Cheesy Chicken Enchiladas

Most days at my work involve frantically jumping from one appointment to the next, filling in any time between the cracks with attempts to do paperwork that documents everything that I do at work. Sometimes, this crazy pace will abruptly screech to a halt as I somehow manage to catch up on paperwork and not need to run anywhere for an appointment just yet.

That happened to me once this week. It was wonderful. Sitting at my cleared-off desk, my thoughts turned to what I would make for dinner when I got home. I thought about what I had in my fridge before turning to my coworker and announcing that I wanted needed to invent something with chicken breasts and cream cheese. She raised her eyebrow in bemusement and told me to knock myself out.

Challenge accepted.

I did a quick ingredients search on allrecipes and settled on this one simply because it was already in my saved recipes, meaning that I’d once looked at it and decided it was worth making. It also looked easy enough to make. Anyway, any attempts at Mexican food are received well in my home.

And it had cream cheese. Did I mention the cream cheese? It’s my favorite ingredient ever.

Add in a cup of salsa. I added the remnants of my last batch of homemade salsa, which actually ended up being exactly one cup.

Keep stirring over medium heat as the cream cheese melts and blends with the salsa.

Meanwhile, I boiled some chicken breasts. Simple enough.

I also got some pinto beans ready. Gonna be honest, there’s a less-than-ideal story about them. I’d asked hubby to pick up some pinto beans and kidney beans when he went to the grocery store a while back, since I wanted to make chili. I should have specified that I meant cans, but I didn’t, and he came back with dry beans. I’d never prepared dry beans before, so I didn’t realize how far they went. I made a whole bag of each. Since I only needed a cup or two for the chili, and since I hate throwing away food, I froze the rest. So yeah, these were reheated frozen pinto beans.

Still good, though. I tossed them in the sauce, and by then, the chicken breasts had cooled down enough to cut up, so I added them, as well.

Stir it all up. Nom nom nom.

I had assorted tortillas in the freezer, two multigrain and four regular white. Zapped them in the microwave and they were nice and soft and ready to go. One by one, put the creamy chicken filling in each one.

Then roll them up, resting them seam-side down.

And top the whole thing with shredded Mexican-blend cheese. So authentic.

Cover it with foil and bake.

Someone thought it smelled divine.

A half hour later, it looked amazing.

Top the enchiladas with sour cream and some chopped tomatoes. I also cooked up some Spanish rice to go along with it.

Hubby gave it two literal thumbs up and announced that it was the closest thing to authentic Mexican food that he’d had in a while. His feedback on food is pretty honest so I took it as a genuine compliment. He did note that the boiled chicken could have been improved upon by soaking it in marinade and grilling it, but he said it was delicious as-is and gave me a kiss.

Good enough for me.

100th Post: Rich Chocolate Cake

Here it is: my one hundredth post! Hard to believe that I’ve found so many things in my kitchen to blog about over the last year, but I’ve got to say that I don’t know if I would have made it this far if it weren’t for all the positive feedback that I've received. Thank you, readers!

So here we are. One hundred posts. I thought I’d celebrate it with a cake.

Okay, honestly, the cake was really for a coworker’s birthday, but the timing worked out pretty well. Cake it is.

I’ve made this cake twice before. The first time, I was living in my little Pennsylvania apartment. My closest group of friends were the other psych/ animal behavior grad students, and of the 6 of us, 3 had April birthdays. We decided to have one dinner to celebrate. The second was hubby’s birthday, several years later, during our first year of living together.

I’m pretty sure that I had only made two layers both of these times, pouring the batter into two round cake pans, and I can’t quite remember why. This time around, I planned to do three layers, as the recipe calls for. Even better, I found this nonstick cake pan in my cupboards, leftover from the people who own this place and moved out in a hurry, so I could count on at least one layer coming out nicely.

A sure sign that I’ve had this recipe a long time is having actually handwritten the recipe on a piece of paper, even though it is readily available on allrecipes.com. This was before the days of smart phones/ tablet computers! Also apparently before the days when I could afford ink for my printer.

Start off with some flour. Add baking soda, baking powder, and salt, and set it aside.

Here’s where the “rich chocolate” part of the title comes in: a whole cup of unsweetened baking cocoa.

And pour two cups of boiling water into it.

Whisk it until it’s smooth and let it cool completely.

If you’re impatient like me, pull some of those frozen lunch box blocks out of the freezer and use them to speed the process up a little bit.

Hokay, time for the next part. Cream together butter and sugar, as so many other recipes also begin with.

Then beat in four eggs, one at a time, beating after each one.

And mix until well-blended. Add some vanilla.

Then alternate between the flour mixture and the chocolate mixture, adding both in small increments.

Until it looks like this!

Pour it into your three cake pans. I’ve seen people tap the pans on the counter to get the air bubbles out. I don’t know if that’s necessary or not, but I did it.

And then bake at 350 degrees. Piece of cake.

I let them cool on wire racks for about 10 minutes to give them a chance to set.

And then I used a scraper and gravity to turn them all out to finish cooling. Luckily, no major catastrophes. I had greased those pans pretty thoroughly.

Pretty!

After they cooled entirely, I whipped up a tiramisu filling simply because we had marscapone cheese in the fridge and I had no idea what else to do with it. Thanks, google. Used my really ugly yellow bowl because I wasn’t thinking of how ugly it would make the filling look in pictures.

And then I made some regular frosting with confectioner’s sugar, butter, vanilla, milk, and cocoa powder.

I just let the mixer go on and on and on, since I discovered while making Christmas cookies that a little extra time of whipping frosting makes a big difference.

Okay, time to start assembling.

Step one: slather half of the tiramisu filling all over one of the cakes. The cake had cooled entirely by this point, but it was still soft and crumbly, so this actually took me a really long time. I really wanted to avoid having crumbs in the frosting and filling, so I was trying really hard to be gentle.

Plop on your next layer, then realize that your cakes are uneven. Perhaps from batter shifting as I put them in the oven?

In retrospect, I could have gotten creative with a large serrated knife to even them out, but I didn’t think of that until afterward, so here I am committing to a lopsided cake by putting on the rest of the tiramisu filling.

Put that third layer on and giggled a little bit. I put all three layers on bottom-up, but that didn’t really fix the problem of them rising in the center, did it? Definitely should have used a large knife. Oops.

And then I started in with the frosting. Again, the cake was super delicate so this was a long process. I started with the top layer and worked my way down, filling in cracks between layers as I went.

Not too bad. Right? Don’t laugh at me.

Okay, story time.

That first time I made this cake, I made it the day before our dinner gathering at my apartment. I wanted to cover it, but I wasn’t sure how. I had plastic wrap, but of course I knew that that would be pretty messy when it came time to remove the plastic. Toothpicks would have been a great idea to hold the plastic up off the frosting, but what grad student living on a stipend has toothpicks in her cupboard? Not me. Then a flash of (what seemed at the time to be) brilliance hit: Uncooked spaghetti looks an awful lot like toothpicks. It felt silly to be sticking spaghetti in my cake, but I didn’t have any better ideas. I figured I could just pull the pieces back out when I was ready to serve. I didn’t count on the fact that the moisture of the cake would soften the spaghetti pieces, leading them to break off. I didn’t even realize it until I was actually eating the cake with my friends, when I found a piece of uncooked spaghetti in my piece. I laughed and owned up to it, which turned out to be a good thing, because one friend looked really relieved as he said, “Oh, that explains it. I was afraid to ask.”

This time around, I had purchased a plastic cake platter with a cover, and this was way better.

And then I brought it to work. I was tempted to steal a piece first just so I could get a nice picture of it, but I settled for waiting for my coworker with the birthday to discover the cake whole. I ended up using my phone to take a picture of a slice served on a fancy-dancy paper plate afterward. This is how I roll.

It was pretty yummy, not gonna lie.

Oh goodness, will I have to do this for every coworker’s birthday now?

Stuffed Peppers

I was at the grocery store, stylishly dressed in my yoga pants, husband’s sweatshirt, and dirty sneakers, picking out fresh produce. A woman had her cart blocking the entire bell pepper display, but she moved it aside when she saw me coming. She gestured to the prepackaged sets of bell peppers and asked me why the sets only included yellow, orange, and red peppers, not green peppers. I didn’t have an answer, but asked my own: Why were all the red bells so monstrously HUGE? The woman waved her hands matter-of-factly, informing me that they were good for making stuffed peppers.

I was quiet for a moment, then picked out seven. Because of course I needed seven bell peppers. And it makes total sense to pick an odd number like that.

The recipe that I selected when I got home called for four peppers. I thought about cutting it down, since it was just hubby and I, but then I figured I’d leave it as-is and have plenty for lunch the next day. I selected two greens and two reds.

I cut off the tops and then hollowed them out, scraping out the seeds and membranes.

Plop them in some boiling water for a few minutes.

And then rinse in cold water to stop the from cooking. It actually smelled pretty good at this point.

I set them up on paper towels to drain. And started wondering if they were cooked a tad too long, since they were soft and kind of droopy.

Here’s a little tip that I learned on another site – cut off the bottoms of the peppers so that they’ll stand up all right in the pan.

Now for the stuffing.

Take a pound and a half of beef.

And a cup of cold rice. I had made gumbo the day before and had plenty of rice to spare.

Dump it in with the beef.

Add an egg.

Some chopped onions (also conveniently leftover from making gumbo).

And some Italian-style bread crumbs.

Add salt, pepper, and garlic powder.

And some Parmesan cheese.

I stood there looking at it for a few minutes, not wanting to just dig in with my hands and wondering if I could mix it evenly and well with just a wooden spoon. I tried, and this is as far as I got.

I finally gave in and got my hands dirty.

I divided the mixture into four balls so that each pepper could have an equal amount.

Stuffing them wasn’t hard at all, even though the peppers were delicate after having been boiled for a few minutes.

I mixed a can of tomato sauce with a quarter cup of white wine vinegar. I don’t know why the recipe wanted that, except to make it more acidic and cause worse heartburn than it would otherwise. But I went ahead and did it because the recipe said to. I’m young and I can get away with these things. Pour it over top of the peppers.

And top with some more Parmesan cheese.

This is one of those dishes that you can put in the oven and then clean the entire kitchen before it’s even ready. It needs 80 minutes, so you have plenty of time. I poured some wine for hubby and I.

I used some of the leftover wine charms that I made for our wedding. I found myself wishing I could “pin” them on Pinterest. Oh goodness.

Anyway, the peppers weren’t the prettiest things ever. The tall, skinny red bells plopped over, and the tomato sauce just wasn’t all that visually appealing to me.

It didn’t look all that recognizable on my plate, either.

But damn was it delicious! Hubby declared that it was like meatballs inside of peppers, and he added, “That’s what I’m talking about.” Man food.

This was such a delicious meal. Hearty, warm, and filling. I forgot until there were only about 10 minutes left on the timer that I had wanted to make roasted potatoes and also a broccoli side dish, but I took a gulp of my wine and thought, “Screw it.” Turns out, one pepper with all that stuffing was plenty of food. I wouldn’t have been able to eat that and potatoes, and I would have just eaten far too much. If you’re trying to go for a more balanced dish, I’d suggest slicing your peppers in half instead of keeping them whole.

Otherwise, not much I’d change. Yum!