Useful website for Spanish and recipes

I am always on the look out for Spanish and Latin American recipes to try, and I have just seen a great one for Cuban Arroz con Pollo (Chicken with rice) at Learning Spanish is Fun which is a great Spanish blog and resource. I think cooking dishes and learning the words for different foods and ingredients is a great way to learn about a culture. The recipe is well written and illustrated with a really mouth watering photograph - you can tell that the blog's author, Sabrina, really has a passion for her subject matter. I'm really looking forward to trying out the recipe if I can track down some of the ingredients.

Cooking Empanadas

I have just got to give a mention to the website Empanadas Criollas. I had decided to do an empanada dinner party, and invited a few guests, assuming it would be easy enough to find plenty of empanada recipes online. For those that haven't tried them, empanadas are small pasties or pies with a variety of fillings which are a common snack throughout South America. The most common fillings are based on minced beef (carne picada) but there are many different options - chicken, fish. vegetable, cheese, and even a few sweet versions as well. My intitial recipe research on Google last night produced page after page of recipes for minced beef empanadas but no alternatives. I really wanted to have five or six different recipes, including a couple of vegetarian options. Eventually I stumbled on the site I mentioned above which has absolutely loads of different empanada recipes - sweet and savoury, meat, fish or veggie. It is all in Spanish, so it is a good opportunity to practice. Unless you are really fluent you will have to look up a few words for ingredients or cooking techniques, but that just helps with the learning.

Have fun cooking