Emergency hotline

Carmen showed up this afternoon with groceries and announced we were making empanadas from scratch. “How hard can it be?” she said, pulling out a crumpled piece of paper with her grandmother’s recipe scrawled in Spanish. Famous last words.

Emergency hotline

Two hours later and we look like we’ve been in a flour fight. The dough kept tearing, the filling kept leaking everywhere, and at one point Carmen accidentally dumped half the salt container into the mixture instead of the flour. We tried to salvage it by adding more flour, which just made everything worse.

Finally admitted defeat and called my mom, who laughed so hard I had to hold the phone away from my ear.

Calling for backup (aka my mom’s emergency empanada hotline)

She talked me through damage control while Carmen sat there picking dough out of her hair like some kind of tragic kitchen sculpture. Mom’s sending her actual recipe tomorrow, written in English this time.

Jake walked in during the worst of it and just stood there taking pictures instead of helping. At least someone’s documenting our culinary disasters for posterity. Pretty sure we’re ordering pizza tonight.