Chilaquiles!

Most people who know me know how much I love to eat.  And more than how much I love to eat, how much I love to cook.  One of my favorite hobbies is eating something delicious and then trying (sometimes for weeks) to recreate it.  Okay, so maybe its more of an addiction than a hobby.

For a few years D has been pretty much obsessed with Trader Joe’s Chile Verde chicken burritos.  I buy, oh, about 3 packs of them every week or two and they dissapear pretty much as quickly as I buy them.

So a couple weeks ago when we had the honor of tasting our friend Jose’s homemade tomatillo salsa I got inspired to try and make my own chicken chile verde.  I spaced on taking pictures of the process of making the tomatillo salsa (which essentially consisted of me roasting tomatillos, onions, a LOT of garlic and some jalepenos for an hour) but managed to document the rest of the process.

I pressure cooked a pound and a half of chicken breasts with the tomatillo salso for almost 2 hours until it fell apart at touch.

The beauty of chilaquiles is that its basically a Mexican casserole.  I love casseroles.  I mean I really really love casseroles.  I make mac and cheese at least a few times a month and its what D asks for as his birthday meal every year.  As as I’m typing this I’m realizing that what would be incredibly delicious would be a chilaquiles mac and cheese.  But I digress.

Chilaquiles essentially consists of fried tortilla wedges (I skipped a step and just used blue tortilla chips), some sort of salsa, meat (optional), and cheese baked.  I assembled all those delicious ingredients and came up with this:

10 minutes at 450 yielded a delicious gooey mess that we enjoyed with tortilla chips, a crisp Sauvignon Blanc (for me) and iced tea (for D) while we watched Empire Records.

I didn’t exactly recreate D’s favorite chicken chile verde burritos but we found a delicious alternative and who says there won’t be a remake of the burritos with the leftovers later this week?!