My enchiladas are a storecupboard meal, so the flavour is slightly different each time depending on what's actually in the pantry. Generally, there are onions, sometimes garlic and chilli and bell pepper too. There is mince, usually beef, and a tomato sauce spiked with chilli and sugar to make it taste more like a salsa. The mince is cooked and has some of the sauce added to it, along with grated cheese and mayonnaise, and the mince mixture is spooned into tortillas. The tortillas originally sat on top of a layer of refried beans, which have now (of necessity) been replaced with smashed kidney beans, and are covered in the rest of the sauce and a bunch of cheese before being baked for twenty minutes.
That's the basic idea of the meal.
Enchiladas
(Printable Recipe)
(Printable Recipe)
Serves 2
(2 filled wraps are a medium-large meal for 1 person)
Essential:
1 onion
1 pack of mince (250g)
3 tablespoons of tomato puree and 500ml water
(or 500ml tomato sauce)
Chilli powder
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 handful grated cheese
1 tablespoon mayonnaise or sour cream
4 tortilla wraps
1 tin of kidney beans
More cheese for topping
Seasoning
Optional:
Garlic
Chilli pepper
Bell pepper
Gravy powder
Red wine
Extra vegetables
Bacon
Use your imagination!
Chop your onion, and garlic, chilli and pepper if using.
Put about 1/3 of the chopped vegetables into a large pan, and the other 2/3 into a small pan. The large pan is for the mince, the small one for the sauce. Fry on a medium heat until softened.
Add the tomato puree and water, or tomato sauce, to the small pan. You need a fairly thick sauce - enough to bind the meat together and cover the final dish. Let the pan simmer for a few moments before adding chilli and sugar to taste, along with other herbs and spices if desired. Add some red wine to the sauce, if using, and season.
In the large pan, add the mince once the onions have been softened. Last night I added 3 rashers of bacon, cut into strips, to the mince pan at this point as well. I usually sprinkle some gravy powder over the mince in its first few seconds of cooking, to darken it a little and make the mixture more gluey when it comes to spooning it into the tortillas.
Once the mince is almost entirely cooked through, add about two-thirds of the sauce to the mince pan, trying to get most of the big lumps of onion and pepper in. Stir through. If you are adding vegetables to the enchiladas, such as broccoli florets, add them to the pan now and allow to simmer on a medium-high heat for five to ten minutes. Season!
Turn the heat off under the small pan.
Add mayonnaise and grated cheese to the cooked mince and stir through.
Get your kidney beans, drain and rinse them, and put them in the microwave on high for one minute.
Mash the beans roughly with a fork and put back in the microwave for another minute to soften them further. Mash again, and spread on the bottom of an oven-proof dish.
Spoon a quarter of the mince mixture into a tortilla and roll it up.
Place the tortillas in the dish, on top of the layer of smashed kidney beans.
Repeat with the other three tortillas. Cover the tortillas in the remaining sauce, sprinkle with grated cheese, and bake at 180 degrees (360 Fahrenheit) for twenty minutes.
Serve, happily.
