Overcoming fear...of puff pastry

The Fairy Queen never wanted to learn to cook. Why, she thought, full of teenage feminist fury, should some man expect her to make dinner every night?? So instead she learned to type (on a typewriter! Before white out!), thinking that if she could type, she would always be employable, and thus less likely to end up with that horrible man with his unreasonable dinner expectations.

And then she grew up. She was employable, and there were some nice men she dined with, but not one demanded regular home-cooked meals. Finally, when no one was looking and besides it was all her own idea, she thought she'd teach herself to cook, using Gourmet magazine. As newbies will, she skipped soup and rice and scrambled eggs and went straight for the hard stuff: pie, brioche, some insanely layered trifle thing her family fled from at the holidays. She once spent an entire Saturday collecting spices to make her own curry powder, ignoring the perfectly nice bottles of curry powder on the shelf, only to have the beau she was making curried vegetables for confess he'd be happier with a cheese sandwich (cold, not toasted, with plain yellow mustard).

And then she grew up some more and realized that just like many things, cooking took some practice. Soon she found that cooking and baking were pleasurable activities in and of themselves, that cookbooks were almost as good as novels, and that feeding people something nice that she'd made was one of the most satisfying things imaginable.

These days, she's a pretty good cook: bread, cake, soup, all manner of seafood and vegetable adventures, as Phrodaux is a pescatarian. But there was still one thing that seemed too daunting to contemplate: puff pastry. As soon as she encountered those words in a recipe, she turned the page and thought: too hard, too complicated, no way.

But then there was a Cooper encounter. Cooper Boone, of Cooper's Table and many other amazing endeavors. Seriously, check out this gorgeous site.  At a party much too fabulous for the likes of us, my assigned contribution was a fancy appetizer. I don't do fiddly bits very well, and when I heard there was puff pastry involved, I tried to appeal to Cooper's mercy. He was unmoved. In fact, he was stern: get with the program, girl (I may be paraphrasing here) and learn to love puff pastry!

As it turns out, I was busy doing other things at the very fancy party, but I did observe the construction of Puff Pastry Asparagus, spearheaded by a very lovely teenage girl who watches a lot of Food Network. I did get to apply the egg wash, though, and later, while bartending, I observed how people consumed vast quantities of these beauties in about 5 minutes.

So, upon my return to this coast and more normal life, I thought: Puff Pastry, bring it on. While perusing a paella cookbook on loan from Phrodaux's dad, I found a recipe for tuna empanadillas - baby empanadas. These are easy and amazing and make people swoon. They require exactly one box of Pepperidge Farm puff pastry sheets. They will not make you cry while you make them. And don't forget: everything is better with a cold PBR.