Kibinai ~Lithuanian Empanadas~ Chicken Pillows

Kibinai

Making these reminded me a lot of making chicken pillows with my mom.  It was one of our favorite recipes growing up... but my mom is not Lithuanian (my dad is).  I decided to use chicken as my meat- I think that a ground beef would make the best flavor in this dish.

Ingredients

3 lb meat

2 sticks of butter

3 lb flour

3-4 onions

3-4 eggs

200 gr sour cream

Marjoram

Salt & Pepper

Directions

1. Separate eggs into a bowl, reserve yolks in a separate cup.  Mix 1 tsp Salt and almost all of the sour cream into the whites.

2. In a separate bowl, use a pastry blender to cut room temperature butter into the flour.  Add the egg white mixture to this and mix it well.  This dough should be sticky.  Put it in the fridge overnight (or just an hour or 2).

3. Shred meat & onions, add to them the remaining cream and spices, salt and pepper.

4. Roll out pieces of the dough.  I found that what you want here is a relatively thin sheet of dough- I cheated towards the end and used my pasta roller to roll it to about 1/6-1/7" thick strips. If you have trouble with the dough being sticky & you're using a rolling pin, I suggest using more flour- you don't want your empanadas to be very sticky at this point.  You could use Saran wrap beneath and on top of the dough to prevent it from sticking to things. Cut out 3"-4" diameter circles with a tumbler.  Put a hunk of meat on each circle and crimp them together.  The crimping process is my favorite part- it's beautiful & you should watch people do this on youtube- it's quick and elegant. 

5. Beat the yolks and baste the pastries.

6. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

~I will be trying a meatless version soon- it has a cabbage and hard boiled egg filling~

-Enjoy!-