Daring Cooks: Enchiladas

Our hosts this month, 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 on www.finecooking.com and written by Robb Walsh.

Growing up in Texas, I obviously ate a lot of enchiladas. Cheese, beef, chicken, green chili, sour cream, ...you name it, I've probably had it. Any time you take a tortilla (flour is my favorite) and roll it around a filling of some sort then top it with a sauce, I'm game to eat it. Enchiladas are without a doubt, my favorite Tex-Mex food. My favorite combination is a simple cheese with a red sauce.

Our challenge this month was to make enchiladas with a homemade Mexican style sauce. It had to be a Mexican sauce so I decided to go with a 'chili gravy' from Robb Walsh's Tex-Mex Cookbook that I had been dying to make for a long time. This cookbook is the bible of Tex-Mex cooking.  As Robb says, chili gravy the life blood of old-fashioned Tex-Mex cooking. It's a mix between an Anglo brown gravy and a Mexican chile sauce. This was the type of sauce that I grew up eating in my enchiladas, both at home and in restaurants. This is the sauce that I love.  But it's one that I've never attempted to make.  I've always used the canned version and while that's good, it's not homemade.

For my filling, I decided to go simple and use shredded chicken and cheddar cheese.  A lot of times, people get too complex on enchilada fillings and in my opinion, simple is better.  Too much 'stuff' in the filling almost always ruins the enchilada for me.

I'm sure my mom would have preferred the given green chili enchiladas and I'm also sure they are very good but I much prefer the enchiladas that I ended up making.  The sauce was out of this world amazing.    There was no doubt that this was an authentic Tex-Mex chili gravy.  It was full of the nice bold chile flavor.  It was slightly spicy but not too spicy.  The chicken and cheese paired wonderfully with the chili gravy.  An absolutely delicious meal all around that I will be making many, many times to come.

If you would like to get the recipe for the chili gravy, see page 74 of The Tex-Mex Cookbook.

Thanks to our hosts for challenging us this month to make enchiladas with a homemade sauce.  This recipe had set on my shelf for well over a year and I never got around to making it.  Now I'm sorry I wasted so much time!

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