"empanadas" news and stories

Got leftover chicken? KitchenDaily expert Lauren Braun Costello fills puff pastry dough with the meat, along with green chiles, sautéed onions and spices, for a simple, savory Mexican-inspired supper. And for a Monday dinner, these empanadas make easing into the week a pleasure.

Chicken Empanadas Recipe

Watch Laura cook chicken empanadas in this how-to video.

Each week, we round up a selection of scrumptious links from our friends over at YumSugar. Here's what they've got cooking this week:

• Fill them, fold them and bake them -- empanadas will take care of your leftovers.
• Buttermilk moves beyond pancakes to ice cream.
• Get the sweet skinny on the Top Chef Just Desserts contestants.
• Hold off autumn with chicken smothered in raspberry BBQ sauce.
• There is more to fall recipes than apple pie, though apple pie is a must.
• Go nuts with some legume learning.
• Will your kitchen pass a food-safety inspection?

For the next three days we're going to feature Latin American flavors, starting with the empanada, one of those perfect pop-in-your mouth treats. It's hard not to love the baked turnovers of flaky pastry dough stuffed with your choice of beef, spicy chicken, Argentine sausage, shrimp, spinach, broccoli, tuna... or pretty much any combination you can think of.

Stevendepolo shot the photo of this dark and meaty combo of ground beef, hard-cooked eggs and black olives at a party to celebrate Chilean Independence Day (which is September 18). But we say, start eating those empanadas now! Try this Kitchen Daily recipe for a spicy beef variety with pipián (pumpkin seeds).

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Happy National Empanada Day!

Named after the Spanish term for "baking in pastry," these savory turnovers popular in Mexican, Spanish and Latin American cuisines typically involve circular dough folded in half to encompass a variety of veggie-meat fillings. Empanadas are presumed to have originated in Galicia, Spain, where the pastries essentially served as portable pieces of sealed pie for the working class.

Their contents vary regionally -- Argentinian empanadas are usually stuffed with ground beef seasoned with cumin, olives and sometimes raisins; Chilean varieties typically use a higher onion-to-beef content, due to the high cost of meat, while Bolivian ones often have a partially liquid filling.

Blogger TheStoneSoup experimented with the vegetarian empanada recipe (pictured above) by Bourke Street Bakery, using an eggplant-onion-chickpea base brightened by cilantro and goat cheese. Try the recipe yourself -- or suggest your favorite empanada fillings in the comments!

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'Nirmala's Edible Diary: A Hungry Traveler's Cookbook with Recipes from 14 Countries'
by Nirmala Narine
Photos by Diana DeLucia
Chronicle Books -- 2009
Buy it on Amazon

Nirmala Narine, founder of the spice company Nirmala's Kitchen, heads to South America in her latest cookbook, "Nirmala's Edible Diary," a colorful travelogue covering 14 countries, including the one of her birth, Guyana.

With snippets about her travels in each nation, Narine whets a reader's appetite and then satiates it with a handful of recipes.

See what we tested and whether the book's worth buying after the jump.