White Enchiladas

I found this recipe (from my new favorite site!) and couldn't resist.  But in an effort to NOT give Miyagi a heart attack I fudged a few things to make them slightly (only slightly) less death-inducing.  I'd take a good look at that recipe though.  My descriptions are somewhat lacking in, oh, measurements and such.

First I started by cooking some chicken for shredding.  The recipe uses a whole chicken but I'm too lazy to deal with that so I just used a couple of chicken breasts.  This is my attempt at shredded chicken.  This picture was also taken before I got frustrated with forks and just stuck my fingers in the chicken the pull apart as many little pieces as I could!  Darn chicken.

And this is the can of chicken that I prematurely opened thinking I'd need to sneak behind Miyagi's back and supplement my chicken . . .but I didn't end up needing it!  Hooray!  But I'd already opened it so now I have an open can of chicken in my fridge. Boooo!

Then I sauteed up some chopped onion.  But I didn't have quite enough so I chopped them really small.  It makes sense in a weird way.  Basically you are making two parts in this recipe.  This is the filling, and later you make the sauce.  Or if you're a superhero you can make them at the same time.  I am not a superhero (or am I?) so we're starting with the filling.  After the onions cook slightly you can add in your chicken, and some chilies.  One of my $0.25 cans of chilies with the festive labels was perfect for this.

Add some paprika and chicken stock to keep things moving around, and get everything nicely mixed up.  Now at this point the recipe called for heavy cream.  But I didn't even have LIGHT cream.  Or beige.  So I poured in a little milk and a dollop of sour cream.  In my opinion there can never be too much sour cream in a recipe.  This worked just fine.  After all the liquid cooks off you can let this cool a bit while you get your tortillas ready.

A lot of people use flour tortillas in a recipe like this, but we had a bunch of corn tortillas and they sounded good so pulled them out.  Normally you're supposed to lightly fry them in some oil to soften them up but 1. I'm too lazy and 2. this recipe doesn't need any more oil.  So I nuked them for a few seconds to warm them up so that they were pliable AND they burned my fingers at the same time!  I'm so good.  Anyway.

Put in a little of the chicken mixture.

And then a little Monterrey Jack cheese.  This is holy cheese.  That's why it's glowing.

Then you can roll them up and set them seam down in a 9x13 pan.  People seem to love Pyrex for these but this is the only 9x13 we have so you'll just have to deal with it.  As you can see mine are perfectly rolled and sealed with no tearing or breaking at all.  You can see that right?  RIGHT?? 




Now to the sauce.  Melt a few table spoons of butter in a skillet and whisk in a few tablespoons of flour until it looks like this.

Then add about 1 1/2 C of chicken stock and whisk until it's smooth.  Stir in another cute little can of chilies and about a cup of sour cream.  Once this is well mixed dump in 1-2C shredded Monterrey Jack and stir it until it's all melted and happy.  Give it a good dose of salt and pepper and a dash of paprika and you're all set!  But we're not done.

Pour this concoction all over your pan of enchiladas.  And then because you want to use the rest of your cheese (and NOT because you want to hide the jagged broken pieces of tortilla sticking out of the sauce) sprinkle the rest of the cheese over top. Hey this corner looks ok. 

 Stick this in the oven at 350° for about 30 min until that corner now looks like this.  Spend that 30 min liking out the bottom of the sauce pan like you would if you were making brownies.  This could be considered a meal on it's own if you're in a rush.

And voila!  It only took you 2 hours to make a beautiful (at least one corner) pan of enchiladas!  Of course, we couldn't wait 2 hours for dinner.  So we started with an appetizer of pizza rolls, and then ate dinner around 9:30pm.  If I were smart I'd make up a bunch of the chicken filling and just freeze it for quick enchilada making later.  But I'm not always that smart.