How to Do Empanadas Yourself

Ship: Johann Smidt
Date: 14.01.2026
Position: Costa Rica
Nautical position: /
Etmal: /
Total: 6836 nm

Did you ever try empanadas? No, different question – did you ever make them yourself? Well, me neither until today in our fantastic cooking class that our teachers gave us. I can assure you that self-made things always taste the best!!

So first, I am going to describe to you guys how to make typical Middle American food yourself. The ingredients are corn flour (masa de maíz), Parmesan cheese (queso), warm water (agua caliente) and a bit of salt (sal) and the dough is ready for the stuffing (relleno en español).

We filled it with white cheese and beans (frijoles) and then fried the raw empanadas in hot oil (aceite de girasol) in two pans. As I took out the golden-brown empanadas, I really felt like working at McDonald’s or KFC, because the oil was splashing in drops onto our clothes and in the end we smelled like French fries. But nevertheless, the outcome was definitely worth it and it tasted delicious.

After the cooking class, we immediately continued with our program because the language school had organized a dance class in its yard just for us. The teacher Marco and his assistant introduced themselves and showed us how to dance different Latin dances like bachata or salsa. We all tried our best and most of us girls managed to do the turn without making too many steps (solo cuatro!!!).

In the evening, we sat around the campfire that the teachers had prepared for our group, talked about the day and ate pizza for dinner. Even though we have classes here and a lot of program, it really is very relaxing (relajado) and we wouldn’t say no to staying here one week longer than planned.

Personally, I will miss my Spanish teacher Andrea very much because she is just a sweetheart and taught us much more than just grammatical structures. We played many juegos de mesa and learned, for example, the futuro simple as we drew our perfect future city outside in the garden on DIN A2 paper and described our paintings afterwards with the help of the new tense.

For me, she was the nicest teacher I ever had in my school career <33

Greetings:

Nepomuk: Liebes Piepsen, alles Gute zum Geburtstag! Ich hoffe, Du bekommst diese Grüße pünktlich und hast einen herrlichen Tag. Genieß‘ es! Ich denke sehr an Dich! Hoch sollst Du leben! Ein gesegnetes neues Lebensjahr wünsche ich Dir!

Ylva: Hallo ihr da drüben! Es war richtig schön, wieder mit euch zu telefonieren, hab‘ euch alle sehr lieb!!