Enchiladas

I'm excited to be doing another "learning to cook" post today! Last week I was sick and cooking was the furthest thing from my mind. For this week, I decided to make enchiladas. I used a recipe from food.com pretty much step-for-step, so I'll primarily just be sharing the photos today.

I started out with tomatoes, onions, and garlic. These all went briefly in the oven to soften up a bit.


If there was any doubt before, this wood-on-wood photo makes it clear how much I enjoy using wood as a photography background!
After letting the veggies cool off, I stuck them in the blender with a nice little variety of spice including:


and


I was a little bit nervous about putting the onion and garlic in my (cheap) blender, but it was fine and the sauce was ready!



Next came the spicy paste for the chicken breast.



This involved mixing together more of the same spices and creating a paste by adding oil and water. I think this is where I made my fatal error. The recipe calls for chili powder. I had a few packets, some of which said "not spicy" while others said "with spice." Hmmm. Mauricio loves spicy food and I like it quite a bit myself, so I decided to go half and half. When these enchiladas turned out way too spicy, I knew I should have just stuck with the non-spicy chili powder. Oh well, live and learn!

Anyway, I rubbed the (spicy) paste onto the chicken breast and baked it for a few minutes on each side. At this point, the kitchen began to smell heavenly.



While the chicken baked, I got the cheese and chili peppers ready. I left the seeds with the pepper which may have been another culprit in the spice overload, but I'm not sure. We've eaten things with the seeds before and enjoyed it. I'll probably leave them out next time just in case.



After the chicken was done, I sliced it up and it was time to put together the enchiladas!



My hands were rather messy during the assembly and I was starting to feel rushed, so it went mostly unphotographed.

I baked them for about 20 minutes and...



all done!

Like I said, they were very spicy and I didn't have any sour cream to complement the spice, so I'd definitely do things a little differently next time. But aside from that, it was a delicious meal! :)