Halibut masa empanadas

Actual legal empanadas are made with wheat-flour dough, with a filling of beef, pork, chicken or fish, then baked or fried. They're much like the pasty in Britain. The dough here is made of masa.

I saw masa empanadas prepared with chicken filling and then deep-fried, but I did not want to do that. I pan-fried them briefly but not thoroughly and then steamed them lightly by drizzling water into the hot pan without soaking the dough. That cooked the portions that were not touching the pan. The effect is much like tamales without the corn husks and different from fish tacos because the masa is incompletely firmed, that is, the masa is not an actual tortilla. It needs a sauce. I used homemade tzatziki that I had on hand and that worked well. These are seasoned so extremely that it's impossible to identify halibut, so it's probably not the best use for this excellent fish. 

Masa is amazing. Mix approximately equal portions of hot water to masa flour, possibly a little more water as this batch here. It blends easily, much more easily than wheat flour. This batch is seasoned with cinnamon, cumin, cayenne, black pepper and salt. 

The halibut steak is diced into chunks. Such an awful thing to do to halibut. My only excuse here is that I have a ton of it, possibly a few pounds,  and I'm experimenting with something different. The cubes will cook and then be smashed, its own grain will determine the final texture

Seasoning is heated in a pan with butter, lots of it. Cinnamon, coriander powder, cumin powder, habanero powder, chipotle powder, cayenne powder, see there?, three chile types, black pepper, sea salt, celery salt. 

The halibut chunks are added and cooked gently and only briefly until it turns to from translucent to white-opaque and begins to flake.

The halibut chunks are smashed with a spoon. Japanese sake is added, but it can be any liquid. 

The tomato is added raw and off the heat. Tomato was planned, cucumber was impulse. 

The mixture was taste-tested, deemed insufficiently hot. After all that chile powder, even with habanero which will blow your hat off, it still wasn't quite there so I added this red chile which looks like a ripe jalapeño but is actually considerably hotter. 

The masa dough is pressed more thickly than ordinary tortillas. 

The masa disc is filled with two tablespoons of halibut mixture then folded and the edges pressed. The edges glue themselves together much more readily than wheat-flour dough. It's surprisingly easy.

I am delighted with how cooperative these things are. They didn't break apart, they didn't stick, they didn't dissolve when steamed, they did cook completely through. They're fast enough that the tomato and the cucumber inside stays raw. 

Now for something entirely unrelated to empanadas.

I finished my brother's pop-up card in time. I put off the project so long that I had to really slap it together. Pretty much like every school assignment I ever had. It's not like I'm not being creative in the procrastination period, after all I am thinking about it. If you would care to look, this card is a simple one-pager about ridiculous penguins doing perfectly unpenguiny things.

Update: At this point my brother has one son. His wife said, "Look, he made two baby penguins. That means we're going to have two children."

Turns out they did.

Several years later, he called and told me that he went out to dinner with friends for his birthday and he took his new card and all the previous cards that I sent to him and his wife in a bag including this one and showed them all to his friends.

I didn't realize I had sent them both so many. I had no idea the two had been saving them. They don't seem like the saving card type of people. He told me that his friends were amazed. They just shook their heads and told him, "your brother is out of his mind."