Last week was my host parents' 20th wedding anniversary and also a four-day weekend, so there was quite a bit planned. Various extended family was coming into town and we were going to have a party on Saturday night. Ohhh yeahhh, a party. We did a lot of prep in the days leading up, making little dessert treats and decorating the house and whatnot. But my host mom, aunt, and grandma also took some time to make empanadas just for us. Well, they made a batch of big empanadas for the house on Thursday and then a lot of tiny little cheese empanadas for the party on Saturday. As always, I was fascinated watching the process. Here's what I sat in on Thursday afternoon:
So here's their system: they prepare the dough and filling beforehand (I didn't see that part). These are empanadas de pino, so the filling is a beef and onion combination, with hard-boiled eggs and sometimes olives (not this time). Grandma rolls each circle of dough to the appropriate thickness, then Yeny spoons the filling into the center, adds one little piece of hard-boiled egg to each, and folds the dough over (she has a little bowl of water that she dips her finger in to make the edge of the dough circle sticky when she folds it). Then Aunt Betty does the fork-pressing thing around the edges to make sure they are sealed adequately, because the next step (not shown here) is to fry them! Empanadas can either be baked or fried, and you see both pretty equally here in Chile, but Thursday they went with fried.
This process was repeated on Saturday, but with smaller dough circles and just cheese filling. Delicious! Another aunt also made several cakes (THERE WERE FOUR CAKES) and I helped out with some marshmallow shish-kabobs (see below!) and some little cookie balls called cocadas.
a festive touch!
So Saturday evening we all went to mass because Yeny and Vlady were receiving a special anniversary blessing from the priest, and afterwards everybody came back to the house. I was pretty amazed that they managed to fit over 50 people in the front room! We did a champagne toast (with lemon sorbet, very yummy) and ate all the little finger foods and then they took the tables out so that everybody could dance. I didn't take any pictures with my camera that night, partly because so many other people were taking pictures and partly because I just wanted to enjoy the party. I learned to dance to Chilean cumbia music (which all sounds the same to me, unfortunately), and was introduced to this song called La Escoba. Basically, it's just a very goofy, very fast-paced song, and whenever it comes on you have to go crazy and jump and holler and do conga lines and switch directions and start dance circles and it's just madness but it's so much fun! I wish I had a video of it, but just take a listen and picture a whole room of people acting silly:
And while I do know that more pictures were taken, they have not yet surfaced on social media so I have limited access to photos from the night! Here's one that captures the mood of the Escoba pretty well, and I will pass along more when they appear : )
That would be my host parents stuck in the middle of the Escoba mob. Happy Anniversary Yeny & Vlady! I had a fantastic time, 'twas a smashing success! : )
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