It has been a rough winter in the Leena Eats household. Unbearably cold, especially after living in Australia for a year. Not a lot of culinary inspiration. And some of the worst colds and flus I have ever had in my life. I am fairly certain I spent the entire month of January sick. Woe is me. Oh woe, is me. Sometimes, when you are having a bad week-month-YEAR in cooking, it is best to stick with those tried and true recipes, the ones that no matter how hard you bite it, you still can’t mess up. For me, that recipe has always been chicken and cheese enchiladas. I pushed aside the used tissues and a self-doubt that could only be Nyquil-induced and got to work. Let’s just hope I don’t set the cat on fire. No promises. It was one of the first recipes I tried to cook by myself from my mom’s beat-up old red Betty Crocker cookbook. You really have to admire Ms. Crocker’s attempt at foreign cuisine in the 1980s. Tomato sauce, ground cumin and chili powder = Mexican food, and apparently, and it was good enough to satisfy me.
As the years went on, the recipe morphed into several different versions as I started to experiment with creating a more authentic enchiladas sauce. First, I cut out the chili powder altogether and experimented with smoky chipotle peppers. They were nice, but still nothing like the enchiladas I get at the local Mexican restaurant. However, the Mexican restaurant enchiladas were a bit too bitter, which I suspect is from the use of dried chiles. My goal was to find a nice balance between the sweet tomato-based Betty Crocker enchiladas and the bitter dried chile-based sauce from the Mexican restaurant. Finally, I came across this sauce recipe from Damomma that you might remember from such posts as this one. The initial sauce of dried chiles was a bit bitter, but when I cut it with a bit of tomato sauce, it was perfection. Exactly the sauce I was looking for. Hot damn. I got something right! Topped with a bit of homemade guacamole, this dish was perfect and rejuvenating. I can cook again! And it tastes delicious! There is hope for me yet!
*Note- the cat was not set on fire, but was mildly coated in a light film of shredded cheddar during the enchilada construction phase. ~LTG!
