A friend mentioned making empanadas with her kids on her blog awhile back, and I said “Hey! Meat pies! That sounds good, we’ll do that.” I looked around and snarfed a dough recipe from Smitten Kitchen, one of my favorite food blogs. I stuffed the pies with ground beef cooked with a packet fajita spices and grated cheese. I cut the recipe in half, and we still had enough for dinner for us one night (and we weren’t shy about eating that night) and lunch for Jeff for two more days. These were excellent; the dough was flaky and flavorful, they were fun to eat, and they traveled well in Jeff’s lunch. He really liked them. These would be totally easy to customize, and would be fantastic for a group dinner and a creative alternative to meals like top-your-own pizza. This is a new recipe that we’ll be making again.

However, this recipe is a prime example of why it’s important to read the whole recipe all the way through more than once before you start cooking. I glanced through the recipe, said “Oh, ok, it’s just a pastry dough like I’d use for chicken pie or something, no big deal” and went on my merry way until it was time to start dinner. I’m mixing and mixing and get to the part that says “Form dough into two flat rectangles and chill them, each wrapped in plastic wrap, at least 1 hour.” I can tell you that you can skip the plastic wrap and just throw the dough in some tupperware, but it’s got to sit in the fridge at least an hour, preferably longer. I hadn’t allowed enough time for this because I hadn’t read the whole recipe all the way through. I let it sit for about 45 minutes before I said “Okay, good enough, we need to eat dinner.” The dough was fiddly and not terribly structurally sound, but I got the pies made up, and dinner was tasty. However, the dough that sat in the fridge overnight and got turned into Jeff’s lunches was much easier to handle.

The reason I’m going on about this point is that I’m hoping to encourage people to cook more and to try new recipes, and I’d say one of the leading causes of cooking failure, especially with new recipes, is not reading the instructions. I beat the dough into submission and got it to do what I wanted to do, but it was very fiddly, and if I were a new cook, it would have been easier to chuck the whole thing in the trash.

Anyhow, lecture over. Dinner was delicious, and maybe one day, I’ll remember to follow my own advice. :)