Pineapple

Last week Winco had pineapple on sale for a "come buy me!" price. I couldn't pass it up. Once I got the fruit home, however, I was immediately intimidated by having this big, yellow, acidic fruit to eat before it went bad. So I put it in the fridge for a few days and started thinking.

I disassembled the beast this morning. It was a juicy job that took me a bit of meticulous time, but completely worth it.

Once the pineapple was nicely diced, I sectioned it out. 2 cups for making pineapple rice, 2 cups for pineapple empanadas, and the extras for plain ol' eating!

I then set to making the empanada filling. Pineapple, a couple of tablespoons of sugar, 1 orange, and a couple of tablespoons to get everything started. Put that in a pot on the stove, and cook away! The fruit released a ton of water, and I stirred quite constantly for about 30 minutes to cook the moisture off. Once the fruit was tender and the water cooked off, I took the pot of the heat, ate some breakfast, and moved it to the fridge to wait until I felt ambitious again. There was an interlude of a few hours as Mary and I visited the Arcata Farmers Market (which is awesome!), and Michael and I took a trip to the beach with a couple of friends.

After our trip to the beach I came back home and started the empanada dough. I used roughly half whole wheat, half all-purpose flour. The dough also had butter, oil, water, and a little bit of vinegar in it. It was mixed until smooth, then put into the freezer to chill. I rolled the chilled dough into flat rounds, dropped 1-2 tablespoons of pineapple filling inside, and closed it up. The whole little pocket baked at 350 for nearly 30 minutes. They smelled pretty good coming out of the oven!

Sadly, I'm not sitting here raving about my wild success and imploring that everyone try one of my pineapple empanadas. I'm not impressed by this outcome. The dough lacks a certian sweetness (which could be due to the whole wheat), and the pineapple doens't have much of a kick left. So, chalk that one up as something I probably won't do again. I'm thinking apple empanadas next time...