Tex-Mex - Enchiladas Combination Platter


(Un)Finished plate first. Your standard enchiladas combination platter.

I’ve made the rice and beans several times before and they’re just the way I like them. This was my first time with this particular enchilada recipe. I really liked it overall, but would make some small tweaks next time.

The base sauce is pretty similar to how I usually do it, though i don’t typically add the roux and tend to keep it vegetarian without adding the beef. This one has a great beefy flavor. The onion didn’t work for me so well on this one. The dish only gets 15 minutes in the oven. With both raw onion on top and as part of the filling, it’s just too overpowering. Next time I might cut down on the amount of onion used for filling - or saute it up with some extra ground beef for a meatier filling.

I also only had a 10 pack of tortillas while the recipe wanted an even dozen. Even so, that seemed plenty to fill my 2L baking dish and I still ended up with more sauce than would fit. More tortillas and a larger dish would have been better.

Recipes:

Out of the

Bonus Round!

The reason I only used half of the 3 bags of chiles was so that I could use the other half to make a batch of vegetarian sauce. The Mexican rice recipe also produces more tomato puree than the recipe actually calls for, so the extra goes into this sauce. No beef and substitute vegetable stock for the chicken stock, minus the volume of the tomato puree.




Standard pressure cooker refried beans prep. Dried pinto beans, diced onion, minced garlic, dried oregano, vegetable oil.



Standard Mexican rice prep. Long grain rice, more minced garlic, diced jalapeno. Short grain rice would work too. I just prefer Basmati.



Simmering tomato/onion/stock puree.



Start frying the rice in oil.



10-15 minutes later, the rice has some nice color and it's ready to add the tomato puree & finish cooking.



On to the enchilada sauce. Start with dried chilies - half a bag each of the bottom 3 and a couple arbol pods for heat.



Keeping the dried chiles submerged in the hot water.



Gross looking flaccid soaked chiles. Sure you want to make these into a sauce, boss?



After a few minutes in the blender,



Assembly is messy. Fry the tortillas, dip in sauce, fill, roll. Fast forward to fully assembled and ready to bake.



Prep station - square baking dish with a bit of said sauce spread out on the bottom, an open pack of flour tortillas with 6 left, frozen corn, diced onion, fresh shredded monterey jack cheese.



Each enchilada gets 1tbsp corn, 1tbsp onion, and 1/4cup cheese.



All lined up.



Smothered in sauce.



And an excessive amount of onions.



Followed by an excessive amount of shredded cheese and sliced jalapeno.



Ready to serve!



This batch was no less tasty than the one before it. Only complaint is they were a little chewy. The tortillas probably should have been lightly fried first. I also usually use less sauce, leaving more tortilla exposed to get a bit of the edges crisped up.



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