I absolutely LOVE a good magic trick, don’t you? You know what, I’m gonna show you a trick right now! How about that? Okay so let’s take the words chicken enchilada. <– That’s one labor intensive pair of words right there. Between the making of the filling plus actually filling and folding business, you’re looking at an easy couple of hours. Now take those words, chicken enchilada and add a casserole at the end of it. What do you get? Chicken enchilada casserole! <– Bam! Saved you a good hour right there. Now, that’s good kitchen magic 😉 Hardy har har. Yeah, totally lame, I know. But could you just pretend for a sec that you actually got a insy winsy chuckle out of that one? 😀 White chicken enchilada casserole is where it’s at, yo. Comfort food to the max. That white sauce, though. Mmmm – mmm. Living in Texas means a.) tex-mex – available to you 24/7/365 at every street corner – which either you love or you’re going to learn to love. Thankfully, I fall into the first category. and b) be it chicken enchiladas or anything else with this white sauce on it, I will gobble it right up. The first time I made this little number to test out the white sauce and what not, I didn’t think this recipe would make it to the blog. Sure, the sauce was good and I do mean good, the chicken was there, and the enchiladas were stacked like a lasagna, but it was missing something. And sure enough, it was my favorite ingredient of all time — BLACK BEANS! If you’re a regular reader, you already know about my love minor obsession for black beans. I love, love, love them. The second time I made them with black beans and for a little more color (and also, nutrition) I added in some corn. And it was LOVE at first bite. I think Anees actually told me I had to make these for the blog before he even had swallowed his first bite. I live for that reaction! Because when the hubby actually says something with black beans and corn is better than the version without them, you know you’ve slowly but surely started to convert him from being the total meat-lover that he is evil grin. Moving along… I used carb smart flour tortillas for this recipe. Carb smart tortilla’s are made using more fiber (aka good carbs) and less of the bad ones, plus they’re balanced to have WAY more protein then the regular flour tortillas that give you <1 gram per tortilla. <– tricks like these help keep this chicken enchilada casserole nice and healthy. I cut up the 6-inch round tortillas into 2 inch strips. This also helps cut back on some of the carbs. Most recipes call for as many as 12 whole tortillas for serving 6-8 people. That’s almost 2 tortillas per person! I used a total of 8 tortillas and my dish still feeds 6-8. That’s a little less than 1 whole tortilla per person.
Now let’s stack these enchiladas! 1.) spray your dish! <– do not skip this step (you’ll be sorry) 2.) 4 strips of tortillas 3.) hit it with the sauce, baby! 4.) chicken 5.) black beans 6.) corn 7.) cheese me, please! 8.) repeat 2-7 9.) all of the remaining tortillas, sauce, + remaining cheese Into the oven this lovely little chicken casserole goes! And out comes the bubbliest, cheesiest, sauciest, chicken enchilada bake that you’ll ever experience in your entire life. Your brain is going to demand that you feed yourself this. I really do wish that I had taken a little bit of extra time and care to take some more pictures for you, but full disclosure here, when a chicken enchilada casserole is staring you in the face and the warm, familiar smells of melted pepper jack cheese + green chili white sauce is slowly mesmerizing you, there’s only so many pictures on can take before digging right in. The layers of cheese, chicken, BLACK BEANS, and corn all tossed together with a garlicky sauce and strings of cheese pulling in every direction. <– KA-BOOM. Mind blown! You need white chicken enchilada casserole in your life. Like, pronto.
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