Chicken Enchiladas

Growing up in New England, we weren't exactly surrounded by a wealth of Mexican food options. It was basically Taco Bell and that was it. Surprisingly I found a great Mexican restaurant in Westport, CT, where my college roommates and I would go for margaritas and tasty food. It was there that I first fell in love with enchiladas. I have yet to return to that little Mexican restaurants since moving to SoCal, so I am not sure if their enchiladas would still compare the wealth of tasty options I have here.

As enchiladas remain one of my favorite Mexican dishes, I decided to attempt making them for the second time ever. My first attempt was a Tyler Florence recipe, that was quite good but I wanted to try something that was a little more traditional and also wanted to make my own chile sauce. I found this recipe on the Simply Recipes blog and liked the sound of it because it was very straight forward and had a recipe for red chile sauce. While the blogger made it clear that you could use the store bought version, everyone who knows me, knows I am all about making things from scratch. I made a few tweaks along the way and they are noted in red in the recipe below.

Mom's Chicken Enchilada Recipe
from Elise at Simply Recipes

Ingredients
1 small onion, chopped (about a cup) (I doubled the sauce so used approx 2 cups of onion)
Vegetable oil - grapeseed or olive
2 small cloves garlic, minced (3 large cloves of garlic)
1 14.5-ounce can tomatoes, preferably fire-roasted if you can get it (29 oz can of tomato puree)
2 Tbsp red chili powder (I ended up using upwards of 3 Tbsps, probably would have used more if I hadn't run out)
1 teaspoon sugar (2 tsp)
1/2 cup to a cup of water
12 corn tortillas
Grapeseed oil, peanut oil or canola oil - a high smoke point vegetable oil
2-3 cups of cooked chicken, shredded or chopped (I roasted boneless chicken breast on a baking sheet with oil, garlic salt and pepper at 350F for approx 3o mins and then shredded it)
Salt
2 cups grated cheese (about 1/3 lb)

Method
1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. (Once heated I put the chicken in to cook while I prepared the sauce)
2. Prepare the sauce. Coat a large skillet with oil and sauté the onions on medium heat until translucent, a few minutes. Add the garlic for a minute more. While the onions are cooking, purée the canned tomatoes in a blender. (I skipped this step as I had bought tomato puree) Add the tomatoes to the onions and garlic. Bring to a low simmer. Start adding the chili powder, one teaspoon at a time, tasting after each addition, until you get to the desired level of heat and chili flavor. For us that's around 2 Tablespoons. (As noted above I used approx 3 Tbsp and the flavor was very good, but I definitely would have used at least a Tbsp more for some added heat) But it depends on your taste and how strong the chili powder is that you are using. Note that the tortillas and chicken will absorb some of the heat, so allow for that and let it be a little bit spicier than what you want in the finished dish. Add a teaspoon of sugar if necessary to cut down on the acid from the tomatoes. (I'm not sure if was the because I used tomato puree instead of pureeing my own tomatoes, but this step was definitely necessary to neutralize the acid and strong tomato flavor) You want more of the taste of the chili and less of the tomatoes for this sauce. As the sauce simmers, dilute it with water to keep it from getting to thick as it simmers. (This step was also very necessary, I don't think I used enough water because my sauce was still a bit too think, but I was concerned about watering it down too much and losing the spice of the chile) Remove from heat. Alternatively, use a prepared canned enchilada sauce, which can be perfectly fine.
3. Mix in 1/4 cup of the sauce with the cooked chicken, and a 1/4 cup of the cheese. Sprinkle with a little salt. Set aside.
4. Prepare the tortillas. There are 2 basic ways to prepare the tortillas - the traditional way of dipping them in the sauce and heating them individually, and my mom's way when she is trying to cut down on the fat.
First the traditional way. Heat a small light skillet on med-high heat. Add a teaspoon of oil (high smoke point oil as indicated above, we use grapeseed oil) to coat the pan. Dip a tortilla in the sauce to coat the tortilla with sauce on both sides. Place the tortilla in the skillet and heat for a few seconds, until the tortilla begin to show some air bubbles. Use a metal spatula to flip to the other side for a few more seconds. Set aside on a plate. Repeat with remaining tortillas. Proceed to the step 5. (I used the traditional way)
For my mom's low-fat method of heating up the tortillas, she places a small amount of oil in the skillet to coat the pan. Add a tortilla, flip it to its other side. Then add another tortilla on top of the first to soak up some of the excess oil. Flip them both together and add yet another tortilla. Keep adding them wherever there seems to be some excess oil. The idea is to heat the tortillas and soften them with the minimum amount of oil. As the tortillas become soft and heated, remove them to a paper towel to soak up even more excess oil. If you find you need more oil in the pan, add it. With this method, you do NOT get the chili flavor infused in the tortillas.
5. Assemble the enchiladas. Use an 8x12 inch pyrex baking dish. Place a couple spoonfuls of the chicken mixture in the center of a tortilla and roll it up. Place in the baking dish and repeat until all dozen of your tortillas are neatly placed in rows in the casserole dish. Cover the tortillas rolls with the remaining sauce. Sprinkle with the remaining grated cheese.
6. Place in the oven and cook for 10 minutes, or until cheese is bubbly. Use a metal spatula to serve. Serve with thinly sliced iceberg lettuce that has been seasoned with vinegar and salt (no oil), guacamole or avocado slices, and sour cream. Garnish with cilantro.

Serves 4.

As noted above my chile sauce was a bit thick, this made dunking and frying the tortilla's a bit more messy than I think it should be. I really liked the flavor of the chile sauce and would make it again, first making sure I have enough chile powder and then continually adding water to thin it out. I also think if you follow the recipe and use canned whole tomatoes and puree then yourself the sauce will start out thinner than mine did. I also would mix a bit more sauce with the chicken as everything was a bit dry, but again I think alot of this can be attributed to the thickness of the sauce.

I served the enchiladas with vegetarian refried black beans. I love refried beans and I always do the same thing with them. I put a can of refried beans in a pot over medium heat and as they start to heat up I add between 1/4 cup to 1/2 cup of salsa to add flavor. I will often add cheese too, but didn't last night as there was plenty on the enchiladas.

Overall this was a tasty meal that I will try to make again, taking into account what I learned this time. Until I am more proficient at enchiladas, I think it will be relegated to a weekend meal as it took a little longer than I normally like for a weeknight meal. For me to make everything it took just over an hour which isn't too bad but when I get home from work between 7:30p and 8p, it puts dinner a bit late. If I use canned sauce and leftover chicken it will come together alot more quickly.

Peach Raspberry Crisp

As I'm new to the food blog thing. I am not yet in the habit of taking pictures of the things I make. I remembered with the desert I made this weekend, of course after half of it was eaten. That's why you are only getting a picture of the corner!

Anyway, I wanted to make something that took advantage of the delicious fruits that are currently in season, specifically my two favorites: peaches and raspberries. I looked for crisp and crumble recipes online that were specific to peaches and raspberries, but they all used oatmeal. While oatmeal is quite tasty and I have had many a wonderful dessert using it, my brother and I had a conversation earlier in the week about how we prefer the way our dad makes apple crisp, using a Fannie Farmer recipe that uses no oatmeal. So rather than reinvent the wheel I decided to make an old favorite and share it with everyone because we always get so many complements on it.

Here is the Apple Crisp recipe from the Fannie Farmer cookbook. My changes are in red:

5 cups peeled, cored, sliced apples - I used approx 4 cups of peeled sliced peached & 1 cup of fresh raspberries, this filled a 9x9 baking dish nicely

1/2 cup water - As the peaches and raspberries are quite juicy I omitted the water

3/4 cup flour - I used 1 1/8 cups of flour (multiplied the recipe by 1.5)

1 cup sugar - I used 1 1/2 cups of sugar

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon - I used 3/4 tsp

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, cut in small pieces - I used 3/4 cup of butter, make sure the butter stays cold until using it

1. Preheat the oven to 350F.

2. Butter a 1 1/2 quart baking dish (I used a 9x9 square pyrex baking dish), and spread the apples (peaches and raspberries) in it.

3. Sprinkle with 1/2 cup water. (again with such juicy fruit the additional water isn't neccessary)

4. Combine the flour, sugar, cinnamon, and salt in a bowl.

5. Add butter. With your fingers, rub butter into other ingredients until mixture resembles coarse crumbs.

6. Spread mixture evenly over apples (the fruit).

7. Bake 30 minutes or until the crust is browned.

According to my dad, the key to getting the crust super brown, yummy and crispy is to place the oven rack one higher than you would normally bake, approximately third up from the bottom of the oven. This alows the bottom heat used to bake to reflect off the top of the oven and onto the crisp mixture allowing it to crisp up and brown nicely. This was the first time I tried baking it this way and it turned out perfectly, as you can see in the photo.

Of course this recipe is also excellent with apples, and a favorite in my family.

Enjoy!

Poppers on the Grill

With the NBA finals going on over the last few weeks and being a hardcore Boston fan, there has been alot of game watching at my place. The food that goes along with sports is as much of the experience for me as the actual game. This past Sunday during Game 5 in LA I decided to make some game day vittles for my brother and I to enjoy. Aside from some BBQ chicken with Stubbs Honey Bourbon sauce (I highly recommend Stubbs!), and chips with salsa & guac, I decided to test out a recipe my boyfriend uses for Jalapeno Poppers on the grill. Of course this recipe includes bacon, as he's Canadian and I think most things he likes include some form of bacon!

RECIPE

This recipe makes 12 tasty poppers

6 fresh jalapenos
1 8 oz tub of cream cheese (I used Lite)
12 strips of bacon
toothpicks

1.Wash and dry the peppers. Then half the jalapenos and remove all of the seeds and veins. Be careful with touching your eyes or anything sensitive for a day or two after. The pepper juice stays with you for a bit, even if you wash your hand multiple times! (I learned this the hard way)
2. Fill each half pepper with cream cheese
3. Cut the bacon strips in half, so they are easier to wrap around each pepper.
4. Wrap each pepper with the bacon, they usually take a full strip, then secure the bacon with a toothpick
5. Turn the grill on low heat. Place the pepper, cream cheese side up on the grill. Cook for 30-40 mins until the bacon crisps up.

These are a little time consuming for a quick treat, especially when you see how quickly they disappear. But they are very tasty and well worth it. I may consider trying them with a mix of cream cheese and cheddar cheese next time, just to add a little something extra.

Enjoy!!!

Greek Night

What first inspired me to start a blog, is the cooking club I started. I love to cook and have some friends who share my love of food and cooking. So I thought what better way to share this than to start a club were a few friends could get together and try new recipes out on each other. As we cooked and ate that night we talked about how a blog is a great way to share thoughts on the recipes we made at the very least with each other, but also with anyone else who is interested. We also had lofty goals of including pictures of what we made. This post unfortunately won't have any, as we decided this after most of the food was gone!

For our first meeting we decided to tackle Greek cuisine, something I have always loved and wanted to actually try to cook. Each person picked a recipe to make. On the menu was Saganaki, Baba Ghanoush, Spanakopita and Moussaka. All very traditional Greek dishes, but stuff none of us had tried to make before.

I chose to make Moussaka as I had found a wonderful Greek food blog with a moussaka recipe that claimed to be the best. Of course with such lofty claims I had to try it out. Following it the recipe and link to the blog where i pulled it from

http://greekgourmand.blogspot.com/2008/05/marvellous-moussaka.html

Note: this Moussaka recipe is intended to fill two 1400 ml (1.5 quarts) loaf pans, or one medium sized rectangular deep-walled baking pan. I used 2 Pyrex glass loaf pans which explain the double-edged downward narrowing appearance of my Moussaka slice in the photo above. 


Recipe: 
1 ½ lbs. regular ground veal 
2 lbs. potatoes (preferably yellow-fleshed) 
2 medium-large eggplants 
2 medium sized white onions, diced 
1 ½ cups of Greek extra-virgin olive oil 
1 ½ tablespoons tomato paste 
1 teaspoon of garlic powder 
½ cup white wine
Salt and pepper to taste 


For the White Sauce (béchamel):
4 cups of cold milk 
1 cup of flour 
¾ cup of butter 
2 eggs 
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg 
Salt, pepper 


Preparation: 
1. Peel potatoes and wash eggplants. 
2. Slice off stalk and bottom ends of eggplant, slice useable portions of ends into thin discs. 
3. Thinly slice the eggplants lengthwise. Make sure to cut the slices relatively thin as they will thus absorb less olive oil when fried and result in an overall less oily finished product. [My Moussaka is never oily and this is part of the reason.] 
4. Place eggplant slices in a large mixing bowl filled with salty water and leave to soak for 15 minutes, then remove eggplant from water and leave to dry well on outspread towel(s). The eggplant must be dried well before being fried to avoid hot oil pops and splatters. 
5. Slice potatoes into relatively thin lengthwise slices. 
6. Over a medium heat add a ¼ cup of the olive oil to a large frying pan and proceed to fry the sliced potato discs in batches, laying them out flat in the bottom of the pan, ensuring to turn each over to cook both sides. The potato slices should be fried until slightly soft. When the potato slices are cooked, remove from the hot oil and place them on spread paper towel(s) for them to drain 
7. Once the potatoes are done, using the same frying pan (though you may need to clean it), add a ¼ cup of olive oil and over a medium heat start frying the eggplant slices in batches. You will need to keep adding more olive oil to the pan as you go with each batch of eggplant slices as they do absorb it rapidly. This is where the virtue of thin slices makes itself known… The thinner slices need less time in the pan to soften and they absorb less oil before seeping it back into the pan, thus less oil is required to fry them overall. 
8. As with the potato slices, when the eggplant slices are soft and almost translucent from the oil absorption, remove each batch from the hot oil and place them on spread paper towel(s) for them to drain well. 
9. Once the eggplant slices are cooked, add the remaining olive oil (or about a ¼ cup) to the same frying pan - which likely will not require cleaning this time - and proceed to sauté the diced onion until soft. 
10. Add ground veal to the onions in the frying pan and mix well to break up the meat. Stir meat continuously over a medium-high heat for 10 minutes, making sure to brown all the meat well. 
11. Add wine, garlic powder, salt and pepper to the pan and stir well to mix. 
12. Dilute tomato paste in 1 cup of water and add to pan, and when the mixture boils reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer uncovered for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. The meat mix needs to simmer long enough to reduce the liquid in the pan and for the meat to drink up the sauce completely, without drying out. 
13. Grease the sides and bottoms of your pan(s) with olive oil and cover the bottom(s) completely with a layer of potato discs; overlap where necessary to ensure as complete a covering as possible though make sure not to use up all the potatoes for the bottom(s) alone; you will probably require a little more than half the potato slices to ensure a complete bottom cover. 
14. Using a spatula, spoon out a little more than half of the meat mixture and spread to cover the bottom potato layer(s) evenly. 
15. Cover meat layer(s) with remaining potato discs as best as possible, then cover this potato layer completely with a layer of eggplant slices, overlapping as necessary to ensure complete coverage, right to the sides of the pan. 
16. Spread remaining meat mixture out evenly to cover the eggplant layer and using the spatula press down on the layers (though not too hard) to compact them in order to ensure sufficient room for the thick layer of white sauce (béchamel) to come. 


How to prepare the white sauce (béchamel): 
1. Melt butter in a medium sized saucepan over a medium-low heat. 
2. When butter is melted, thoroughly incorporate the flour in stages using a whisk and continuously stirring for about 5 minutes. (Note: As this can be an arduous task due to the need for sustained rapid stirring and the thickening of the sauce, I recommend using a wand blender with a whisk attachment for making the white sauce). 
3. Once the flour is fully incorporated, slowly, in a thin but steady stream, add the 4 cups of milk while stirring continuously and turn up the heat slightly to bring the thick sauce to a boil and then remove the saucepan from the heat.
4. Add nutmeg, salt and pepper and mix sauce well. 
5. Beat the eggs and slowly add them to the sauce making sure to combine well. 
6. Pour a thick layer of white sauce into baking pan(s) completely covering the top meat sauce layer. If necessary, spread white sauce evenly with the bottom of a large spoon to ensure a uniform surface. 
7. Place filled baking pan(s) into an oven pre-heated to 350° F. (180° C.) and bake for 40 minutes or until the top is nicely browned. 
8. Let stand to cool for at least 1 hour before cutting into slices and serving. [Personally, I let it cool for several hours before consumption. In point of fact, Moussaka is always better on the following day, as all the flavours have had a chance to coalesce. So, once it has cooled completely, if you refrigerate your Moussaka and then warm it just before serving on the following day, you will get the full benefit of its flavours and textures.]


I followed this recipe almost exactly. The only changes I made were that I halved it to make it a little more manageable and less time consuming, but also substituted ground beef for veal, as people don't eat it and quite frankly the price of veal when I was shopping was through the roof. Other than that everything was written and while it was a time consuming recipe, it was well worth it. The flavors were so rich and savory and everyone seemed to enjoy it. Not the most ideal recipe for the hot summer days ahead but I would definitely recommend it as a nice comforting meal during the cooler months.

As I get the recipes for the other girls' dishes I will post them, but for those who don't know Saganaki is Fried Feta (soooooo tasty!), Baba Ghanoush is an eggplant hummus (our was quite spicy but tasty nonetheless) and Spanakopita is Spinach and Feta pie (even more delicious the next day!)

Overall from my Greek cooking experience I was pleasantly surprised and how few ingredients were needed in each dish, how easily they all came together and richness in the flavors. I am quite proud at the fact that none of us had ever cooked Greek before and pulled off a really delicious meal. I plan on trying more recipes on my own and will definitely pull more from the Greek Gourmand blog.

http://greekgourmand.blogspot.com/