Empanadas and Bodega Food

Photo of Guava Empanadas just like the ones I started eating in the 1980s in North Tarrytown.

Latin Americans bodegas in North Tarrytown (now Sleepy Hollow) also sold foods I had never had before my senior year in high school. I became exposed to them while working weekends with my father. Dad worked the 3 to 11 evening shift at Sing Sing Prison as a guard. When I became old enough to swing a mob, vacuum, and operate a buffing machine with accuracy, I joined the family business. I humorously called it Opie and Sons because all three of us boys worked cleaning offices at sometime in our pre-high school graduation years. By my senior year in high school, Randy enlisted in the army and Marshall attended Howard University. As a result my dad and I spent lots of early weekend mornings cleaning offices, a church, a firehouse, and Frank’s Fuel. Frank’s lay in an industrial section of town along the banks of the Hudson River on the outskirts of a Hispanic neighborhood. This was on west side of route 9/Broadway. The side of town historically where black southern migrants and Latin American immigrants from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic lived. My dad with give me a couple of bucks to get some food. One day, I found this corner bodega up the street from the entrance to the GM plant that had really great fruit empanadas. They looked like Jamaican patties but smaller. These had delicious fruit fillings such as pineapple, apple, and my favorite, Guava. Empanadas have thicker and sweeter crust on the whole than Jamaican patties. I’d buy a couple of empanadas, a bag of sweet plantain chips, and a carton of orange juice. With that in my stomach, I’d make it through the second half of cleaning Frank’s Fuel. Here’s a link to a Guava empanada recipe: http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-detail.asp?recipe=656455