Enchiladas Verdes

My husband made enchiladas verdes last week, using two new ingredients that we've never cooked with before - tomatillos and cotija cheese! We made some improvisations along the way to make the recipe work for us, but they are turned out very delicious!

We cooked the tomatillos, serrano peppers and garlic in our cast iron Dutch oven, lined with aluminum foil, since we didn't have a griddle pan. It worked really well, blackening the veggies until they were ready to be blended into a delicious sauce. We only used 2 cups of chicken broth for the sauce, which already made the sauce pretty watery. We ended up adding several scoops of cornstarch to thicken it because it wasn't doing it on its own once we started heating it up.

We also decided to lightly crisp the corn tortillas in a pan instead of frying them, which worked out well, but took longer than frying. I think next time we would want to fry them, just to see if there is a difference.

The sauce was really spicy from the serrano peppers, but once we dipped the tortillas in the sauce, rolled up the chicken and lettuce/cilantro mix inside, and slathered on some creme fraiche (I couldn't find any Mexican crema at my grocery store) and cotija cheese, the sauce really mellowed out and wasn't too overwhelming. We had these again the following night and the sauce was even more flavorful than when we first made it.

I would definitely recommend trying the dish! It takes some work with all of the steps involved, but it was a lot of fun (to watch) - I was the kitchen supervisor for this meal while Matt cooked a delicious dinner for me!