Api and Pasteles

Tea time with the Astorga family

Our friends, the Astorgas, came over yesterday afternoon to hang out and have tea. Since it was a holiday yesterday, Jimena closed her pharmacy for the day and offered to teach me how to make a very traditional Bolivian snack, api and pasteles. Api is a sweet mashed corn drink served hot (sounds gross right? it's good) and pasteles are fried, hollow doughy pastries with cheese inside and powdered sugar on top...yummm. Javier and Jimena, along with their 2 kids, are building a house on the same street that our property is on and will one day be our very close neighbors. They are fairly recent Christians and really excited to be more involved in the Mallasilla Bible Church as well as our home group. After doing a tour of their partially finished home, we came back to our apartment and got ready for business. Jimena had brought all the ingredients and began mixing and flattening and filling with cheese. We did a little bit of food prep and a lot of talking. Since my in-laws brought my crock pot (thank you, thank you!), I had put on some chicken meatballs to cook, which made less work for tea time. I tried to fold over the little doughy pockets of cheesy goodness and make pretty little designs to join the two sides together, but they came out looking a bit lame. Practice makes perfect, I suppose. When we were almost done, Jimena brought out this fantastic plastic contraption where you lay the dough on it, fill it with cheese, and then close it like a little pocket book. It seals everything nicely with a perfect design. She was clueless how to use it, but I quickly explained and we realized that would have saved us a lot of work. The frying didn't take long and then we were ready to share the meal with our friends- api, pasteles, meatballs, and lemon bars...strange combo, right? My stomach churned over that one all night!

The finished product (there's the yellow and purple api in the mug)