“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist.”—Oscar Wilde. Heather on a riverboat in Venice—she knew how to live.
Our friend Heather Petersen loved these enchiladas, but she didn’t cook. Instead, she bought the ingredients, printed the recipe, and asked (or paid!) people to make them for her. She wasn’t lazy—she often went out of her way to help people (spending two weeks away from home nursing a friend back to health; delivering Crumbl cookies to our door when she learned, aghast, that we’d never tried them). She just didn’t want to cook.
Last weekend, church women prepared these enchiladas for two hundred of us as we mourned her premature death and celebrated her extraordinary person. In a letter he read at the funeral, my friend Trevor told her, “Somehow when you looked at us, you made us each feel like a celebrity, though most of us are utterly ordinary and almost always a bit awkward. You listened to us as if we were poets, when most of us ramble and repeat ourselves.”
Now, we prepare these enchiladas at our house to remind us how she made us feel and that we want to be like her.
The sauce resembles a mole, but is made simply with chili powder. This means the character of your chili powder will strongly influence the enchiladas’ flavor. Keep in mind that your chili powder might be too strong to use the full 1/4 cup (as ours was). One day we might experiment with adding an 8-ounce can of Hunt’s tomato sauce to this mixture, but right now we want to eat them exactly the way Heather did.
Chicken Enchiladas
Serves 8 to 10
Enchilada sauce ingredients
½ cup of butter (one stick)
½ cup of flour
¼ cup chili powder
4 cups/1 quart chicken broth
Enchilada ingredients
1 tablespoon of olive or canola oil
1 small white or yellow onion, peeled and diced (if you have chicken that’s already been cooked, you can substitute 1 bunch scallions or a couple of small spring onions)
1 1/2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breasts or thighs
1 4-ounce can diced green chiles
1 teaspoon salt
Freshly ground pepper
1 15-ounce can of black or pinto beans, rinsed and drained (we like small white beans)
10 soft taco-size flour tortillas
3 cups Mexican-blend shredded cheese
1 batch of enchilada sauce (instructions below)
Make the sauce:
Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Add the flour, then stir and let cook for several minutes, until it smells a little more golden and like something you want to eat. Add the chili powder and stir for a minute or two, to let the chili powder toast a bit. Start adding the broth 1/2 cup at a time, stirring to blend it completely before you add the next batch. Once the sauce has moved thoroughly from the solid to the liquid category, you can add all of the remaining broth at once--maybe the final two cups of broth. Bring the sauce to a simmer, stirring, and let it cook for a couple of minutes until it thickens a bit. Remove from heat.
Prepare the filling:
If the chicken is already cooked, shred it into bite-sized pieces with your hands, and add the scallions, green chilis, beans, and some fresh pepper to a bowl. Taste to see whether it needs more salt.
If the chicken is raw, heat the oil over medium-high heat in a large sauté pan. Add the onion and sauté for about three minutes. Add the chicken and sprinkle it well with salt (around 1 teaspoon), cooking until the internal temperature of the thickest part of the meat reaches 160 degrees. Let the chicken sit for 5 to 10 minutes, then chop it into bite-sized pieces and mix with green chilis, beans, and freshly ground pepper. Taste to see whether you need to add more salt.
Heat the oven to 350 degrees and spray a 9 x 13-inch baking pan with cooking spray.
Assemble the enchiladas:
Tortillas
Enchilada sauce
Chicken mixture
Cheese
Lay out a tortilla, spoon 2 tablespoons of enchilada sauce down the center, add a line of chicken mixture on top of the sauce, sprinkle with cheese, then roll. Place in baking dish, and repeat.
To roll the tortillas, tuck in the sides an inch or so over the filling, then roll the bottom tortilla half up over the filling, squeeze gently to consolidate the filling, and finish rolling into a tube. Place in the pan and repeat with remaining tortillas. Pour the remaining sauce evenly over the enchiladas, then cover with the remaining cheese.
Bake uncovered for 20 minutes until enchiladas are cooked through and tortillas have a slight crisp on the outside. Garnish with fresh cilantro, if you’d like. Serve with sour cream and guacamole or sliced avocado.
