Homemade Enchiladas

Intense and delicious!
You will need:

1 dozen corn tortillas
5-6 dried Pasilla Chilies also called Anchos
(often in packaged Mexican food section)
6+cloves of good garlic
A yellow onion
Small can of tomato paste
Spinach leaves, no stems, produce bag full
Mushrooms, at least half a pound
Cream Cheese (Tofutti)
Almonds or pecans
Small bunch of cilantro
Olive oil
Canola oil
Salt
(optional, grated Jack soy-cheese)
Wear an apron!

Begin by slicing open the ancho chilies and removing the seeds and stems (seeds seem to scrape off best with a thumbnail despite trying various tools). Don’t touch your eyes or lips with hands with chilies on them. Put the anchos in a sauce pan with water to cover them, add salt, and simmer on low heat for 20-30 minutes. While they simmer, chop 3 big cloves of garlic and ¼ of an onion and put them in a blender.

Wash and de-stem spinach, dice 3 more garlic cloves and rest of onion. In olive oil in a sauté or sauce pan, sauté the onion and garlic until nearly golden and add spinach and mushrooms and cook until wilted and tender. Set aside spinach. (Grate cheese if using Jack). Set up a saute pan with shallow canola oil to get ready to lightly dip the tortillas in hot oil to soften them.

When anchos are done, add the chilies and water to the blender and blend with garlic and onion. Hold lid on tight when you blend, not too high a setting. To taste, add tablespoons of tomato paste and re-blend to reach desired hot/cool spiciness. I found I ended up using the whole can, but kept adding/blending it 3 tablespoons at a time. Another time I will try roasted tomatoes per original recipe, not the paste. I also added a tablespoon of olive oil to cut the spiciness, but that wasn’t in the original recipe.

Set up a counter adjacent to stove top with the pan of spinach, a bowl larger than the tortillas filled with the sauce from the blender (don’t wash blender out, leave some sauce in down around the blades), any grated cheese, the corn tortillas, and an empty dinner plate. All this needs to be beside the sauté pan with the canola oil. And you need the pan you are going to assemble and serve them in – glass or ceramic pie/casserole type.

Heat up the canola oil and with the type of tongs you may use in making pasta, begin lowering one tortilla at a time into the oil and quickly flipping it over and then lift out, let oil drip off, and drop into the bowl with the sauce. As you do that with one hand, with the other, drop the next tortilla into the hot oil. You will get a production going where you then remove the tortillas from absorbing the sauce on both sides to the empty dinner plate in time to drop another tortilla from the oil into the sauce and another tortilla into the oil.

Once all tortillas have been in the hot oil and dipped in the sauce, and are on the dinner plate, turn off sauté pan with oil and clear space to assemble the enchiladas. Set one sauce covered tortilla in the serving pan and with the same tongs or finger, add the spinach/mushroom filling, cheese if desired, and there will be sauce remaining that can go on top of the spinach before you roll if you desire. Roll them up, and keep on filling them.

I ran out of spinach as didn’t do a full bag’s worth, so I improvised something equally delicious. In the blender that still has the sauce in the bottom, add 4 oz of cream cheese and nuts (almonds or pecans), a small bunch of cilantro, and a little soymilk for moisture and blend. Then use this delicious cream filling instead of the spinach, on another group of tortillas.

They do not need to bake, but you can add any remaining sauce over them and warm them in the oven before serving so they are all the same temperature. I served it with a green salad and watermelon and it was a quintessential Mexican meal!

PS – doesn’t hurt to play some Spanish language music and dance a bit while making these – viva Mexico!