Thursday Enchiladas

It's been much too long since we had enchiladas. In fact, searching back through the blog it doesn't look like I've made any since I started this thing 3.5 years ago. Crazy!

I'm sure I have an enchilada recipe laying around somewhere, but there was a particular taste I was looking for in this sauce, so I made up my own recipe.

Anyway, Andrea got things started this afternoon by tossing a couple of chicken legs in a pot with a sliced carrot, a chopped stalk of parsley, an onion, a couple bay leaves, and some cilantro stems. After adding enough water to cover the chicken, she covered this and let it simmer for an hour and a half until the chicken was fall off the bone tender. She took the chicken out and let the stock reduce a bit.

When I got home I strained the stock, then added a bunch of dried chilis (2 guajillo, 3 chile negro, and powered ancho, new mexican, and chipotle), some freshly ground coriander and cumin, a couple slugs of soy sauce, and a good pinch of dried oregano. This simmered for a bit until the chilis were soft, then I pureed it, stirred in some sour halbrahm, and then strained the whole mess again.

After skinning and picking the chicken, Andrea rolled it into corn tortillas with some thinly sliced onion and set the finished enchiladas on a thin layer of sauce. We topped the pan of enchiladas with the remaining sauce and some grated gruyere and then baked it at 175C until the sauce was bubbly and the cheese was nicely melted.

We ate this wonderful, wonderful food with some parboiled rice (with wild rice) and a green salad.

It's not going to be 3.5 years until the next time we do this.