Enchiladas - No assembly required

For some reason I felt like enchiladas this week.  Since we've been making our own tortillas, everything that we've eaten has been a vertical build on a horizontal substrate. Sometimes it's just easier to eat something if it's in a nice little parcel.  It also means that our guests don't have to go through the trouble of assembling their own dinner.

And so we dive headlong into Enchiladas Verdes!

The presence of Rick's books has caused some serious cookbook neglect on our behalf toward the rest of the shelf.  We have a very large variety of books and if you go looking, you can probably find a Mexican recipe in each.  Fortunately for us, there are dozens of choices in this week's tome: Some Like it Hot - Spicy Favorites from the World's Hot Zones.  Author Clifford Wright has written a stack of cookbooks, largely about Mediterranean cooking, one of which earned the James Beard award.  However, this nod to Marilyn Monroe features a whole bunch of Mexican dishes, all with a spiciness rating, and a helpful section at the back for sourcing ingredients through the internet.

We'll eventually look into the internet sourcing, but until then, it was back to Sarker Foods to get tomatillos and chile peppers.  We were on the lookout for Serrano chiles and we're still not sure if we found them.  There were two bins of peppers, one had chiles that were about 12cm long, the other had chiles that were about 3cm long.  Remember, everything in the store is labelled in Sinhala, if I had to make a guess. I asked the nice lady at the counter if they specifically had Serrano peppers. She said she didn't know but she said that the bigger peppers were medium spicy and the small ones were really spicy. Seeing as how we didn't have any Liquid Chromatography equipment, or a panel of five judges in our pockets, we decided to buy both varieties.  Also, at $0.68 for a bunch, we've found a new place to buy cilantro.

So we washed up the longer peppers and I cut the end off of one and gave it a spin.  The very tip wasn't too bad so I tried a little further up where the seeds were.  It had a nice punch to it.  Our measuring stick for heat was that of a jalapeno and I deemed it at least that hot.  Not wanting to make the dish uncomfortable, we started with 4, even though the recipe called for 8.  Into the pot they went with the tomatillos and a quartered onion.

Chicken bath! A little more than half a kilogram of bone-in chicken breasts got to soak up some herbs and spices for about 12 minutes.  Once it was done and we extracted the chicken, I mentioned that we could make chicken soup with the stock; it's a suggestion that is almost laughable.  When we get finished with a night of Mexican cooking, the kitchen looks like a war zone.  The last thing we want to do is start cooking soup from scratch.

So here is the green chile sauce, after spending a few seconds in the blender.  An initial assessment determined that the four chiles we added were probably going to be enough.  So it got left alone for a few more minutes to simmer away.

Next we removed the chicken from the bone and shredded it thusly.  You're supposed to add creme fraiche or sour cream to the chicken along with some onion but considering that creme fraiche is more expensive, guess what we added.

So here is the enchilada part: you en-chile the tortilla by dipping it in the chile sauce.

And here is was I enjoyed most: entering the third dimension with those tortillas.

When you've got a whole baking dish complete, you continue to en-chile them by dumping the rest of the chile sauce right on top.

If enchilada means to en-chile something, does that mean that encase (en-queso) means to en-cheese something? That joke sounded much funnier in my head, I swear.  After this they landed in the oven for about 10 minutes.

Bang! The reverse angle.  Complete with a pile of beans and a dollop of sour cream.  Radish, red onion and cilantro provide a welcome distraction.  In an assembled state, we realized that we probably should have dropped the other four chiles into the pot.  Oh well.  The fact that we used a scotch bonnet in our regular roasted salsa more than made up for it.  Yikes.

Also, red rice was on the way, but didn't make it to the first round of dinner.  We successfully identified a reason to revisit the design of our rice cooker.  You can turn the timer, and it ticks away, just as if it was plugged in, even though it's not.  And because you're adding hot chicken broth and hot rice to the thing, the walls steam up as they normally would.  The bell rang 43 minutes later but it was only a lie. It merely indicated the passage of time, not the completion of rice. Womp womp.

Herb Garden Update

Everything that we planted has poked through the surface except for the mint; we think it's a write off.  These are the super chiles; we're stoked.  Now that everything has sprouted, we're supposed to expose it all to the blinding sun.  Considering we had snow on sunday, we're not sure where this 'sun' character is.