Red Sauced Chicken Enchiladas

On thursday night when I made the Pad Thai I used up the rest of my roasted chicken from a few days earlier and made chicken stock.  I also threw in another carcass from separating some chicken pieces for the chicken breasts I used in the Pad Thai.  After the stock was ready I was left with quite a large amount of chicken meat.  So I thought tonight I'd make enchiladas.

I usually make white sauced enchiladas with green chiles, sour cream, and monterrey jack cheese, but recently Jon has been talking about how much fun it'd be to learn how to make red enchiladas.  Hint hint....  That means, "Hey wife would you mind looking up a recipe for red enchilada sauce and learning how to make it so I can eat red enchiladas without paying $11 for it?"  Ha ha!  At least I think that's what he means when he says this. 

I had looked through a few recipes before and I thought I had tried making some sort of red Mexican sauce a while ago with dried chiles (which were hiding in a ziplock bag in the back of our pantry/cupboard), so I figured I could just pick up a few ingredients that were pretty common to Mexican food while we were at the grocery after Mass this morning and whip them up for dinner.

After looking through my mexican cookbook, another sheet full of enchilada recipes my mom gave me, and allrecipes.com I found a recipe called, "The Best Red Enchilada Sauce".  I also happened to have most of the ingredients needed and it got great reviews.  So I thought I'd try using the enchilada sauce in the link with the method for making the other type of white cream based enchiladas...sort of.  I didn't dip the tortillas in the red sauce like I do with the creamy casserole type enchiladas.

I honestly didn't know if this was going to work out so well.  I taste tested the sauce before I simmered it and it didn't taste like much besides tomato paste, so I got a little worried.  Usually when I get really worried about trying something new I don't take a lot of pictures because I don't really want to blog about a kitchen fail.  However....after the sauce simmered, the enchiladas were baked, and Jon took his first bite he said, "Wow that's really good."  He took a few more bites and said again (without prompting by me!), "Wow, that's really good."  I usually have to prod my husband with my fork before he says anything about the food, so this was pretty exciting.  I thought they were decent too, so I prodded, "What would you rate this out of 5?"

He replied, "4.9-5 but only because I think it could still be really perfected."  4.9!!!  4.9!!!??!  That's like a gold medal for an ice skater...wait do they go off a scale of 10?  Whatever!  I was pretty darned excited he liked this that much.  But I agree, it could be even better.  I might even try this with shredded beef sometime, I bet that would be fantastic.

One thing I didn't have was beef broth (yeah, yeah, as usual) for the sauce.  I'm sure that would have made the sauce 10 times better.  I used the chicken broth I made when I cooked all that chicken.  I also scaled down the recipe a bit, so the measurements were probably a tad off.  The original recipe said it made 17 servings.  Since I'm not feeding my extended family I decided to scale it down to 4.  (I know, there are only 2 adults in our household, but Clare eats pretty well, I had a lot of shredded chicken, and we like leftovers here!)

So just be warned.  Try to be very careful with your measurements and use beef broth!

Here's what I did.

Red Sauced Chicken Enchiladas

Ingredients
1lb cooked shredded chicken
6 flour tortillas (I made mine again the recipe is here and I used coconut oil)
1/2 an onion chopped
1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp oregano
salt and pepper to taste
1/2c shredded cheese (tonight I used white and regular cheddar, you could probably also use monterrey jack or cotija)

4 servings of Best Enchilada Red Sauce


Method
1.  Saute onions in a medium pot on low heat until soft. 

2.  Add shredded chicken, cumin, oregano, salt and pepper and 1/3 of the enchilada red sauce and continue to saute on medium until everything is well combined and heated through.  Take off the heat.

3.  Preheat oven to 350.

4.  In each tortilla put some chicken and a sprinkling of your shredded cheese and roll up (don't use up all the cheese).  Put all your rolled up enchiladas in a casserole dish and cover with the rest of the red sauce.  Sprinkle with the remainder of the cheese. 

5.  Bake in the 350 degree oven for about 20 minutes until the sauce is nice and bubbly and the cheese is melted.

Yum!  Serve with a side of homemade (I'll have to post that recipe another time) guacamole!

Again, I have no idea if this is an authentic Mexican recipe, because I am not Mexican, so if my Mexican friends (or those married to Mexicans and living in Mexico) want to correct some inauthenticity here, please feel free to leave a comment! 

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Dear God,

  thank you for successful and surprising discoveries.  Help us to never be bored with life so that we always have a child like sense of awe and excitement, especially for your wonders.  Help us cultivate a virtuous Fear of the Lord, which helps us to understand our own place, your love and mercy, and your majesty all at the same time.  Amen.