In episode 090 we are making Cream Cheese Chicken Enchiladas for dinner. If you love enchiladas, you are going to love this recipe! Shredded chicken is mixed with cream cheese, sour cream, green chilies, onions and jalapenos. Rolled in yellow corn tortillas and baked with red enchilada sauce and cheese.
Serve it up with some rice and beans for a great Mexican dinner.
Transcript
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Intro: Hey. Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of Let’s Make Dinner, your audio library of amazing dinner recipes you can always get on the table. I’m your host, Susie Weinrich.
Susie Weinrich: Happy Thursday everybody. Okay. We’re here for another episode of Let’s Make Dinner, and I’m super excited this week because I just figured out that we are on episode 90.
I cannot believe that I have 90 podcast episodes behind me. When I first started this thing, I thought, this is crazy. We’ll see if this works. If this is what I want to be doing. It absolutely is. Obviously, here I am. I’m at episode 90 and I have absolutely loved doing this podcast and connecting with an audience in a totally different way.
So here we are, episode 90. We are making Cream Cheese Chicken Enchiladas, and it just couldn’t be a better recipe for my 90th episode. I feel like I’m treating 90 like it’s a hundred, but I’m super excited about the round number. Enchiladas are one of my very favorite foods to eat just in general. You know, people say, if you were stuck on a deserted island, what’s one food you would eat the whole time? Enchiladas, a hundred percent, no question. I hope you love enchiladas too.
Tips and Tricks: I hope that you have the ingredients to make these cream cheese chicken enchiladas for dinner tonight. So let’s get into some tips and tricks for your enchiladas. First of all, let’s talk about your tortillas. You can absolutely go with a flour tortilla when you make enchiladas. It’s not traditional, but it will work. Flour tortillas are so much easier to work with than corn tortillas. But on the flip side, corn tortillas are traditional. They’re way more flavorful than flour tortillas, and they’re just a little bit more delicate. They make a better enchilada. If you choose to use corn tortillas, here’s what I’m going to tell you. Number one, buy a quality corn tortilla. If your grocery store has ones that are refrigerated, that are maybe made locally, buy those. Those are going to be your best bet. Second of all, buy the yellow corn tortillas, not the white corn tortillas. Yellow corn tortillas are going to have way more flavor than the white version.
Second tip. If you are making any type of chicken enchilada, this is an excellent time to take advantage of that rotisserie chicken at Costco or at your local grocery store. Take off both breasts and some thigh meat. Whizz it up in your stand mixer, shred it up, and use that. It just cuts an entire step out of making these enchiladas.
Third tip. Either make your own enchilada sauce or find one in the store that you really, really love. For a long time, we loved the Target brand market pantry enchilada sauce because it was really tangy, it had a lot of vinegar in it. But now I tend to make my own enchilada sauce. So I actually have a recipe on Mom’s Dinner that I will link for you in the show notes and you can check out that recipe. It is so simple. Let me just tell you, to make your own enchilada sauce, you literally just need vegetable oil, flour, a bunch of spices from your spice cabinet, and some chicken broth. You could also throw some tomato paste in there if you want, but that’s it. It is so simple. Oh, and I will say you do need vinegar and some lime juice as well. But it literally comes together in five minutes.
The next tip is about your cream cheese. This recipe obviously is Cream Cheese Chicken Enchiladas. The filling is going to be a mixture of cream cheese and sour cream, so you want to make sure that your cream cheese is at room temperature. I will tell you that cream cheese comes to room temperature pretty quickly, and if you need it to happen a little bit faster, what you can do is cut your cream cheese into little one-inch cubes, leave it out at room temperature, and it will soften in less than 30 minutes. It happens very, very quickly.
So I think those are all of my tips for the ingredients and making the Cream Cheese Chicken Enchiladas. So let’s go ahead and get into the full recipe.
Cream Cheese Enchiladas Recipe: All right. When you’re making these enchiladas, there are going to be basically three separate steps or portions to this recipe. You’re going to make your enchilada filling, then you’re going to assemble the enchiladas, and then you’re going to bake.
We’re going to start with the enchilada filling. Dial it back a few. You need to preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Now let’s get to the enchilada filling. So you need a big skillet because we’re going to saute some veggies to add to the chicken and the cream cheese. In a really large skillet, over about medium heat, you’re going to add a little bit of vegetable oil or olive oil, and you’re going to saute half a cup of chopped onion, three fresh garlic cloves, and some chopped jalapeno. Use as much jalapeno as you like. So if you like a lot, if you want a lot of spice, get up in there, use a couple of jalapenos. If you like, no spice at all, you could actually sub in poblano peppers for the jalapeno peppers. So you’re going to saute that for about five minutes just to get it to start to soften.
Now, while that is sauteeing, in a large bowl, you’ll want to combine the shredded chicken, which actually you need two and a half cups of cooked shredded chicken. Eight ounces of cream cheese at room temperature, four ounces of sour cream, a four-ounce can of chopped green chilies, and half a teaspoon of kosher salt. So stir that all together and then once that jalapeno and onion mixture is ready, you can stir that in there as well. So that’s it. That’s the filling for the Cream Cheese Chicken Enchiladas.
Now for assembly, anytime I’m making enchiladas, I like to do kind of an assembly line to make my enchiladas. I like to have my prepared baking dish, which actually I just use a 9×13 casserole dish. I spray it lightly with a little bit of non-stick spray, and then I put about half a cup to three-quarters of a cup of enchilada sauce across the bottom, just to coat the bottom so your enchiladas don’t stick to the pan. Then have your tortillas, the chicken filling, some cheese, and the red enchilada sauce.
Let’s pause the recipe for just a minute. If you are using corn tortillas, you absolutely have to prep them first. You can’t just use them straight out of the package. They’re super delicate and they will rip and tear and be a hot mess. What you have to do is heat them in some way. So if you have your own way to heat corn tortillas, go for it. What I like to do is take my cast iron skillet, and put it over medium heat. I usually will put a little bit of oil in the bottom and then wipe it out with a paper towel. Just get that pan-hot. Then I put a corn tortilla in for about one minute per side, and then use that tortilla. While I’m using that tortilla, I put another tortilla in the pan to warm up while I’m rolling that first enchilada, and so on and so forth. Warm up your tortilla. You’re going to put about three tablespoons of that chicken mixture down the center of the tortilla, sprinkle with a little extra cheese, and then roll the tortilla up and you’re going to place it in that prepared baking pan seam side down. Now, you’ll repeat this until all of your tortillas are used, all of your fillings are used and your pan is full.
I think this recipe is going to make somewhere around 12 enchiladas. So once you have them all rolled up, you’re going to pour the remaining enchilada sauce over all of the rolled enchiladas, sprinkle all of the remaining cheese over top, and then cover your pan with foil and bake it for 20 minutes. At the end of that 20 minutes, you’ll pull the foil off and bake it for another 15 minutes so that the cheese on the top gets nice and melty and gooey. You’re going to let the enchiladas cool for about 15 minutes. So just like any type of casserole or lasagna, you want them to cool for a little bit because all of the filling and the cheese and all of that is going to set up just a little bit, just enough so that you can dish it out without everything falling apart.
When we serve these enchiladas, we love to do just two enchiladas per person. Then I love to have some little topping garnishes. For these enchiladas, we’ll either do fresh, diced avocado, a little bit of chopped cilantro, or maybe some green onions. You could do shredded lettuce or pico de gallo. Then of course your traditional Mexican side dishes, so like Mexican rice, refried beans. I just published a great recipe for corn salsa that would be a great garnish for these enchiladas. I also have an excellent pineapple side dish that’s pretty much for Mexican food. It’s fresh-cut pineapple with this honey orange cilantro lime glaze that goes over it. It’s an excellent side dish that I don’t think a lot of people expect when they’re having enchiladas. You expect rice and beans, but pineapple is a wonderful fresh side dish you can add to the mix. Then one more side dish that we love is a cilantro lime slaw, which actually would be a great garnish to the top of these enchiladas as well. So of course I will link all of those recipes, all of those side dishes, and I’ll link my favorite margarita recipe in there too, if you want to have a little margarita. You can check all of those recipes out. Just so you know, you can find all of these recipes that are on this podcast on my website, momsdinner.net. That’s where I share all of my recipes. You can print them, or cook them from the website. You can actually even text yourself the ingredient list and a link to the recipe. You can pin it, print it, or do whatever you need to do when you’re ready to make any of these recipes.
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Outro: Until next time, I hope this episode of Let’s Make Dinner makes your dinner time a little easier. See ya.
Double Dip: All right guys, now it’s time for your double dip. Thank you so much for sticking around. So in the double dip, if you’ve never been here before, it’s where we talk about the recipe that’s coming up next week so that maybe you can get prepared and get the ingredients you need to cook along with me next week, next Thursday.
So what are we making next Thursday? We are making Baked Barbecue Meatballs. I love a meatball. This barbecue meatball is no exception. It has great flavor for this time of year. You know, we all start thinking about a little bit of barbecue here and there, but this one you don’t have to have a grill. You don’t have to be outside. You can just make your barbecue meatballs and enjoy.
Okay, so here’s what you need to grab for next week’s episode on Thursday. One pound of ground beef, one pound of ground pork, and two cups of bread. So this could be French bread, white bread, ciabatta, any kind of bread will work as long as it’s not super seedy Bread, half a cup of milk, one large egg, one and a half tablespoons of your very favorite barbecue sauce. One tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, two teaspoons of chili powder, one teaspoon each of garlic powder and onion powder, a little sprinkle of smoked paprika, kosher salt, and then, of course, some more of your very favorite barbecue sauce to glaze the outside. So I hope you’ll join me next week and make these. Let me tell you what goes really, really well with these are my garlic mashed potatoes. You can do them on the stove or you can do them in the instant pot. They are perfect. My mouth is watering. They go perfectly with this Barbecue Meatball and then maybe some green beans on the side is mwah! Perfect. I hope you’ll join me then, and until next week, have a wonderful week ahead.
Recipes Mentioned
- Cream Cheese Chicken Enchiladas
- Red Enchilada Sauce
- Mexican Rice Recipe
- 15 min. Refried Beans Recipe
- Pineapple Side Dish
- Pico De Gallo
- Corn Salsa
- Margarita on the Rocks
Next Week
I hope you join me every Thursday for a new episode and a fresh dinner idea. Next week we are making Baked BBQ Meatballs. Grab the ingredients and we’ll chat on Thursday.
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