bring lunch and have it there. I didn't know what to bring and I didn't have anything to make sandwiches so I took these Empanadas out from the freeze and baked it and brought them as lunch. It was great since you don't need utensils and doesn't make too much mess.

I think this is also good for afternoon snack :-)

I love them. My husband love them and my son love them also (except the olive. He spit out olives...)

I also made two apple Empanadas since I ran out of beef mixture and still had two disks left. It was great also.

Birthday Party at friend's apartment in Manhattan with Argentinean Dinner

The other day, a friend of my husband who lives in Manhattan had a birthday party and he and his wife invited us for the birthday party at their place.

They live in an apartment in Manhattan and this was our first time visiting their apartment. Their apartment was right by the Hudson River and the view was spectacular.

Isn't it awesome to have this view from your own apartment everyday?

His wife is from Argentine so she made some Argentinean dinner for the party.  I don't know the name of dishes she made but all of them were so good!

First, we had creamy chicken pie. It has creamy chicken with green peas in a flaky dough. It is creamy but not too rich so you can eat them a lot. It was really good.

And we also had meat and potato pie. It had some cinnamon on top and it was great combination. I loved cinnamon and ground beef together.

I was not too familiar with Argentinean dishes and when I think of Argentinean dishes, I always thought about grilled beef so it was great to get to know all these delicious new dishes! I would love to know more about Argentinean dishes. I think I will research more. Since now I have an Argentinean friend, if there is any question about Argentinean dishes, I can just ask her!

There were some other friends of theirs at the party and it was first time for us to meet them but everyone was so nice and easy to talk to so we really had a great time together.

oh, we also had dessert of course but I forgot to take photos. It was chocolate pudding cake and cheese cake. Both of them were really good. We ate so much!

And they showed us this funny cup they have. I had never seen anything like this. Isn't this wild? It is so funny!

Anyhow, we had a great evening and I hope that we will see all of them again sometime soon!