Stacked Green Chili and Chicken Enchiladas
The May Daring Baker’s Challenge was hosted by Barbara of Barbara Bakes and Bunnee of Anna+Food have chosen a delicious Stacked Green Chile & Grilled Chicken Enchilada recipe in celebration of Cinco de Mayo! The recipe, featuring a homemade enchilada sauce was found onwww.finecooking.com and written by Robb Walsh.
I was so excited to make this recipe. For those of you who know me in the real world you know that I could eat mexican food pretty much every day and not get sick of it. Since moving to Canada my choices of mexican food have been severely limited. Basically there is one restaurant that I know of that is about 20 minutes from our house, and we don’t live in the middle of nowhere, so you can imagine my dilemma. I have resorted to making mexican food as often as possible, usually enchiladas.
What I like about this month challenge was not just that we were making mexican but that we had to make our own green chili sauce. I have made red enchilada sauce quite a few times but since it doesn’t call for fresh chilies it was never much of a challenge. The challenge sauce wasn’t difficult by any means but it was fun to start from scratch and use ingredients that I don’t always use, tomatillos.
So after charring them both black, which I unfortunately didn’t get a picture of, I combined them with the other sauce ingredients and let it simmer while making the rest of the dish.
As I mentioned before mexican food is hard to come by here thankfully the grocery store has a decent mexican section to find the staples. Unfortunately my store doesn’t seem to carry corn tortillas, oh don’t worry there are about 10 varieties and sizes of flour tortillas but for some reason I have never been able to find corn. If I hadn’t been in a rush to get this recipe done last night I would have gone to the local mexican grocery store which has everything a person could need. So I settled for flour tortillas.
There are a few things that I changed about this challenge in the spirit of being a little bit healthier. Although I am normally all about cheese and fried things, especially french fries, I am trying to each healthy during my pregnancy and there fore I used about half the amount of cheese and did not fry the tortillas.
Once the chicken was cooked I set out to stack everything up and bake it in the oven until the cheese was melted. From start to finish it really didn’t take that long especially considering making your own sauce. In the end this recipe was great. I was a little worried when I tasted the chili sauce because it was really spicy but once it was added to the whole dish it was toned down a bit. I look forward to trying this again and added a bit more personalization to it.
Here’s to a successful challenge which for some reason has eluded me the last few challenges with both Daring Cooks and Daring Bakers. I am happy to be back into the groove of cooking and look forward to blogging more.
Green Chili Sauce
4 fresh anaheim chilies
4 tomatillos
2 cups chicken broth
1 clove garlic
1 teaspoon yellow onion
1/2 teaspoon oregano
salt and pepper
1 tablespoon cornstarch dissolved in 1 tablespoon water
Coat each chile with a little vegetable oil. If you are doing only a couple chiles, using the gas stove works. For larger batches (as in this recipe), grilling or broiling is faster.
Lay the oiled chiles on the grill or baking sheet (line pan with foil for simpler clean-up). Place the grill or broil close to the element, turning the chiles so they char evenly. They should be black and blistered. As they are completely charred (they will probably not all be done at once), remove them to a bowl and cover with plastic, or close up in a paper bag. Let them rest until they are cool.
Pull on the stem and the seed core MAY pop out (it rarely does for me). Open the chile and remove the seeds. Turn the chile skin side up and with a paring knife, scrape away the skin. Sometimes it just pulls right off, sometimes you really have to scrape it. DO NOT RINSE!
Put a medium saucepan of water on to boil and remove the papery outer skin from the tomatillos. Boil the tomatillos until soft, 5 to 10 minutes. You can also grill the tomatillos until soft. Drain and puree in a blender or food processor.
Return the tomatillos to the saucepan along with the chicken broth, chopped green chiles, minced onion, oregano, garlic, salt and pepper. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat and then reduce the heat and simmer for 10 minutes.
Add the cornstarch/water mixture and stir well. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until the sauce is thickened and reduced to 4-5 cups, another 10-15 minutes. Adjust seasonings and add hot sauce if you want a little more heat.
Stacks
2 chicken breasts, grilled or baked
6 corn tortillas
cheese
In a baking dish large enough to hold two separate stacks of tortillas, ladle a thin layer of sauce. Lay two tortillas in the dish and ladle sauce over the tortillas. Add chicken, cheese and then more sauce. Continue stacking until you have used all ingredients.
Bake until the sauce has thickened and the cheese melted, about 20 minutes. Let rest for 5-10 minutes. To serve, transfer each stack to a plate. Spoon any leftover sauce over the stacks and sprinkle with cilantro, if you wish. The stacks may also be cooked in individual gratin dishes.
