Peruvian Empanadas

For my next monthly dinner I've chosen Peruvian as the cuisine.  At this stage it looks like the menu is going to be as follows.

• Lemonada (lemonade peruvian style)
• Ceviche (seasoned raw fish)
• Empanadas (see photo)
• Trout escabeche
• Alfajores (short bread with sweet filling)

So I decided to trial the empanadas first.  Empanadas are basically a short crust pastry outer with a seasoned mince filling.  I ran out of time to make the pastry myself so resorted to frozen short crust which worked out rather well in the end.  Short crust pasty is actually one of the easier pastries to prepare so didn't really need the practice.  The mince filling was onion, shallots, chilli, sweet paprika, ground cloves, cumin, olives, roughly chopped boiled egg pieces and sultanas.  As you can see by the photos the pastry pattern to close up the empanadas varied quite a bit.  I had a friend over for dinner and she definitely had more finesse when closing them up.

Stay tuned for more trials.