the review: chicken enchiladas

Wow. We are on a roll, people. This was a good dinner. I totally forgot to make rice, and almost forgot the salad, but no matter. The enchiladas were awesome (The Cook’s Illustrated Cookbook, page 350). I know, lame word, but absolutely appropriate description.

We were in full force tonight, so I doubled the order and made 20 enchiladas. We had three left. I will say that I must be the slowest cook ever. As with all Cook’s Illustrated recipes, this recipe starts off with a great description of why the recipe works. The point here was to make enchiladas that took 90 minutes or less. Mine took quite a bit longer than that. This may be because I have kids asking me questions every 30 seconds and need to read and re-read the instructions. I suspect I am not alone in this. Maybe we should send some kids over to the Cook’s Illustrated test kitchen to help them improve their time estimates. I volunteer mine. Anyone else?

The cool thing about this recipe is definitely the lack of steps. The chicken cooks in the enchilada sauce. You then strain the sauce, using the chicken and seasonings for filling and reserving the sauce for the top and bottom of the cooked enchiladas.

The time consuming thing was prepping the ingredients to start the cooking. Again, this may have been due to distraction on my end.

I did not follow the process for warming the tortillas, which was meant to keep the finished enchiladas from becoming soggy. This was more because I was lazy and already running late with dinner than because I like soggy enchiladas. It turned out to be just fine. While the enchiladas were a bit soggy, the flavor more than made up for this omission. And I may have used flour tortillas instead of corn because I can’t read labels. Also not a problem in the finished product.

This is definitely a keeper recipe. You should totally make it. Invite people over so that you have an excuse to make more. Or just make more and eat them yourself.