Dinner Tonight

Since I promised some sharing of random details from my here & now life, there is nothing like starting with what I cooked for dinner tonight. I decided to reuse some chili that I had made in the crock pot a couple of months ago and froze. I LOVE reusing leftovers (this is not only referring to food, but jewelry parts, fabric, and yarn - pretty much anything lying about, only not for dinner, obviously). I'd been thinking about what to do with that old chili since we took it out of the freezer a few days ago to thaw. It's not really hot soup weather at the moment (the high today was in the upper eighties here in our town on the Hudson River). I needed to find something different, so I searched Google to see what others online are doing with leftover chili.

I stumbled upon this recipe for homemade (and easy) enchilada sauce: http://www.gimmesomeoven.com/red-enchilada-sauce/. I had read about some people using leftover chili to make enchiladas, and was intrigued.

So anyway, I won't go into too much detail on the sauce except to say, it took FOREVER to thicken, which I think was due to the high humidity in my house today. So I simmered the heck out the enchilada-sauce-in-progress until it actually started to resemble a sauce, and it turned out very good (a wee-bit lumpy since I was not as dedicated to whisking as I would have been if I wasn't keeping an eye on G. at the same time as cooking the sauce.)

My real inspiration came when I asked myself how I was going to make the chili mixture thick enough to make the enchilada actually enchilada-like. Eureka! I added grated cheese (a no-brainer) to the chili mixture until it was a nice consistency. Then, in an act of sheer genius, I spread a layer of cream cheese on each tortilla before adding the chili and forming the enchiladas.

Anyway, I had put a thin layer of sauce on the bottom of the pan before I added the enchiladas, then put the remaining sauce over the top. 15 minutes on 350 as-is then another 15 minutes covered in a thick blanket of grated cheddar & it was dinner!

My hunch about the cream cheese paid off and the enchiladas were fabulous. I was excited about my creation because I had taken a recipe I was moderately enthused about and with some creativity and some targeted Google searching, found a way to make leftover chili into something we really enjoyed. This is one of the things that I love about my sister-in-law, Lynn: she will take a recipe and then basically change it to suit her own taste, and it rocks every time. In her honor, I consumed a couple of cups of coffee while I was making dinner, I might add! Although in retrospect I probably should not have chose this hot day to use my oven, forcing the air-conditioner to work even harder.

So I hope you enjoyed my first blog post. I promise they will not all be about food (they will probably all mention coffee at some point, though - ha!), but this one was because, well, we had chili in the freezer!