Chicken enchiladas: take 2

My first attempt at chicken enchiladas (p147) was not a complete disaster. The biggest problem with it was that I'd used home-made tortillas, which were overcooked and hard to roll up, then went soggy and unpleasant when soaked in the enchilada sauce. I was pretty sure I could get a better result with bought ones, so I decided to have another go at it.

Last time, it took me all evening to make my enchiladas. This was, of course, because I'd decided to make the tortillas first - a painfully long process with disappointing results. I was surprised at how quick it was to make enchiladas with pre-made tortillas.


The process has two parts - the sauce and the filling. The sauce takes only a minute or two to whizz up in the food processor, and the filling is just a matter of frying up an onion and some chicken. You're supposed to use cooked chicken and just heat it through, but I just chopped up a chicken breast and cooked that with the onion.

The next step is to dip each tortilla in the sauce, then add some filling and roll it up. Remembering how difficult (and messy) it was to dip tortillas into the bowl of the food processor, I looked around for something wide and shallow to pour the sauce into: pie plate - just the thing!


It was still quite messy rolling up the enchiladas, but not nearly as bad as last time. I did have one issue which was the same - not enough filling. I was making a half-recipe, since I couldn't see myself eating 12 enchiladas, so I should have had enough filling to fill 6 tortillas. Though I definitely had more than the one cup of chicken required for a half-recipe, and filled them quite sparsely, I barely had enough filling for five enchiladas.

Still, five was more than enough for me, so after sprinkling cheese over the top, I put the enchiladas in the oven, and set about making a tossed green salad (p180) to go with it. It's a pretty simple salad, really - it's difficult to see why anyone would need a recipe in order to make a basic green salad, but if you do, there's one in the Edmond's book!


To dress the salad, I mixed up some mustard dressing (p183), which is basically french dressing with some wholegrain mustard in it. I put all the ingredients in a spare screwtop jar, and shook it up. The dressing combined ok, but all the mustard seeds just sunk to the bottom. Oh well.

Though the cooking time given in the recipe is 30 minutes, the enchiladas were ready after 20.  I didn't realise it at the time, but looking back at the recipe today, I found that I should have put tinfoil over the dish - and I didn't, which probably explains the faster cooking.


It tasted fine, though, and since I'd made more salad than I intended, I ended up with quite a large meal. That was ok - I still managed to eat it all!


I'm now satisfied that I've done chicken enchiladas justice. With bought tortillas, they were really much tastier. As for the salad, it was pretty good, just an ordinary green salad really. The dressing was nice, but not really different from the plain french dressing - the mustard may have added a bit of flavour but none of the actual mustard seeds made it into the salad.

So have a go at chicken enchiladas sometime. Use pre-made tortillas, and I'd also recommend that you up the quantities of the filling mixture. Just be aware that they're a little bit messy to make. And if you're looking for something to go with your enchiladas, you could do worse than pair them with a tossed green salad.