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Recipe: argentine empanadas

Four weeks in Argentina as a field assistant on a GPS campaign is enough to know when you are in love with a cuisine. The Argentines know how to cook (they’re all Italians, for crying out loud) and dance and drink and smoke and drive like maniacs and look beautiful. I have some favorite foods from what we sampled in restaurants, from the grocery stores, and in the homes of so many kind hosts. The best part was the asados – argentine barbecues that literally had 7-8 courses of MEAT. First we start with morcillas (blood sausages) and chinchulines (organ meat sausages) and then various cuts of beef like lomo and bife de chorizo at the end. You work yourself up to the best cuts, but of course by then I was drunk from all of the flowing red wine and probably had colon cancer to boot. I also loved the morning dose of dulce de leche on tortas warmed over the parilla in camp in the morning.