Uruguayan Pascualina Recipe

What is it?

Pascualina or Pascualina pie is a very popular dish in Uruguay.
It is very simple to make, and is very nourishing and a great way to have children enjoy eating spinaches or chards.
It is a cake with dough covering it up and down, and in the middle the filling of spinaches and chards and eggs.

Recipe

Ingredients

For the dough:
The dough can be made in different ways, but we choose here the simplest and easiest.
2 cups of flour
½ cup milk
½ cup cooking oil
1 egg
3 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt

Put the flour in a bowl, then add the salt and baking powder, mix well, and add the liquid (milk, oil and beaten egg) and mix. Put it in a floured table and knead the dough until it is soft. Spread it out until it is very thin, then cover it with flour or with cornstarch. Fold it in two, and do the same procedure either with flour or cornstarch…(we prefer cornstarch). Fold it again, and do the same, you can go on doing this until you get a small bulky square of dough. Cut it in almost half, one part slightly bigger than the other. Spread again the bigger part and cover the baking dish with this dough. Then you put the filling inside and cover the filling with the second piece of dough after you spread it to the size you need to cover the baking dish, sealing the border from the down part with the upper part border.

Filling Ingredients:
1 big chard
2 spinaches
1 green pepper
1 onion
2 cloves of garlic
Salt, pepper, oregano
5 eggs
½ cup of grated cheese
Oil

Preparation:
Wash and put to boil the chard, when it is almost done, when the white parts of the chard leaves are tender, add the spinaches and let all this get done, in about five more minutes. Drop all into a colander and let the water get out of it. Meanwhile, fry the sliced onion, the sliced pepper and the cloves of garlic, sliced. Then drop into this pan where the onion mixture is, the chard and the spinaches mixture, let it mix well with the other preparation, take it off the fire, add salt, all the flavors, the cheese, one egg, and mix well. With a knife and fork, cut the chard and the spinach inside the pan, so it gets to be in very small pieces. Put this as a filling inside the baking dish and the half of the dough. Make four holes in the filling, and crush one egg inside each one. Cover very carefully with the second part of the dough and seal it. With a little brush, paint the dough over with milk, so it will get golden all over.
Take it to hot oven for about 30 minutes or until it is golden all even on top.
Enjoy it! There you have an easy recipe and very tasty! It goes with almost anything else, meat, pork, fish, and can be eaten cold or hot, as you wish. In Uruguay this recipe is done almost every week in most houses, as people love it!