Latin- Week 6

This was the last week that we were in the South American region of Latin Cuisine. I prepared Empanadas. There were not that many recipes again this week, so someone else prepared the savory filling for the Potato and Beef Empanadas, I prepared the dough, the chimichurri sauce, and then decided to prepare a sweet filling too. Of course. I found some pears and walnuts in the cooler and chopped them up. I sauteed them with a little butter, sugar, and cinnamon to make a caramel sauce. Then I made an actual caramel dipping sauce to go on the side. Delicious!

I liked these Empanadas, especially, because they were baked, not fried. Empanada dough on its own is not terribly healthy, so any step taken to improve the nutrition of it makes me happy.

I did enjoy the flavors of the savory Empanada. I would take steps in the future to make sure that the filling was evenly divided. Some of ours ended up with more potatoes and some had hardly any potatoes at all. Both ways were enjoyable, but I liked those with the potatoes better.

In our dividing up the recipes, there was a miscommunication and the ceviche this week was accidentally skipped all together. Whoops. The Quinoa dish was also a fail, since Matt put his on to boil and noticed hundreds of teeeeeny tiny bugs crawling all over it in the pot. It was organic. Ick. The tapioca cake didn't turn out well, either. It was just kind of a solid blob of gelatinous coconut. I'm hoping the sweet potato cake that we will be doing next week from the Caribbean will be better!