Viva Enchiladas

Mexican food has always been a popular cuisine at my abode, although throughout my cooking experiences, enchiladas have been a missing element. Tacos, nachos, burritos, quesadillas, baked tortillas and bowls of chilli have made their way into my accommodating belly but never enchiladas, until a few weeks ago...

Enchilada recipes that I had seen in the past didn't seem exciting or interesting enough to bother with. When I purchased Viva Vegan there were too many other intriguing Latin American meals that stood out and the enchilada recipe went by unnoticed. This fantastic book has had such a good workout and most of the recipes initially bookmarked have had a trial so it was a nice surprise when I stumbled across the Potato-Chickpea enchiladas with Green Tomatillo sauce and Pine Nut crema.  

Terry suggests that the tomatillo sauce, pine nut crema and potato chickpea filling can be made in advance. There are several parts to the recipe which can make it rather time consuming and I was thankful for this advice. It is feasible to make the whole recipe on a lazy Sunday afternoon, however, the pre-planning is highly beneficial for a faster weeknight meal. Fresh tomatillos are called for in the recipe which are something that I have never seen, however I purchased a tin of tomatillos a while ago from Casa Iberica so these were used instead.

We all loved the enchiladas and gave credit to the tomatillos for making the flavour so distinctive. It was the first time we had tried tomatillos which have quite a tart taste. The left-overs were equally delicious the next day.

The following week I made another batch of enchiladas using a variation from Viva Vegan. This batch had a seitan, potato and silverbeet filling with a ancho chile sauce. They were also delicious and I wasn't sure which ones came out on top until I repeated the tomatillo enchiladas again. Surprisingly it was unanimous that we all slightly preferred the tomatillo enchiladas over the ancho chile ones!

Prior to venturing into the enchilada world, I found a short video of Terry Hope Romero making the potato chickpea enchiladas with tomatillo sauce. The recipe was also posted on this site and as it is quite a long one, I'm not going to re-write it as the changes I made were very minor.