Enchiladas

Dinner last night was a smash success. beef enchiladas was the meal du jour. It was pretty good too. homemade sauce, browned ground beef, homemade tortillas, and grated cheddar cheese. The tortillas were made from the bakery mix I received from commodities. 2 cups of bakery mix, and 1/2 cup very warm water, mix with your hand, then let sit 15 minutes. Roll out into 8 tortillas and then fry up on a griddle with no fat on it. Set aside. Brown the meat (I didn't season it this time but next time I'll at least put some salt and pepper on it) and then set that aside. The enchilada sauce was special though. I called my sister, I know she makes enchilada's a lot. Come to find out she uses La Victoria sauce, and just dumps it... Well, that didn't help me any as I don't have that. So she hit the internet and found this recipe.

2 cups chicken Broth
4 TBSP. chili powder
1 tsp. ground cumin
2 HEAPING tsp.garlic powder
3/4 tsp. salt
1 pinch ground cinnamon (less than 1/16 tsp.)
1/3 tsp. sugar
5 TBSP. cold water
5 TBSP. flour

Add all except flour and water to a saucepan and whisk over medium high heat while it comes to a boil and then turn down to a simmer for 3 minutes. Whisk a lot so it doesn't stick and all those spices incorporate.

Mix the flour and water in a seperate bowl so that it's all blended and not lumpy.

While whisking the original chili powder stuff, slowly add the flour and water mix and bring briefly back to a heavy simmer/boil so that it cooks the flour.

Well... I followed this recipe, except I used ONE CAN of chicken broth which is just about 1 cup and 7/8 of another cup of broth. so it was a little less broth than the recipe called for.

I didn't like it. It tasted of nothing but chili powder and it was gross. Blah. but I had put all this work and stuff into it so I didn't just want to toss it... Besides, hubby decided he REALLY wanted enchiladas for dinner. hummm... ok. out comes my brain (ugh... Like I wanted to think last night). I looked around my kitchen, which is still a bit of a shambles from moving it, but starting to shape up nicely, to see what I could find. Long story short I added 2 more ingredients. The only downfall is that I didn't measure them. I just dumped them in.

1/2 to 1 cup brown sugar
1/4 to 1/3 cup ketchup

I stirred these items into the other finished sauce and it came out FANTASTIC!

Using the tortillas, I rolled up a few tablespoons of the ground beef into each one, stacking them neatly in a baking dish. when I ran out of tortillas, I sprinkled the rest of the meat in a layer on top. So I ended up with 8 little rolls of meat stuffed tortilla...

Here's the layers in my baking dish.

about 2 tbsp. sauce
tortillas with meat inside
cheese
sauce
tortillas with meat inside
last of the meat
sauce
cheese

There was still about 1 cup of sauce left over, which was good, as hubby dumped extra sauce over his servings (YES! He ate seconds!) of enchiladas. There were enough for both of us to have seconds and they were fantastic! Hubby has asked that I add this sauce to our recipe book, so I am. And we'll definitely make it again... and maybe more than one time again. lol. It had just enough heat to clear your sinus' too. Awesome bonus!

Other than that I did some painting on the trim inside the house yesterday, while hubby recouped from Friday. He moved everything into the house and the cabin from the garage/tent as we were getting some rain Thursday night. As of today, I am very, very glad that he did this, and so is he. Today we are getting torrential downpours. Which we are absolutely taking advantage of. We have 18 gallon totes under three downspouts on the back of the house, and we are gathering this rain water up for use. We have already put 25 gallons in our big 325 gallon holding tanks (would have had more if we were going out regular, but we didn't go out in the middle of the night. lol!) and have filled 2 carboys in the house with water too. And the totes are still out there. In the hour that we have had them empty they have probably another 9 gallons in them total. Ack! lol. Very, very nice if you ask me. It means that we won't have to go anywhere for water for a bit.

Since we are going to have to move the big water holding tanks though, we can't put as much as we like in them. As soon as this spate of weather lets up we are going to go out, take apart the power station, move the water holding tanks to a spot where we can build a straw bale housing around them and put the power stuff in the cabin or under the house. If it doesn't go one place, it'll go another. hehe. THEN, once the water holding tanks are in place we'll fill them up. since we are to get rain for the next week, I am ABSOLUTELY sure we'll get them full before next Saturday! Whoot! No water worries. :D For a while at least.

Ok, off to find something to get into.

Soggy mistress of Treehaven Lake