Recipe Review: Homemade Tortillas & Vegetarian Enchiladas!

I love Saturdays, because it's a day when I actually have the opportunity to cook! I'll normally cook on Saturday and make a large amount of the food for leftover lunches throughout the week. It's a good time saver!

This morning I started out by making homemade tortilla shells. I'm trying to get away from bleached and enriched flour, so I thought I'd use the organic whole wheat flour I bought to make my own shells! I found the recipe I used here. One weird thing about this recipe is that I cut it down to yield twenty servings. I rolled these babies as thin as I could, and I got seven medium size tortillas out of the dough. So if anyone wants to use this recipe, I would plan accordingly. The recipe I'll post here is for the original "60 servings." Here it is:

Ingredients:

* 5 cups all-purpose flour
* 2 tablespoons shortening
* 2 teaspoons baking powder
* 1/4 teaspoon salt
* 1 1/2 cups boiling water

Directions:

1. Mix together the flour, baking powder, and salt in large bowl. Cut in shortening to resemble cornmeal. Add water slowly, mixing with your hands to make a soft dough. You may not need all the water.
2. Knead a few minutes on floured surface until smooth and elastic. Lubricate top with oil, put back in bowl and let rest, covered for 10 minutes.
3. Divide into small balls the size of golf balls and proceed to roll out into size and thickness you prefer.
4. Cook on top of stove over medium heat using a cast iron grill or heavy skillet until top is slightly bubbly then turning on opposite side for a minute or two.
5. Keep stacked and warm inside a clean dish towel.

They turned out really tasty! I think it's something I'll make on a continual basis just to have. I like them a lot better than the store-bought ones anyway.



Then I went on to make the filling for the enchiladas. I sort of just used things that I found around the house. Earlier in the morning I pressed a whole package of tofu to squeeze out of some the water. For the filling, I started by caramelizing a chopped onion in olive oil on the stove. While I did that, I steamed some broccoli. I added cubed tofu to the onions, chopped broccoli, chopped carrots, cilantro, parsley, fresh sage, and oregano. While that was in the saute pan, I worked on the sauce. (I also added a little bit of cheese afterwards when I was placing the filling into the tortilla shells.)



The recipe I used for the sauce was more so a mixture of a bunch of recipes I found that I combined together. Here are the ingredients that I used:

1 t. cayenne pepper
2 T. cumin
3 t. flour
1 t. oregano
1 t. parsley
2 cloves garlic
1 t. pepper
2 1/2 c. vegetable stock
Cheese

I would actually recommend only using 1/2 t. cayenne pepper. Although I liked it the way it was, it was on the high end of hot and spicy for me. You make this just like any sauce--combine the ingredients (except the cheese) and boil it till the flour makes it thicken. Then you add the cheese into the sauce to melt. The tortillas should be filled and lines up in a casserole dish and then just pour this sauce over everything.

I let it bake for about 28 minutes, and it made the house smell REALLY good!



Even my mother liked it, despite the fact that she was wary of the tofu! ;-) I think it's something I'll make again. It was really filling and I loved the full flavor of all the spices. Between filling the shells and the sauce, I used a whole brick of cheese. Even though it was made to feed 6 people, I think that was a bit much, and I'll probably use less next time.

Because the tortilla shells weren't pre-made, this took me a LONG time. The entire morning, as a matter of fact. However, I think that if I have the shells already made, it will go a lot quicker next time.

Oh! In other news, Josh and I met with the wedding planner a few days ago, and things are coming along really well! There's still so much to be done, but things are starting to fall into place! We took our engagement pictures last week with our photographer Katie from Guided Light Photography. (The link is to her blog where you can see a slide show of our pictures!) We've seen the pictures, and absolutely love them! They're so fun and carefree--totally us! She was fantastic, and I'm so excited!