Spicy Chicken Empanadas

Bake spicy chicken empanadas for a quick and easy appetizer.

Let’s start with chicken empanadas. I love this I just love them. And you know why? Because it has dough, it has cream cheese and it has chicken and it has cheese all of my favorite foods. So we’re going start with three cups of chicken and to that we’re going to one eight ounce package of cheddar and jack cheese. We’re going to add a fourth of a teaspoon of diced red bell pepper. We’re going to add on jalapeño this has been diced and I've seeded tis one so it won't be quite as hot as it would be if we had left those seeds in. And to this I'm going to add a tablespoon of cumin and that’s going to give it a nice spicy flavor. And I'm going to add a little salt, a little fresh ground pepper and now I'm going to add a four ounce block of cream cheese. And we’re just going to mix this together. We want our mixture to be nice and stiff. We don’t want it runny because we’re going to put this in the pastry and we’re going to baked them. And we don’t want all the insides running out. So this is going to be nice and stiff. And I think the best way to do this is maybe just kind of get in with your hands and the heat from hands will soften your cheese and your cream cheese. So that worked nicely you can see the warmth from my hands, soften that cream cheese and the cheese. And that made it real, real easy to mixed up. All right, now we’re fixed to use another one of favorite ingredients you know. Out of all the convenient foods this is definitely up there at the top as far I'm concern. And I am using refrigerated pie crust dough. And this work just wonderful for fried pies, for regular pies and then I'm going to take a biscuit cutter and you can see that I'm using a rather large biscuit cutter because by the time we fold our empanadas in half they're going to get a lot smaller. So we just going to come in and cut our dough out. In circles, just like that. Okay, so we’re just going to come in here and then take a little filling and we’re not going to be able to put much even though I'm very tempted to over fill it, I'm going to try not to do that. And I'm going to get just a little bit of water. And I'm just going to run around the edge of that so that that water will damp in my crust and make it adhere to each other. And we’re going to just dip our fork back into our flour. We’re just going to make sure that we’ve got it sealed very, very well. And I'm going to just give our cookie sheet just a light spray because when I go to remove this, I don’t want them to stick. So you can see what a easy, easy process this is and you can do this part up earlier in the day and then have them all ready to pop into your oven. But the beauty about this particular dish is you can use whatever left over meat you have. If you have some pot roast that you got from the night before it would be fabulous in this. Really, kind of whatever you’ve got left in your refrigerator. All right, a little bit more and you can see, you know, how quick and easy this just moves right along. This is one of those great dishes that the children can get in and help you with. There is no way that they can hurt themselves because there is nothing dangerous at all to the dish, no cooking involved after you get your chicken together. So now, its time for us to beat up an egg and brush it over our pie crust and if you go to your refrigerator to grab an egg and you're out, don’t worry about it you can use melted butter or you can use heavy cream or milk if you have it whichever you have. But this does make it so pretty and shinny. And just makes it just a little bit more appetizing looking. So we’re going to put this in a 400 degree preheated oven and we’re going to bake them for about 15 minutes.