Chicken Enchilada Casserole - YUMMY!

I really was in the mood for some Mexican food, but this summer we are on a budget because I'm not working, so that really ruled out restaurants.  While I'm a decent cook, I'm by no means restaurant worthy.  However, now is the time to work on that otherwise we are going to be eating the same boring foods all summer long.  With that in mind, I decided to ramp it up with some different recipes that I never tried before, or I haven't made in a long time. After all, cooking is an art, and if you make something you really like that just leads to making CUTE recipe cards for swaps!

So, without further ado I'm going to explain how I made this:

It was ridiculously good.  Here are my ingredients:

Bone in chicken breast halves

Enchilada Sauce
Corn Tortillas
Rotel (hope I spelled that right!)
Garlic Clove
White Onion
Olive Oil
Sour Cream





So, the first thing was boiling the chicken breast halves.  Yes, life would be so much easier if you used chicken breasts without the bone, but you NEED the chicken broth that is left over to make the dish.

(1) First step is to boil  the chicken.  After the chicken starts to fall apart, I turn the heat off and fork it out into a colander to let it cool off.

 (2) While the chicken is cooling, I go ahead and finely chop my onion and garlic.  I don't put an amount on my recipe simply because I'm kind of a "ooo this looks like the right amount" kind of girl.  I'll tell you I used three pieces off my garlic clove and about 1/3 of my medium sized onion.

(3) Once the chicken is cooled off you are going to need to pull it off the bone and shred it.  By this I mean make it look stringy when you tear it apart.  I don't use the skin or gristle or bones, those go into the garbage.  Just the breast meat.

(4) I put a dash of olive oil in a pan to heat up and then I saute' my onion and garlic together, then once tender I add the can of Rotel.

(5) Once that is nice and tossed up I add the shredded chicken and then I cook together just for a few minutes to heat the chicken up and mix the juices together.  *Feel free to add chicken broth if your mixture looks too dry.  Nothing worse than dry chicken!

(6) In a separate container I added 4 cups of hot chicken broth with 1/4 cup of enchilada sauce and 1 cup of sour cream.  Give or take of course ;).  This mixture is what you soak your corn tortillas in before putting them in your casserole dish.

(7) This is what I did.  I used glass pyrex dishes.  To prep them I poured enchilada sauce in the bottom and then used a brush to spread it evenly on the bottom of the pan.

(8) Next, I took tortillas out of my tortilla soak that I made (see step 6) and put them in the bottom of the pan, somewhat layering them so that the entire bottom of the pan was covered.

(9)  I then added my chicken and spice mixture covering the tortillas evenly.














(10) I topped with cheese.

 11) I repeated this process until my pan was full with my last layer being the soaked tortillas covered in cheese.

12)  I put my oven on 350 degrees and popped those suckers in there.  *NOTE, cover your dish with tinfoil for the first 20 minutes or so, and then uncover for the last 5 minutes or so to brown the cheeses.

I ended up with 2 casserole dishes worth of enchilada casserole.  To me this is better than traditional enchiladas because its the same taste, but I didn't have to individually roll all those corn tortillas! 

I pulled out of the oven and cut with a spatula and served piping hot.  Which is WAY too hot, but watching all that cheese in long strings just make it worth it.

Family survey gave this dish 3 1/2 stars out of 4.  It was kind of messy making so didn't get the full 4 stars, but the overwhelming benefit for me was that the left overs were eaten up within 24 hours!  It was well loved in this house!