08.15.11_Spinach Enchiladas

Spinach Enchiladas. This picture does not do these enchiladas justice for how delicious they were.

Since we hadn't had any Mexican food since our Bean Tacos, we decided to try this recipe for Spinach Enchiladas that Phillip found. I had not made enchiladas in probably four or five years so I was excited to make them again and the thought of spinach and cheese pouring out of a tortilla sounded incredible.

As almost all of the other recipes have been, this dish was super simple to prepare and involved very little cooking and/or prep work (my favorite kind of meal). The first thing to do was to defrost the frozen spinach. To go back and quote my favorite teacher Rachael Ray, frozen spinach truly is an incredible deal when you think about how much spinach wilts down after being cooked. While Ray Ray always used a dish towel to ring out all the liquid in the defrosted spinach ("She can afford to buy new towels each time" is how Phillip rationalized this gross technique) I decided to just use my hands and some paper towels to make sure all the liquid was gone.  Meanwhile, I sauteed some green onion and garlic for a couple of minutes in a tablespoon of butter before adding the spinach to the pan.

In a mixing bowl, I combined the ricotta and Monterrey Jack cheeses with the sour cream before adding the spinach mixture. After everything was combined, I used a 1/4 cup measuring cup to scoop out the spinach and cheese mixture into each tortilla. Using the 1/4 cup divided the enchilada filling perfectly, making the 10 tortillas stuffed evenly. The enchiladas were delicious, super satisfying, and ready in about 30 minutes. I served the enchiladas with some guacamole for a little something extra on the side.

The enchiladas after they came out of the oven, with an excessive amount of cheese melted on top!

The only modifications we made were using flour tortillas instead of corn (it's what I had in the house already) and I put way more cheese on top then the recipe called for. If you wanted to make this dish even healthier you could use olive oil instead of butter to saute the green onion and garlic, sub low fat cottage cheese instead of ricotta, and use corn tortillas (rather than flour) like the recipe calls for.