Day 38: Chilaquiles

Happy Cinco De Mayo!!! With finals wrapping up, Jimmy's graduation, and my surgery going on, I totally forgot it was Cinco De Mayo. Thanks to Facebook status updates, I was reminded. I googled some "traditional" recipes, and I came across Chilaquiles. I've never had this before, and since I am trying to be more "well rounded" when it comes to different cuisines, I decided I HAD to try this.

Ingredients

For The Chicken:

4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts		1 onion, quartered
2 cloves of garlic

For the tomato sauce

2 onions, fnely chopped		1 garlic chopped very small
12 tomatoes peeled and seeded and pureed		1 Tbs cilantro, minced
salt and pepper, to taste		2 Tbs Tabasco sauce if you want it hot (optional)

Plus you will need

4 round corn tortillas		Sour cream, diluted with a small amount of water
½ lb manchego cheese		½ pound mozzarella cheese

Cut the tortillas into strips

Cook chicken with a little water, the quartered onion, a pinch of salt and two cloves of garlic. Cover, cook slowly over a medium heat.

Once the chicken is fully cooked, place chicken on a plate. Cool until you are able to handle it.

Throw away the garlic and onion.

Tomato Sauce

Sautee the chopped onion and garlic in some olive oil. Once the onion is translucent, add tomatoes, cilantro and Tabasco sauce, over medium heat for 10 minutes. Salt and pepper to taste. Shred the chicken and place in sauce, lower heat and cook for a few minutes to absorb some of the flavors from the sauce. Do not over cook.

Frying the corn tortillas

Deep fry the corn tortillas. When they are crisp, remove and drain on paper towels.

Assemble

Set the chilaquiles like lasagna. Use a large lasagna pan and layer the following:

• tortillas



• chicken in sauce



• sour cream {diluted in water}



• cheese.

Repeat layers and finish with cheese and sour cream. Bake at 335 degrees F for about 45 minutes.

What we thought:

This took about two hours to make, not including oven time. When all said and done, this tasted great! Jimmy and I both rated this a perfect 10. We liked the "freshness" the cilantro provided plus I really enjoyed the kind of cheese I used. For some reason, it didn't occur to me that you can chop of tortilla wraps and make tortilla chips. Remember, I was born blonde. My tortilla chips turned out great! I did not fry them like the recipe called for, I baked them. I sprayed canola oil on both sides and cooked for about....4 songs worth (i was listening to music at the time). That would be about 12 minutes. I just need another recipe so I can use up my tortilla wraps. Any suggestions?