Chicken and Black Bean Empanadas

Today's adventure is making empanadas - those tasty meat-filled pockets of love that come to us from South America. Now to really do justice to a savory empanada takes quite a bit of time and the filling is more often than not beef-based with raisins, chopped green olives and hard-boiled eggs infused with plenty of yummy spices. I've made "authentic" empanadas before, but it was pretty much an all day affair. Mrs. Hendo tires of beef easily (unimaginable in my universe) and I was being lazy today so I opted for a chicken based filling and simplified lots of other stuff too. This recipe is based on one from Dave Lieberman, host of Good Deal with Dave Lieberman on the Food Network.

Of course there are two basic parts to this recipe - the filling and the dough. We'll start with the filling which is really quite easy and it turned out incredibly tasty. Before you begin, you'll need about a cup and a half of cooked, shredded chicken. I poached a chicken breast how I always poach chicken - toss the breast in the bottom of a saucepan large enough that it's in a single layer. Cover with fat-free, low sodium chicken stock so that the stock covers the breast by at least a half-inch. Toss in a bay leaf and bring it to a boil. Reduce heat to a very low simmer and partially cover. Simmer for 10 minutes. Cover the pan, remove from heat, and let it stand for another 15 minutes. You'll have perfectly moist cooked chicken which can be used in all kinds of recipes.

Now you'll need one medium to large onion, diced fine, and at least four cloves of garlic also diced fine. The basic spice mixture is a teaspoon of ground cumin, a teaspoon and a half of dried oregano, a teaspoon of ground coriander seed, and about a half teaspoon of cayenne pepper.

Bring one-quarter cup of oil (I used grapeseed oil but olive oil works just as well) to heat in a saute pan and add the onion and garlic. Saute for about 5 minutes, stirring often.

Once the onions are mostly tender, add the spice mixture and saute for a few minutes longer.

Now we're ready to add the shredded chicken and the black beans. Use one can of black beans, drained but not rinsed. Add to the pan and heat through. For good measure I also tossed in about a teaspoon of dried red pepper flakes - they can never hurt!

Now comes the tedious part - making the dough. Now maybe you're lucky enough to have a good Latin market where you can buy pre-made empanada dough - no such luck in Moab. There are a zillion good recipes for empanada dough on the web but remember I said I was being lazy today. Hailey will likely be mortified at my solution - she lived in Buenos Aries for six moths last year so she knows real empanada dough from fake empanada dough. So what was my solution?  Ta da........

Something as simple as frozen puff pastry sheets. Hey don't laugh - instead of all that mixing and rising and kneading and rising and rolling and shaping.... all I did was pull the dough out of the freezer about an hour before I needed it and let it thaw on the kitchen counter.

You'll need to flour your work surface as we do need to roll out the pastry sheet. Out of the box they are a square about 10" by 10" - we want to turn that into a square of roughly 16" by 16".

Now we want to cut that into four-inch strips both ways, so that we end up with 16 4" by 4" squares.

Scoop a blob (that's a technical term) of filling into the center of each square.

Now the recipe didn't call for it, but I added some grated sharp cheddar cheese to each - cheese is your friend!

With a small finger-bowl of warm water, dampen two sides of the pastry along the edge to seal the pastry when you fold it to make a triangle. Which two sides you wonder? Just remember that you always want to be sealing "wet-to-dry".  Press the sealed edge with the times of a fork to ensure the seal and to give them that cool look. You'll end up with 16 little lovelies all ready to pop into the oven..

Now there are two sheets of puff pastry to the box and for the second sheet my laziness has really kicked in so I'm making only four big empanadas from the second sheet. Obviously these get more filling that the appetizer size ones in the batch of 16.

So we have two parchment-lined baking sheets ready to go. All we need now is to brush the empanadas with an egg wash which will give them a wonderful golden color as they bake.

Now since it's just Mrs. Hendo and I for dinner I'm only going to bake the four large ones. I'll cover the sheet of small ones with a piece of plastic wrap and place the whole thing into the freezer. Tomorrow I'll put the frozen ones into a zip-lock freezer bag and stow them back in the freezer to be baked at a later date.  Baking either the large ones or the small frozen ones is basically the same - 15-18 minutes at 400 degrees, until golden brown.

Glorious! Tasty, flaky, and perfect! Serve with a good salsa (we had a habanero-mango) and some sour cream! Delightful!