Chicken Enchiladas

Chicken enchiladas are easy to fix for a small dinner party, and they’re packed with flavor.

Often, my chicken enchiladas have actually started with leftover chicken from El Pollo Loco or Costco (usually meat from the less popular pieces in our house like legs and backs), but today I boiled two boneless, skinless chicken breasts (total weight about 1 ½ pounds) for 35 minutes to get the ball rolling.

An advantage of boiling chicken is that most of the fat that might need to be trimmed before frying or baking seems to cook off in the water. By the way, I didn’t preheat the water. I just put enough water in the pot to cover the chickens and then started boiling it on medium heat. When the lid started bouncing around, I took it off and boiled the chicken uncovered.

After 35 minutes, take one of the breasts out of the pot and put it onto a plate. Cut it with the grain, shredding the meat as much as possible as you go. If it doesn’t look quite cooked, put it back in the water for another few minutes. Most likely, it will be done, and after the first one is shredded, take the other breast out of the water and repeat the process.

Pour the water from the pot down the drain with the garbage disposal running, and rinse the pot, using a paper towel to wipe it. You don’t need to use soap, because you’re going to be using it again right away.

Put the pot back on the stove and pour the chicken back in. Add a package of your favorite taco seasoning (I used McCormick’s tonight, because it was 49 cents at Smart & Final) and follow the same directions you’d use for a pound of ground beef, which in this case was stir in ¾ cup of water and simmer for about 7 minutes. There is chicken taco seasoning too, but the standard taco one works fine.

Between occasionally stirring the meat, line a rectangular glass 11” X 14” (or whatever size you have) baking dish with parchment paper and preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Line up six tortillas (Carb Balance will be less fattening but more expensive) with the sides turned up like soft tacos into the lined dish. Put a generous amount of grated Mexican cheese (yes, we’re actually using Mexican cheese for Mexican food!) inside each of the tortillas.  This will melt down quite a bit, so add more than you think you need. You can actually use slices of block cheese inside the enchiladas instead, because it will melt down anyway.

When all of the liquid has cooked into the chicken, ladle chicken into the tortilla “soft shells,” dividing it equally. When they’re all pretty full, sparingly sprinkle a few drops of Tapatio inside.  Fold over two sides (which two sides should be obvious even to the most unskilled novice) of the tortilla together on one of them and quickly turn it over so that the junction of the two sides of the tortilla is on the bottom. Repeat this until you can’t see the ingredients inside any of the tortillas from the top.

Here is the big secret: don’t use enchilada sauce. I have found that every brand of enchilada sauce has way too much salt. It might be okay if nothing else had any flavor, but the cheese is naturally salty, and the taco seasoning is obviously intentionally very salty.

Canned diced petite tomatoes with jalapenos or peppers and onions are cheap and easy choices. Considering that I use Mexican cheese for Italian dishes, you probably won’t be shocked to learn that I usually use marinara sauce (Ragu or whatever I have on hand), and it seems to work just fine. Don’t ever pour any diced tomatoes or marinara sauce onto the enchiladas. More is not better. A tablespoon per enchilada is about right. If it looks a little dry, add a little more where necessary, but don’t go nuts. Sprinkle the sauce topping lightly with ground cumin seed (if you have that on hand) to make it taste a little more Mexican than Italian, but let’s face it: the basis of enchilada sauce or marinara sauce is pureed tomatoes, and it picks up the flavor of the other ingredients.

If you had a little extra chicken after stuffing the enchiladas, you can throw that on. Then, add a generous coating of grated Mexican cheese on top. Bake at 400 degrees for 25 minutes to a half hour, cool five minutes and then serve. 

For what it is worth, using this exact combination of ingredients (boiled chicken, McCormick's Taco Seasoning, trace of Tapatio and cumin, Ragu) earned praise from Julie as the best enchiladas I've ever made.

If you are having friends over, you could have done everything but the baking, then put the enchiladas in the oven a half hour before you are ready to eat.

With this recipe, I can eat about 1 ½ enchiladas, so I would call it four servings, but if you add side dishes of Spanish rice and refried beans, you could easily serve six.

For the Spanish rice, rinse out the chicken pot, and then make Knorr Spanish Rice according to the recipe on the package. It takes less than 10 minutes. Refried beans are even easier. Open a can of Rosarita Spicy Refried Beans, put them into an oven safe dish, and put a generous layer of grated Mexican cheese on top. Loosely cover it with foil, and bake the beans at the same time as the enchiladas.

The Spanish rice just uses the same pot you already had to wash, and whether chicken or Spanish rice, it takes about the same amount of time to wash with dish soap and water.  Either way, it’s actually much easier to clean, for some reason, than taco ground beef. The refried beans will at first look like a messy dish, but you can just soak it with water for a minute or two, and it will easily clean right up. The glass enchilada dish, of course, only requires removing the parchment paper to be clean.

There's nothing more to do but party.

Ole!