Let us now salute a few pinnacles of human achievement — the great pyramids of Egypt, the internal combustion engine, space travel, the Skip Intro feature on Netflix programs.
And meat pies.
Specifically, the small, hand-held meat pies covered in pastry and shaped like half moons that can be served as an appetizer or a main course. They’re portable, fairly easy to fix and boundlessly receptive to most any filling that tickles your fancy. Brown some ground beef, season it as you like, roll it in a flattened dollop of dough and fry it up.
Trade the ground beef for pork, chicken or lamb and experiment with the seasonings. Make a batch on Sunday afternoon and you’ve got lunch or supper for the rest of the week.
Avoiding fried food? Bake ’em.
Not into the whole meat thing? Stuff your pies with a gooey cheese like Monterey Jack and vegetables.
What we really want to get to here are empanadas, the Latin limb of the great meat pie family tree. Empanadas, the story goes, originally came from the Galicia region of Spain and neighboring Portugal. A cookbook from 1520 cites empanadas filled with seafood and it is believed that Spanish colonists introduced them to Latin America.
For more, plus how to make them at home, read Wednesday’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Style.