Freír en la cocina

Cooking two big meals in one week is both rewarding and overwhelming. I want to end the year with 52 entries in this blog related to cooking, and I've skipped a few weeks to being sick/going on vacation/other circumstances, so it's time to play catch-up. Despite checking off many ambitious recipes off my "things to cook" list, I have since added twice as many more recipes to the list I'm hoping I will cook most of them this year. What will next year bring, do you ask? Who knows. That seems to be the million dollar question these days, food or no food. Suggestions welcome.
 

I invited a new guest to come cook with me - Kim. We've been friends since freshman year of college and we hang out every few months now, when both of our busy schedules allow for it. She made the trek out to Allston fully aware that her trek back to east Somerville would take over an hour, and I was pretty grateful for that.



Doughy goodness



Empanadas and plantains were on the menu for the night. The empanada dough was made first and set aside for an hour to let the molecules work their magic. Kim was on the chopping block while I managed and organized the ingredients. 

 



We heated up the stove to fry plantain strips in vegetable oil. Plantains are a strange sort of fruit. The texture of a ripe banana but a taste unlike anything I've tried before. We tried sprinkling salt and Mrs. Dash on the fried pieces, and they were pretty good. I read somewhere that plantains taste good with cinnamon, but that may only be true if the cinnamon is cooked with the fruit - plantains sprinkled with dry cinnamon only tastes like the beginnings of a cinnamon challenge.
 
















 

When the dough was ready, we started the assembly. Kim was the stuffer and I was the roller/fork applicator. We filled the dough sheets with feta cheese, kale, onions, and garlic, which Kim dubbed "fusionadas" instead of empanadas. While the empanadas baked for 20 minutes, we tried the pie from the night before. It was a bit doughy, as I suspected it would be, but the apple sugary insides were oh-so delicious. The empanadas were kind of like mini hot pockets. If I try this recipe again, next time I'll try frying or boiling the empanadas for a different dough texture.