I find as I grow older, I fall more in love with everything that Orange County is. Along with the friendly weather, the soft imported sands (look it up, people), and genuine overall diversity, our little  metropolitan suburbia  has a not-so-secret, not so underground food cultural renaissance that has yet to be truly appreciated. The truth is before I met the empanadas of Orange County, I was okay living in a food rut. I was okay settling for my “ethnic” Taco Bell and my reassuring two-minute ramen. However, when it comes to something as sacred as food, that is no way to live, people. Food should be different, and edgy, and it should be real. Thankfully, Orange County’s got us covered. Much like the softly warm pastry, the history of the empanada itself is deep, complex, surprisingly significant, and  timeless. Born out of the shadows of its own 15th century Portuguese and Galician renaissance, the empanada was first noted in a 1520’s cookbook, and then carried by food-loving colonists to Latin America and the Philippines. So here we are almost half a century later, and yet the dish is still the same, still beloved, and still cherished by families across America. So we travelled, my colleagues and peers, deep into the heartland of Orange County to find authentic empanadas. At $2.50 a pop, Patagonia Empanadas offers beef, shrimp, tuna, and chicken empanadas, as well as spinach.  Personally, we preferred the beef empanadas. Of course we could just be biased; cows are better than chickens, after all. Patagonia’s empanadas are moist, very m-o-i-s-t, with a nice buttery contrast between the pastry shell and the meat filling, Our tasters only complained about one: the shrimp empanada.  They said the empanada tasted like “capers and vinegar”. If you are what you eat, then I would happily take living out my days in an oven with my fellow empanada friends.