Braised Pork Empanadas

Once again, I fell off the charts for way too long writing about dinner. I am offering this one with some ambivalence, but at least I’m dusting off my space a bit and adding something – anything – once again.

My wife and I are hoping to sell our condo so we can buy a house. That has meant a good bit of legwork de-cluttering our current home, and I wanted to make sure that any remaining items in our chest freezer got used up sooner rather than later to insure we didn't have to deal with any substantial quantities of perishables down the road. I had a couple of smaller pork roasts left, and braised them in the crock pot for much of the day, half-submerged in apple juice with a couple of apples and a couple of pears, some cinnamon, a small touch of chili powder, and a bit of honey over the top. Thankfully, my wife was able to occasionally “baste” the meat during the day, and the pork was perfect when I got home.

As before, when I made empanadas, I used frozen shells. I still haven’t taken the opportunity to make my own from scratch, and hope I will next time, but the premade offering from Goya is really rather nice. I coarsely chopped the pork and added about a cup of the juice to it, leaving the rest of the juice and the fruit for later. Once cooled a bit, I assembled the empanadas and set them aside.

I removed some of the peel from the fruit and added a few bananas to it, along with a bit of applesauce I had (apple-banana, which my daughters tend to not eat from the variety packs). I mashed this up and let it chill. I then strained much of the liquid from the crock pot into a sauce pan, reserving about a quarter cup, which I then mixed with some corn starch. I began reducing the juice, added my corn starch slurry, a hint of honey and vanilla sugar (yes, I keep a storage container with sugar and a couple of vanilla beans on hand at all times), along with a bit of orange juice, apple cider vinegar, cinnamon, and nutmeg. I kept this simmering and reducing while I cooked the empanadas.

For the empanadas, I fried them in a 50/50 mix of peanut and olive oil. Since they don’t really need high heat, this works nicely, and adds a great flavor to boot.

The verdict

3 out of 4 of us really enjoyed this meal. Our younger daughter reluctantly, but ultimate ate and seemed to like this. My wife went nuts for the sauce. I was particularly pleased with the mellow apple-cinnamon tones in the pork, and the juiciness and tenderness of the meat. Since I made both roasts, and didn't have enough dough for more empanadas, I’ll make something else with that extra meat in a day or so (probably some nice tacos!). The pork worked well here, but on its own would have done well with just some good barbecue sauce, frankly. I really like the apple/banana sauce as a side. It is nice, every now and then, to have some fruits in place of veggies at dinner time, especially when it complements the meal so well.

Our older daughter decided to be stubborn. While she eventually acquiesced and tried the pork, she basically skipped dinner. Sometimes, we win, sometimes we don’t. It confounds me that she will eat a wide variety of vegetables (heck, broccoli is her favorite), but beyond applesauce, we cannot seem to get this child to appreciate fruit. I suppose I may have to find some sneakier ways to get her to try fruits in the future, but on this night, I failed.

While de-cluttering is not really much fun, it can be rewarding. We have been thrilled to clean out closets and drawers, knowing that so many gently-used items will find another life through donation. We have purged books that each of us have moved multiple times over a decade or more, books that really should have been passed along years ago. We find ourselves thinking more and more about what is important, and when we have a meal like this that removes from our larder something we don’t want to transport, we gain a nice memory, a new dish to use again in the future, and in this case, a hope – a hope that someday both our daughters will reflect back on our time sharing meals and NOT remember the times they threw a fit because something was new, or different, or not a favorite. We are building the last of our memories in the home where each of our girls has thus-far lived exclusively. I probably should make sure that I fill some of the remaining dinner times with more mac and cheese (they will tell you, mine is the best), more ravioli, and more PB&J and grilled cheese for lunch on the weekend. Oh, and broccoli. Definitely more broccoli.

Ham and Fruit Empanadas

This week sucked. To be clear, when I was growing up, that was not a word used lightly, so short of really expressing how much the week sucked in the more colorful words the week richly deserves, let's leave it at that. Not all of the week was bad, but the work part was brutal, and having daily crises to contend with put a real hurt on my good dinner planning. Last night, my wife ended up cooking the ham steak I'd defrosted, and shared it with our girls for dinner as I plugged away at work, well past our collective bedtimes, on one of several problems that was still lingering. I had to rethink my plans for tonight to insure we didn't end up with a heaping pile of spoiled food going into the trash just in time for the weekend. I'm usually pretty careful in my planning and shopping, and having something take me off course late in the week can be a real problem.

I knew I wanted to make another kind of empanada after the fun I had making the spicy pork iteration back in the fall. My initial plan was something with pineapple, with the hamsteak on the side, but since the ham was cooked, I decided to try something a bit different. I used the Goya frozen empanada discos again, accepting my usual time constraints. The biggest spoilage worry I had was the fresh, whole (small-ish) pineapple I'd bought over the weekend, and I used my fun pineapple slicer gadget to get things started. If you can afford one (they're pretty cheap), have room for one, and like pineapple, I strongly suggest picking up one of these tools. They leave the core and the skin behind, and you get even slices to boot. I broke the slices into 1/2 cm bits, and mixed them with chopped dried apricot (around 12), craisins (a generous handful; for a bit of tartness), about 1 1/2 tsp of cinnamon, and about 1/2 tsp each of nutmeg and mustard powder.  I cubed up the ham into roughly 1/2 cm pieces, adding the yield of about a cup and a half to my mixture with a handful or so of shredded cheddar, and remixed the filling. I had more filling than I needed for the 10 pieces of dough, so I'll have to work the filling into something over the weekend. For the cooking, I fried them in a small bath of canola oil.

The verdict

My wife and I LOVED these little concoctions. It was like having a delicious personal fruit pie, and bit of a savory-smoky dinner all in one. The crisp shell with a not-at-all gooey middle was wonderful, and while I had some concerns about it, the modest bit of flavor from the added spices did not overpower the dish at all. My wife opened some chardonnay without me yesterday, and in the spirit of not wasting things or letting them spoil, we went ahead and enjoyed the rest with this meal. I will not hesitate to make these again, and hopefully soon.

This was a challenging week, and we capped off the work week with with a challenging meal for our older daughter. It has been a while since we had any substantial food/dinner drama, but tonight we got it full force. Our usual morning commute of 20-30 minutes to school/work extended beyond an hour and a half, following a tragic, fatal accident on Lake Shore Drive hours before we were even awake that resulted in part of the road closed until late into rush hour. Add to that some general exhaustion, and maybe a small bit of gloom added from the cold rain falling, and I am glad we were able to get her to eat any part of the meal.  When trying some tiny portion of the dinner, she began to cry, and when we asked her why she was crying, she replied that "[the food] tickles the polka dots on my pants!" Ticklish pants are usually a pretty good sign that it's bedtime. After a week of problems, headaches, and adjustments, having such a great dinner to close out the work week was just what I needed. And now, if you will excuse me - I think my own polka dots are starting to tickle...

Spicy Pork Empanadas

Growing up in northern New Jersey, I vividly remember seeing ads for Goya Adobo Sauce. They aired with greater frequency than I would have imagined on network TV of the 1970s and early 1980s. Sure, I also would occasionally tune into the Spanish-language UHF stations to watch a bit of "lucha libre" on weekends, but that was a rare indulgence. (No, really it was). I recall seeing cans of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce in the "ethnic foods" aisle in the grocery store. These always seemed exotic to me, a mystical thing that, as a boy, I would never have imagined having as part of a meal, never mind an item simply "on hand" in my pantry. As I think about it, few foods in the "ethnic" aisle would have seemed viably edible when I was a boy. Part of the reason, I'm sure, was simply my youth and lack of experience, but another part of it probably stemmed from living in a household that was not all that open to cultural "otherness." About the only food we bought from that aisle was the canned La Choy products, and the thought of canned Chow Mein still triggers a gag reflex deep inside for me.

I have come to appreciate a reasonably wide array of foods from other cultures over the years, and I have a fondness for empanadas, not only because they are delicious (really, I don't think I've ever had a bad one), but also because the basic concept is so appealing. Think about it; a delicious filling in a bread/pastry that is fried. Simple, easy to handle, comforting. And yes, I know that baking is an option, but if you can fry, why not? I had not made them before this evening, so the challenge for me was to keep the record perfect; I simply refused to taint the track record by making bad empanadas.

I started with some onion and oil, a bit of tomato paste, the chipotle/adobo goodness, cumin, and garlic salt, and added in small cubes of pork tenderloin and some water. I kept letting the sauce reduce, then adding a bit of water to keep the dish cooking, until finally getting the pork nice and tender (and still juicy). Once reduced down, I felt the filling needed a bit more sweetness to balance the flavors, so I added a bit of turbinado sugar. I confess that I decided on frozen "discos" for my first outing, in part because I wanted to eliminate a point of possible failure, but in larger part because I knew that, like most weeknights, my time would be limited. As a personal goal, I plan to make those from scratch next time.  Once constructed, I fried the empanadas in a mixture of canola and peanut oil until golden brown. 

The verdict

To put it simply; hot and spicy, but delicious. In addition to opening up that can of chipotle/adobo from the pantry, and my time-saving (yes, also a bit lazy) move of using the perfectly acceptable frozen discos, I served some canned pineapple on the side. The sweetness, and more importantly, the acidity really complimented the heat from the filling. 

I thought for a minute about my pantry as I was writing this and realized that, in the event of a long power outage or natural disaster, I would still be able to cobble together some rather interesting meals from the shelf-stable things I tend to keep around as a matter of course. It might be a fun challenge to cook for a few days with only things that are shelf-stable and already in the house just to see what I would end up with. I know this, for certain: it wouldn't be anything like I would have imagined walking those grocery aisles with my aunt when I was a young boy or teenager.