Recent events have caused me to reflect a lot on the mission I served in Paraguay and to ponder over it, perhaps excessively. Perhaps because of this I have recently craved foods I ate there. So a few days ago I tried my hand, again, at making Paraguayan tortillas. Compared to a Paraguayan standard they probably weren't very good, but to me they were delicious. Then the other day I was watching a video about how to make butternut squash ravioli, and the little ravioli looked so much like empanadas that I got a crazy idea. I would make meat empanadas!
I thought it wasn't too farfetched of an idea. After all, a Paraguayan family had showed me how to make empanadas, and albeit it was more than two years ago, I thought, "How hard can it be?"
So at about three o'clock, thinking it would be a snap to prepare in time for dinner, I got out my cookbook and read the recipe for the dough: 8 cups of flour, 1 cup of shortening, warm water and salt. I should've known the measurements for water and salt would be non-existant. Nobody in Paraguay who knows how to cook would ever need such a thing as a measurement. But I thought to myself, "I can do it." And then I set to work. An hour later I looked down at my stiff, lumpy mound of dough and thought "Maybe this wasn't such a good idea." Admittedly, I had to throw out a bunch of it before I had a dough product that looked and rolled out well enough to use. And about the same time that I was up to my elbows in flour and ground beef both of my daughters started to cry. And cry. And cry. And, well, you get the point.
I was trying to roll out the dough, which was still too stiff, and my daugters were crying, and I was starting to wonder where I could buy a wig when all of my hair fell out, and that just happened to be the time that my husband came home. I was acutely aware of how glad I was not to be a little Paraguayan wife, because by the standards of Paraguayan wifery, I'm sure I'd be classed as a failure.
I quickly set my husband to rolling out the dough for me, when all he really wanted to do was take a shower. He is such a great guy!
That was when I tried to shape the dough into empanadas. It was gruelling, frustrating work and I threw the first one out. (To make empanadas you have to cut out a circle of dough and then fold it in half, encasing the filling.) I remembered how the family who taught me how to make empanadas showed me how to fold them over and squish the ends together, and then make a pretty little pattern on the ends. I tried and just got frustrated. Ben kept on offering suggestions. Finally I just decided to squish the ends with a fork.
Then I fried them, anxiously awaiting the grande finale, the best part, where we would get to enjoy "the fruits" of my exhausting and frustrating evening. I quickly took the empanadas out of the frying pan and took a bite out of an oddly shaped one. I closed my eyes even. And I was rewarded by an undercooked, doughy empanada. But man alive did it ever taste good. It was divine. I remembered in detail the night that family showed me how to make empanadas, I remembered the lady who I used to buy them from in Luque, and for the first time ever, I fully appreciated how much work she used to do, and I remembered just how wonderful it was to bite into a Paraguayan empanada just hot out of the pan. I hope I never forget that feeling. That's why I had to write all of this.
The truth is, Ben and I kept working at it and although we didn't finish until almost three hours after I had started, the final empanadas were just as delicious as I remembered. That's why I had to share. Here's to my little empanaditas!
