Empanaditas, island style

It's the last week of class so today instead of a lecture we had a shared lunch (we are a small class).
The only criteria was that we had to talk about how our dish related to globalisation and popular culture in the Pacific. I was going to make pineapple pies, a la Samoa, after finding this recipe on a blog. However the heavens weren't aligning and my first attempt was thwarted by a lack of coconut cream and the second by the internet going down meaning I couldn't access the recipe.

The clock was ticking and I only had a few hours left to conjure up something (I did nip to the shop for more coconut cream in the end), and so today a new recipe was born. Empanadas, island style.

Pastry

• 2 cups flour
• 50g butter
• 1/2 tsp salt 
• Water to mix

Rub the butter into the flour and salt mixture. Add water, stirring with a bread knife, until it forms a stiff dough. Put it in the fridge to chill while you make the fillings. 

That's my generic empanada pastry recipe. You can double or triple it depending on how many people you have to feed. 

Pineapple filling

• 1 400g can crushed pineapple in its own juice
• 1 generous tbsp custard powder
• 1 tsp sugar

Tip the tin of pineapple into a pan/pot. Add the custard powder and sugar and stir on a low heat until it thickens nicely. 

Luau filling

• 1 tin coconut cream
• 1 bunch silver beet (Swiss chard), stalks removed, chopped roughly
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 onion
• 1 cube vegetable stock
• splash of lime or lemon juice
• pinch of chili powder
• 1 tbsp fresh chopped coriander (or 1 tsp dried)
• 1 tbsp cornflour (mixed with a tiny bit of water)
• salt and pepper to taste

Chuck everything in a pot and stir over a low heat until it's thickened up nicely. 

Assembly

Assemble as you would regular empanadas - roll the pastry out on a floured bench, creating circles of pastry by tracing around a ramekin or plate of your choice with a sharp knife. Run a wet finger around the edge of the circle, place a tsp or tbsp (depending on the size of the circle) of filling into the centre and close by pinching around the edges. Press around the edge with a fork or fold like you would a cornish pasty (like a wee stegosaurus). 

Brush with a beaten egg and cook at 200 degrees C for 25 minutes or until golden brown. 

Dust the pineapple ones with icing sugar to serve. 

So easy and so delicious if I do say so myself. The class seemed to love them (yay) and not a single one was left on the plate...

The dishes the other students brought were so delicious too. It was a proper island feast with keke saina (Samoan biscuits), kumara cooked in coconut cream, coconut buns, taro chips, out of this world Hawaiian Ono (sp?) chicken, chop suey, surimi salad made with best foods mayo (of course) etc. It was a lot of fun. I'll miss this class. Speaking of which I should really go and finish my homework...

Palta rellena

One of the easiest and tastiest Peruvian dishes you can make is palta rellena which just means stuffed avocado. I whipped some up tonight as I cooked a chicken dish and of course the pommy flatmate couldn't eat that. 

Simply combine mayonaise, diced red onion, a tin of tuna (you can use shredded chicken instead), spring onion, a splash of lime or lemon juice and a pinch of chilli in a bowl. Half an avocado lengthwise and remove the stone. Spoon the tuna mayo mixture into the hole left by the stone. And that's it - it's so incredibly easy. Serve 1/2-1 avocados per person. It makes a great entree or light lunch. I didn't write down any measurements because the recipe comes from my head and I never measure anything (which makes writing up recipes for staff to follow at work soooo difficult!). 

I forgot to take a photo before it got scoffed, but here's a photo of a similar one my grandmother in Buenos Aires made. Her's has a different filling but it gives you the idea. Even better avocados were only 60c this week. Fingers crossed they get cheaper yet because I could happily eat one every day!

Love thy neighbour...

I love our neighbours today, even though the toddler (I assume) has buried my parsley plant in soil - as if the slugs/snails, cats and caterpillars weren't doing enough damage in the garden already :-(

The reason I love our neighbours is that they let us borrow their vacuum cleaner. Ours broke a few weeks ago so the carpet's been looking more than a little sorry. Now it's looking so clean! I got the flatmate to take them over a jar of our homemade kiwifruit jam to say thanks.

I've been thinking that it's nice that we get along with our neighbours and actually know who they are - it's so easy in the city to live in your own little bubble. Ours may be a little rough around the edges, what with their parties every week (but at least their singing to 10 guitars at 6am is in tune) but they are always really friendly and give free Maori lessons too. The kids are a lot of fun (when the toddler's not digging up my plants he helps me out with the watering can) and we steal borrow their cat from time to time as well.

It was a good job the floor finally got vacuumed because a couple of old friends came around for tea. We polished off a couple of bottles of some very good wine (Stoneleigh pinot gris and Mt Difficulty pinot noir), a fair amount of roast beef with all the trimmings, and chocolate cake with berry coulis. Delicious! It was such a great evening - I think we'll have to do it more often.

When we do roasts we do a separate tray of veges that don't touch the meat and also yorkshire puddings and a nut roast to make it just as exciting for our vegetarian flatmate - not that she was home this evening anyway.

Her nut roast (like a meatloaf shaped giant stuffing) recipe is pretty tasty but tonight we were down a couple of ingredients and it turned out to be one of those times where the 'thrown-together-bits-we-had-in-the-pantry' tasted even better than the real deal. Even carnivores like it served as a side dish.

• First boil one cup of dried pearl barley for around 10 minutes until softened. 
• In a food processor blend 1 cup mixed nuts, 1 onion, 2 slices bread, 2 eggs, salt/pepper, and dried herbs.
• Add the barley, 2 grated carrots and 1/2 cup of grated cheese. 
• Put it all in a loaf tin and put it in the oven with the roast to cook for one hour.
• Voila, something to serve to that awkward vegetarian that comes over for dinner (or that awkward vegetarian you live with 7 days a week, 365 days a year haha).

Fried eggs and green bananas

Multi-tasking. I think I've proven today that I am just as adept at this as any other woman.

• I drank a cup of tea while drying my hair and running late for uni. 
• I weighed up the pros and cons of borrowing a couple of lemons off a tree from a garden down the street while crossing the road without being struck by a car. (And no, I'm doing going to steal their fruit, even under the cover of darkness, though it's awfully tempting). 
• I cooked dinner while setting off the smoke alarm.
• And right now I'm typing a blog entry while watching a cheesy romantic comedy, drinking a Pisco sour, staring at the pile of washing I should be folding and putting off doing the washing up.

Speaking of Pisco sours, if there's a better way of using raw egg white, I haven't discovered it yet. 

On that note, the bottle's just about empty so if anyone knows where I can find Pisco in New Zealand, I'm all ears. 

I cooked a typical Peruvian meal tonight hence the Pisco sour for afters. Rice, fried green bananas and egg makes a simple and substantial meal that is sold in most cheap restaurants in Peru and better yet is normally the most budget friendly item on the menu. 

To jazz up the rice you can make tacu tacu instead. It's rice fried with beans and served in a pattie-shaped mound on the plate. In Peru it's one of the many ways of serving up the same chicken and rice but with a different name. 

There were no white beans in the pantry so I used chickpeas. I also switched out yellow chili sauce for chili powder. 

Here's the recipe:

• Boil white rice then drain it. 
• Fry one diced onion in a generous splosh of oil. Add the chili powder. 
• Add the cooked rice and beans to the pan. Stir fry on a high heat until it starts to get a bit of a brown skin. 
• While that's cooking in another pan fry chopped green banana in oil (one per person).
• Dish up the rice mixture (the tacu tacu) - like a big pancake-like pattie. Put the green banana on the side. 
• Quickly fry up one or two eggs per person and pile them on top.
• Enjoy.

Mine doesn't look all that pretty or taste as authentic as the real deal from a cheap roadside diner but it's filling and tasty enough. 

The proper recipe is in this great Peruvian cookbook The Food & Cooking of Peru by Flor Arcaya de Deliot that I plan to slowly cook my way through - a bit of a Julie Powell style challenge. It might take me a while to pluck up the courage to cook the tripe dishes though!

typical breakfast of spicy sausage and patacones
(fried banana) in Tarapoto, Peru

tacu tacu with chicken in Huanchaco, Peru

Lazy dinners

What do you do on those nights when you just can't be bothered cooking? Takeaways? Beans on toast? Or throw together something incredibly simple with ingredients you always have on hand?

Tonight's been one of those nights for me. Therefore dinner is one of the simplest meals in my repertoire - spag bol, the meatless kind.

Serves around 4 people

Put 2 pots of water on the stove top to boil. In one, boil 1 1/2 cups red lentils for 8-10 minutes. The other is for the pasta (used 1/2 bag budget spaghetti - that's 30 whole cents worth).

Chop a couple of cloves of garlic and one onion. Fry in a little oil. Then add the lentils, a can of tinned tomatoes, tomato paste, soy sauce, vegetable stock, worchestershire sauce, salt & pepper, dried herbs and either a little water or red wine. Chuck in any vegetables sitting in the fridge or freezer - tonight's had capsicum, frozen veges  and handful of baby spinach stirred through at the end. Top with cheese and voila, a cheap, easy and healthy meal that took bugger all time to prepare.

It's just missing the meat, really. The original recipe can be found on the Healthy Food Guide website. It was in the first issue I ever bought which has been well thumbed as it tells you all about how to cook pulses and beans  which saves a bundle being able to buy them dry rather than in a tin.

Snapper: in pictures

The parents dropped by last weekend bringing with them a stash of snapper fillets for my freezer. Yum! I cooked some up tonight with garlic chips on the side and a winter salad of cabbage, brocolli, spinach and celery with a blue cheese sauce. It was the first time I've battered a fish in anything other than beer. I had to hunt for a recipe due to not a drop of beer to be found in the house. Shock, horror. That was never a problem when flatting with males - there was at least a can of double brown to be found down the back of the fridge if you were truely desperate. The wine rack is looking rather full though, but wine-battered fish...??? Maybe experiment on something a little less yummy than snapper in case I fudge it up!

CRISPY BATTER - FROM THE EDMONDS COOKBOOK

1/4 cup cornflour

1/2 cup flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 cup milk

Oil for frying

Sift it into the bowl. Gradually whisk in milk until it forms a smooth batter (duh). Dip the fish into it, and fry until golden.

NB: paraphased that a bit.

No beer batter, but not half bad.

Anyway, last time I was up North we spent a day fishing up the Coromandel. Unfortunately I didn't catch A SINGLE THING!!!!! Luckily my dad caught enough for all of us. That's when I took these pictures. (No pictures of tonight's feed because I couldn't wait to dig in!)

Lesapī mo le sapasui

Samoan feed at a festival a couple of years ago

It's samoan language week so to celebrate I thought I'd share the chop suey recipe I got given in my samoan night class a couple of weeks ago.

ani ani, ani ani saina, fiu, ga'o, lialia, sosi, fasipovi/fasimoa/fasipoa'a, masima ma pepa

onion, garlic, ginger, oil, vermecelli, soy sauce, beef/chicken/pork, salt and pepper (to taste)

• Tipi ma fufulu le fasipovi. Fa'asosi ma tu'u i le pusa aisa. Cut and wash the meat. Soy sauce it (put on enough to induce a heart attack, and then add some more) and put it in the fridge.

• Falai le aniani, aniani saina, fiu ma le fasipovi ile ga'o. Fry the onion, garlic, ginger and meat in the oil.

• Sasa'a le vai vevela i le lialia. Pour the hot water on the vermicelli.

• E vela loa le fasipovi sasa'a iai le lialia ma saeu. When the meat is cooked, add the vermicelli and stir.

• Fa'apuna ma tī i lalo le ogaumu. Bring it to the boil then lower the heat. 

• E vela loa le lialia, tapē le ogaumu. When it's ready, turn off the heat.

 

Here's some I made with red cabbage, choko and mixed veges instead of meat.

If sapasui isn't your cup of tea check out Robert Oliver's Me'a Kai for some tasty, Pacific-inspired cooking. I so want that cookbook - if only it didn't come with a $70+ price tag (ouch!).

I'll leave you with this Samoan sunrise...because it is so darn pretty!

The lagoon at Tafitoala, taken by me 2 years ago.