Empanadas & Cueca

Saturday night: empanada and cueca dancing.  I managed to cut onions without crying and cut meat into tiny pieces, even though I was pretty incompetent with the knife. The woman showing us how to make empanadas mixed together a bunch of ingredients and poured about 3 pounds of flour on the counter. Add some eggs, sugar, yeast, water, and mush together.
BUT  BE CAREFUL: pouring hot water into a pot of oil is a bad idea.  It will cause a huge fire and will cause all observers to run in the opposite direction of the fire, which coincidentally happens to a corner with a door we don't notice. Definitely the biggest fire I have ever been close to.
After we all resurfaced from the corner of the kitchen, there was enough dough to make about 1000 empanadas. We kneaded the dough, and rolled it into the size of mini pizza pies, reminding me of when Bertucci's pizza gave out free dough for kids to play with.
We made empanadas de pino which have meat, onion, a piece of a hard boiled egg, and one olive (two is as lucky as finding a four-leaf clover) and another type of empanada with tomato, cheese and basil. Aside the fact that some of my empanadas were juicing out the sides, i'd say I did a pretty good job. We also made fried shrimp and cheese  empanadas. To cut out the shape we used the edge of a glass, and with this I was not so successful. We of course had to eat a substantial amount of our creations before off to our next adventure: cueca.

I wish I had pictures of this adventure. We went to, a guess it was a restaurant, where they have a band and a dance floor to dance cueca, a dance which I mentioned before is supposed to imitate a rooster courting a hen. Evelyn, our program director found people at the next table over to "teach" us cueca, and once we had our handkerchiefs we were ready to go. I of course had to be the first person to dance, and awkwardly waved my handkerchief in the air jump-hopping in circles. Sometimes I'd spin to switch things up... While there is a real technique to cueca, obviously I have no idea how it is actually done.
After many hours of "dancing" (it was lucky I had my handkerchief or otherwise I would have looked even dumber,) and an extremely expensive taxi ride, I ended up home around 4:30 am. not a bad saturday night.