Empanadas dinner

Empanadas Dinner

There is no doubt that Erasmus live is amazing. Nobody cares about any problems and we just have one common objective – enjoy our semester as much as we can, meet people from all over the world and have fun! That’s why everybody feels so happy. Nevertheless, it is not all about partying and getting drunk in the club (at least I think so). Sometimes people prefer having dinners, picnics, travelling together or whatever.

In my opinion, both type of activities are important parts of exchange programme because they both serve for different purposes. Firstly, you need to meet as many people as it is possible to identify with who you feel the most comfortable. And you can imagine that party is a perfect place for meeting new people and everything is the way easier. After you can make your friendships deeper by cooking, travelling, studying or just spending time together. Luckily, we had a bunch of these events during this semester where I got to know my closest friends. Today I would love to tell you about one of my favourite ones - Empanadas dinner that we had in the beginning of April.

We were speaking a lot about Empanadas since January with my friends. Juan already cooked it with other exchange students and when I saw the pictures from their dinner I wanted to try it so bad. In my story about London I already said that I bought one piece of empanadas in the small shop near the London Eye but of course it is not same to just buy it as cook it for real. Empanadas are pastry or bread baked or fried that is consumed in many countries in Latin Europe, in Latin America, in the United States and also in Asia. Empanadas are stuffed with a variety of meat, cheese, vegetable and other ingredients. Perfect thing is that my friend Juan is from Argentina so he perfectly knew how to make Empanadas. When I found out that we need the oven for preparation it was clear to me that we might organize the dinner at my house since not so many people here had oven in their apartment. My landlord is always nice so she agreed (even though I told her we would be around 13 people) and we started with organization!

Juan with Lucia did all shopping and they came into my house around 9 pm. This evening was also special because I decided to open my bottle of rum - Capitan Morgan that I took from the Czech Republic and surprisingly we did not even start drinking it since beginning of the semester! Everybody was in charge of something. I decided to make cocktails. It was a nice change to drink something different because normally we drink wine all the time here. Juan prepared the beef meat with onions and eggs. Paulina took care of rolling the dough (with the bottle of wine as we did not have any roller). After, she focused on the right shape of empanadas.

Lucia was preparing a starter which was a baguette with butter, spice and cheese warmed up in the oven.

The most important role had Andreas who recorded everybody and made a lot of videos. All these things took a lot of time so it was already 11 pm and we did not even start eating, as usually. Our starter disappeared really fast as we were all starving. Arnaud took his friend to my house and I guess that they were in charge of entertaining us because I remember that before the dinner they decided to have special rules such as asking about permission every time they wanted to do something or doing weird sounds before saying something. Fun as always with them. That evening we made a fire in our fireplace for the first time and it remembered me my home.

First problem arrived when we realized that we did not have enough dough and all shops were already closed. Fortunately, Katarina showed her cooking skills and she started to make her own dough. She just poured all flour on the kitchen unit and she used all my butter (that´s what I remember). It scared me when I saw our kitchen unit totally dirty full of flour, however, in the end the dough was delicious and we did not even recognize the difference between this one and the other one from the shop. Our oven baked so slowly so finally we started eating before midnight! Although I have to admit it was worth it! We had two different types of empanadas - with beef meat and with ham and cheese.

For me, it was absolutely delicious and I could eat empanadas every day. By writing this story I just realized that I am keen on tasting it again! A funny part was, that whole process of cooking took us about 3 hours but I guess that eating empanadas took us less than 20 minutes. Nevertheless, I hope that everybody loved it and they appreciated Juan´s amazing Argentinian food.

Fortunately, our dinner took place on Saturday so after finishing the food we freely continued to the clubs. Firstly, we went to La plage where some people had Triple Dragons. I would like to mention this special drink Triple Dragons because it is not a usual drink that you can have in every bar. I tried it only once but I still have a resolution to have it at least once before leaving Lille. Basically, Triple dragons are three shots that you drink and in the meantime you inhale vapours. I am not so sure which shots they serve but I think one of them is vodka. Never mind, I would recommend everybody to try it since the process is funny, the drink is extraordinary and the price is affordable (6 euros). To evaluate the bar La Plage I would give them a positive feedback. It is an interesting bar where there is sand on the ground, island decoration and it is half club and half bar. Unfortunately, for me it seems too small. After La Plage we went to the Shooters bar where we had whole set of shots for everybody except for Juan and Lucia who were on their way. I also like this bar because in the set they offer special shot with caramel flavour which is my favourite one. In the end, we all went to the bar Smile where we finished our night.

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