Empanadas

I've been in an experimenting mood lately. Last week I made up my own chicken chimichanga recipe, and it was pretty amazing. This week, I plan to experiment with empanadas. (Empanadas were one of my favorite foods on my mission.) Here's the recipe I plan to use. (It's a combination of a taco recipe that I got from LeiLani's mom year's ago, plus an easy empanada recipe that I found online.)

PREP: 3 or 4 hours before you plan to start cooking, put out Rhodes rolls to rise.

Filling Ingredients:

• 1 lb. ground beef
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 large potato
• 1 small onion
• 1 can green beans, diced
• 2 carrots, diced
• crushed chili
• salt
• 1 1/2 t. chili powder

Directions:

• To prepare the filling: Brown meat. Add garlic and onions. Add carrots and potatoes. Add about 1/8 c. water and lots of salt. Add chili powder. Stir and let cook on low-medium for about 10 minutes. Add green beans. Stir and let cook on medium 5-7 minutes. Add crushed chili.
• To prepare the empanadas: Take your Rhodes rolls that have raised and roll them out paper thin. Put taco filling on half of each piece of dough, and fold over. Use a fork to close up the edges (like you would with a pie crust). Bake in the oven for about 15 minutes.

I will let you know how it turns out! It probably won't be very authentic, but it's bound to taste good--I hope. :)

Note: If you're unfamiliar with empanadas, they look something like this:

On my mission, I usually ate them stuffed with cheese, but you can also get them filled with meat and veggies (which is what I'm attempting here), or they make special sweet empanadas that are filled with manjar (kind of like caramel).

Another Note: This concept could also be adapted to make calzones. Instead of stuffing with the taco filling, you could try pizza sauce, mozarella cheese, and pizza toppings (diced pepperoni, sausage, diced peppers, etc.). If the empanadas work out, I'll try the calzones variation next week. :)