Enchiladas: Reloaded

Due to the long weekend we took Friday Night Mexican on the road.

Playing the game from the visitor dugout has its challenges, but nothing that we couldn't overcome. We did bring the cast iron and the tortilla press along. Everything else was completely foreign.  Except for the meal. We revisited enchiladas this week but through the pages of Rick's Mexican Everyday:  Tomatillo-Sauced Enchiladas with Spinach and Mushrooms. The link here goes to the recipe hosted at Martha Stewart's site and even has a video of her and Rick knocking out the first half of the instructions.

We did most of our ingredient shopping before we hit the road; that meant a trip to Sarker foods.  The staff there now know us by sight: the out of place Caucasians buying way too many tomatillos.  And thanks to some intensive detective work (I looked at the huge flag outside) I determined that the script was Bengali.  One of the new things that I've started on the blog this week is a ready list of all of the ingredients that we have had to source and where we got them.  You can access this information from any page by clicking on the link to the right.

We made roasted salsa (as well as guacamole) for chips before the main course was served.  One of the nice things that we got to use was an electric oven (it's been a while!).  So the roasting didn't turn into the nail biting experience that it usually is with our gas oven.  Tomatoes, onions, and serrano chiles went into this one.

There is our bounty of tomatillos before and after being pureed with garlic and chiles.  After that, it gets cooked down and then simmered with some chicken broth.

Here is the guacamole, salsa and chips.  As you can see, those aren't the usual vessels that carry such things to the table at our place.  The restaurant style tortilla chips we had were especially salty so I was able to get away with not adding any additional salt to the salsa.

Here we've got mushrooms, onion, and chicken cooking away in a frying pan.  Don't worry about tossing a big bag of spinach in there because it doesn't take long to cook down into something resembling:

This!  The success of the electric oven and the salsa was karmically offset by the electric stove top.  I have the exact right spot on my gas cook top committed to memory and with my cast iron pan, can produce consistent corn tortillas.  Finding the correct setting on the electric oven turned into a bit of a fiasco.  This was compounded by a slight modification I made to the masa; I added a little bit more water than usual to see if I could press the tortillas out a little flatter.  That made each tortilla a little more sticky than usual, which made it difficult to remove the wax paper and made them stick to the cast iron.  In the end I ended up making another half-batch of masa (using the right amount of water) once I found the correct spot on the dial.

Rick finishes this recipe a little differently, by building each tortilla onto the final serving plate.  It sounds like less work but we like to make sure that everybody is more or less eating at the same time.  So we went with the previous method and built them into a baking dish so they could all see some oven time.  They got covered with the remaining chile sauce and spent about 15 minutes in the oven.  The feta got sprinkled on the entire dish and it went back into the oven for just a few minutes.

Here is the finished dish, all plated up with a touch of cilantro and red onion.

Cooking an entire meal in someone else's kitchen was a learning experience to say the least.  I think next time we'll have to gather all of the necessary dishes and utensils before beginning.  It would save us a lot of frantic searching through drawers and cupboards while holding hot cooking vessels and sharp knives.

Make sure you check back next week where we do enchiladas again, but this time we just put them on a different plate. Yum! Actually, next week's update is going to be mind-blowing, promise.

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