Thursday, July 15, 2010

Beef Enchiladas

Okay, so I've taken a little while longer than I had intended to to post up this next recipe. This was dinner on Monday evening, and here I am posting it two days later.


Anyway, we made Beef Enchiladas, and they were damn tasty. I think in the end they became more baked Fajitas in enchilada sauce, but what the hey, it's Mexican.

So, we begin with dicing up some green peppers, and chopping about half of an onion. The green pepper is for the filling, along with some black olives we sliced and I forgot to take a picture of. The onion is going to be part of the enchilada sauce.

So, we begin with sauteƩing the onion in some olive oil. Later, once it has started to carmelize we throw in some minced garlic. [The garlic cooks up much faster and you don't want it to burn]

The rest of the sauce is tomato pureƩ, which we made by throwing a can of diced tomatoes in our food processor. We were supposed to add chili powder and ground cumin, but since we have neither we substituted with some cayenne powder and salt and black pepper to taste. We'll let this cook and reduce for a while, and move on to the meat.

That was the remains of a 3-pound roast we've had in the freezer for a while. The slab at the top left is fat and connective tissue. [We don't need that for this meal but it really adds flavor in a stew, which is what the roast was originally cut for]

There's the beef slices all cooked up. Most of the fat drained out of the meat or got cooked into it. [When people talk about "marbled" steaks, they're talking about muscle tissue that has a lot of fat going through it.]

Now we start to build the enchiladas. We only had 3 tortillas, which worked out quite nicely, as the baking dish was just the right size. We pour about a ladle-full of enchilada sauce onto the tortilla, then pile on the meat and vegetables, and top it all with a dollop of sour cream and some shredded cheese. We used mild cheddar. Roll it up and place it seam-side down in the baking dish.

Then pour the remaining enchilada sauce over the tortilla rolls, hopefully covering everything. Then cover that all up with the remaining shredded cheese.

Bake it for about 15 minutes at 350 degrees and it should come out like this.

We ate it with cooked peas, though they got a little too cooked.

And we cut up the French Chocolate cake for dessert. It is AWESOME. It's like a really dense chocolate mousse, firm but still creamy and it just melts in your mouth. The recipe called to serve with whipped or sour cream, and I said "to hell with sour cream" so I made some whipped cream for it.

The cake is so rich, we've been slowly sharing with our friends, we can't possibly eat all of it by ourselves.

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