Chicken and Apricot Enchiladas

They take a bit of time to prepare, but enchiladas give you warmth and comfort on a cool fall day. As always, I use refrigerator and pantry staples and leftover bits of vegetables. Here's a post on enchiladas from a few years ago, and I see that my comments about always using black beans is actually not true. 

Ingredients: 

For last night's enchildas, I used a chicken breast (poached and shredded), goat cheese, leftover cooked spinach and 3 dried apricots for each enchilada. You could of course substitute Mexican cheese or Monterey Jack for the goat cheese and add black, pinto or Great Northern beans in addition to the chicken. Sometimes I also add a tablespoon of chipolte chiles in adobo sauce for smoky heat.

Sauce: 

My sauce consists of a roux with 3 tablespoons of flour and about 2 1/2 to 3 cups of chicken stock along with a canned of chopped green chilies and a few tablespoons of salsa. When I use flour tortillas, as I did last night, I don't bother to warm the tortillas or dip them in the sauce because they are plenty pliable as is.

Assembly: 

Once I have all the ingredients on hand, I create a mini assembly line, placing the fillings on one side of the tortilla. Assembling the enchiladas all at the same time before rolling them up allows me to adjust the fillings so each tortilla contains the same amount. 

Cooking: 

Before rolling up the enchiladas, spoon a few large tablespoons of sauce onto the bottom and sides of the baking dish to help keep the enchiladas from sticking to the pan. Begin rolling from the side containing the filling; When you get to the end of the tortilla, pull the remaining flap of tortilla up to the top of the roll so you can lift it easily and place it flap-side-down in the baking dish. The tortillas bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes -- covered for soft tops and uncovered about 1/2 way through for a more crispy top.

Last night, the enchiladas rested on a bed of chopped kale and spinach salad mix, topped with sour cream (low fat of course!) and guacamole with pomegranate seeds. Roasted sweet potatoes rounded out the meal.

Trout -- Quick, Easy and Clean!

Trout and hamburgers are my go-to choices when we eat out on road trips because I can always count on them to taste great. What's more, most trout in restaurants or in the grocery store are farmed rainbow trout, which the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program says are always a "Best Choice" pick. And they're so easy to cook!

My grocery store sells whole trout and filets them for me in minutes. I find that one large trout serves 2 people (plus, 2 fillets fit perfectly in my 12-inch skillet).

You'll need a few pieces of equipment--one special and one probably improvised:

 --A pair of fish tweezers, which I've posted about before, come in handy to remove the few remaining bones that your fish guy will inevitably leave in. I find fish tweezers very cool!

--You'll need to find a cover for your large skillet. I use a round pizza pan, but you may have a large lid from a stock pot or spaghetti pot. Or, simply use a piece of foil. Covering the fish allows it to cook quickly and, maybe more importantly, keeps you from having to clean a bunch of greasiness from your stovetop.


Here's my fool-proof and quick method for cooking trout:

1. Pour a bit of oil in a pan heated to medium high and lay the trout in the pan skin-side-down.

2. Cover the pan and let the fish cook for about 4 minutes.

3. The trout is done when it flakes easily after you poke it with a fork or the tip of a knife and when the flesh is no longer shiny and glistening (cooking sites call this stage opaque--meaning that the flesh is not see-through)

4. Squeeze a bit of fresh lemon juice and add salt and pepper on each piece, and use a metal spatula to serve the fish onto each person's plate,

I don't eat the skin (of any fish actually) because I never cook it to the stage where it's crispy enough to be delectable and because for some fish, like salmon or halibut, I fear the mercury that resides in the fatty portions of the fish.  The topic of eating fish skin is debatable--scroll through this Serious Eats post for the pros and cons of eating fish skin!


With the trout, we had roasted potatoes with a bunch of chopped scallions tossed in after roasting (toss the potatoes in oil, salt and pepper and roast at 400 degrees for about 25 minutes, turning them once) and a salad with my typical melange of this-and-that, including leftover cooked mushrooms, 1/2 of a left-over avocado, slices of red onions, a bit of blue cheese and some toasted walnuts.