A quick tour to Puerto Rico

When I opened the fridge to see what meat I had pulled out of the freezer last night, it turned out that it was ground venison. Extra lean venison. And venison is lean to begin with. Also staring me in the face was a container of olive salad that probably needed to be eaten. What am I going to make with olives and ground LEAN venison?

Turns out a trip to a more sunny place was exactly what I needed, in the form of Empanadas de Picadillo. I think almost every culture has some kind of dough or pastry wrapped around a filling. There's the Chinese shu mai, the Polish pierogies, the Italian stuffed pastas, the French filled pastries, the English have pasties, and the list goes on and on. In Latino counties, one of the best known filled dough is empanadas. I didn't grow up eating picadillo, but I ran into it as soon as I started eating Cuban and Puerto Rican food. This mix of ground meat, olives, raisins, and herbs and spices is a mix of salty, sweet, and briny that has your mouth wondering what flavor is next! Wrap that in a flaky pastry dough and you've got a portable snack that really hits the spot.

I looked up a lot of recipes for picadillo, and found that the ones that appealed to me most were Puerto Rican. They all had ground meat, olives, raisins, and sofrito (onions, peppers, garlic, tomatoes) in common, but had a lot of differences in the amounts. No recipe credits today because I looked at so many and kind of made up my own. I went with what I had, and added a few things along the way, starting with adding a minced carrot to the sofrito. So I guess it was a cross between a mirepoix and a sofrito. I also didn't have enough raisins, so I diced up a few dried apricots to make up the difference. After I fried it all up with the venison, it looked like this:

In the background, you can see my notebook with the ingredients for the picadillo and for the pastry dough. The dough was a pretty standard one of flour, butter, water, an egg, and some salt. Combined, kneaded, rested in the fridge, then rolled out and stuffed them. After baking them up, they came out like this:

You can see there were a couple of sizes - the large one was the last of the dough scraps recombined and roughly shaped.

What went well: The filling was flavorful and juicy, and the pastry dough was flaky and crisp.
What could have been better: I'd roll the pastry out thinner and bigger next time. There was not quite enough filling in the smaller ones for the amount of pastry dough.

All in all, a successful trip to the island. Today Walter's smoking a pork shoulder, so that'll be the feature tonight! Now, what side dishes should I make???