Leftover turkey, Mexican style: enchiladas (with La Costeña Doña Chonita mole)

So a couple weeks ago it was Thanksgiving, and since I'm American I basically force my Scottish family to eat a big-ass traditional turkey dinner with me, even though we're going to have another one in less than a month.

(To be fair, I've never heard anyone in Scotland complain about getting two turkey dinners a year.)

But what do you do with your leftovers when you're also MexiGeek?

Well, for me, leftover turkey means only one thing: enmoladas!

Most Americans have heard of enchiladas. Even a fair few Brits have heard the word, though I have yet to see a proper enchilada served in the UK.

Well, "enchilada" means "(tortilla) smothered in chile sauce". But in Mexico you can smother a filled tortilla in anything.

If you smother it in bean sauce it's an enfrijolada. If you smother it in tomato sauce it's an entomatada. And if you smother it in mole it's an enmolada.

Of course, the purpose of a leftover dish is too be quick and easy. It should be pieced together with stuff you already have lying around.

In Mexico, you would always have tortillas to use up (enchiladas and their variations are usually made with stale tortillas briefly fried to "revive" them), and if it's the day after a holiday, there's a good chance you have some mole in the fridge as well.

This ain't necessarily the case outside Mexico.

One of the things I never shit like shut up about is how I made my own mole poblano one year. And I definitely did use the leftovers to make enmoladas.

But this year I had a little help from my friends at La Costeña, who sent me loads of awesome products from their Doña Chonita range, including mole poblano.

La Costeña is a well-known brand of Mexican food and ingredients. Unlike some brands, they are actually a Mexican company, and their core costumer base comprises Mexicans cooking in Mexico.

However, they have been expanding their international market, which is a great windfall for all of us, because of the high quality and authenticity of their products.

Two things from La Costeña I find indispensable throughout the year are their tinned tomatillos (essential when fresh ones are out of season) and their chipotles en adobo (my favourite brand; I cook with these a lot).

Their Doña Chonita range are ready-to-serve salsas, moles, etc, that you can just pour into a saucepan, heat up, and use.

So this mole, a leftover pack of tortillas and some shredded Thanksgiving turkey made for about the quickest enmoladas ever.

Seriously, this was the first time I ever plated up a Mexican dish less than 30 minutes after starting the prep.

I put the oven on to 160° C fan, then opened the mole and began heating it over medium.

You want it warm, but don't burn this beautiful sauce. Keep an eye on it and stir frequently.

Then I shredded the turkey by hand and fried it in about 10 g of butter and a tablespoon of olive oil.

When the turkey read warm through I added just enough mole to the pan to coat the turkey completely.

Then I filled some tortillas with the turkey, rolled them up, put them in an oven-safe dish and covered with the rest of the mole.

Ten minutes in the oven and they were done. I topped them with crumbled queso fresco from Gringa Dairy before serving.

This is gringo-style cooking, but delicious none the less. (In Mexico you would fry corn tortillas, then dip them in mole before folding them around the turkey.)

The mole, which after all was the star of the dish, was excellent. It had a real depth of flavour that you could only really top by spending four days making your own from scratch.

A lot of non-Mexicans are unsure about mole because it famously contains chocolate (as well as 23 or more other ingredients).

Of course, mole looks like chocolate sauce because of its rich brown colour, but this mole doesn't taste overpoweringly of chocolate because it has such a good balance of its many ingredients. 

It also has a noticeable chile zing, which is important because the real stars of mole are the Holy Trinity of Chiles: anchos, mulatos, and pasillas.

I'm always an advocate of making your own mole, if you have four days and 23 ingredients handy, but most of us don't, besides which it's a good idea to try products like these so you can get an idea of what mole is supposed to taste like.

Anyway, although I made this after Thanksgiving, Christmas is coming up, and I reckon we're all getting pretty tired of turkey curry. Trust me, there's no substitute for turkey enmoladas. 

Enmoladas

First, a couple of hard truths.
1) My own mother does not read my blog. Thanks, mom. Though I guess we're even, because I don't follow her Native American spiritual updates.
2) I hate my mother's enchiladas. Since she doesn't read this blog, I can write that without hurting her feelings.
I love all my mother's food, bar three things: her enchiladas, her bolognese sauce, and her lasagne (which is made out of her leftover bolognese).
By the way, if you know my mom, please don't tell her this. If I get a teary phone call from her, I swear I will hunt you down and kill you.
Now, the thing about my mom's enchiladas are: they are usually enchiladas suizas (Swiss enchiladas, though there is nothing swiss about them), also called enchiladas verdes (green enchiladas). I don't like her green chile sauce and I didn't like spring onions back in the day. I like spring onions now, so maybe I should give them another try.
Mom would also make red enchiladas sometimes. I didn't like these either. Again, I didn't care for her sauce (which wasn't very spicy, despite the fact that enchilada means "infused with chiles"). Also, she always adds black olives, which are not native to Mexico and don't really belong in the dish.
However, this never stopped me ordering enchiladas at Mexican restaurants in the Southern California of my youth.
So it was a revelation to me when I read in Rick Bayless's book that enchiladas are not:
baked - in Mexico you dip the corn tortilla into the sauce and then quickly fry it
a sit-down meal - like most everything made with corn masa, real Mexican enchiladas are a snack food or antojito
even that popular in Mexico - although, in a bizarre example of back-migration, enchiladas suizas are catching on, tacos, tamales, etc are the mainstays.
However, the biggest revelation for me was that enchiladas have what Bayless calls parentes: relatives. Out seems you can dip tortillas in any sauce, not just the common red or green sauces.
In addition to enchiladas (dipped in chile sauce), there are also enfrijoladas (smothered in beans), entomatadas (dipped in tomato sauce), and enmoladas (dipped in any of the seven moles).
Now, this dish has got to be the weirdest "quick and easy" meal ever, because it's only quick and easy if you have the mole on hand. Which I did, because I spent four days making it after Christmas.
If I had really wanted to be authentic, I would have made my own corn tortillas, but I really was looking for something I wouldn't still be cooking at ten o'clock at night. Making homemade tortillas is great fun, and not difficult by any means, but it takes for-fucking-ever.
So I just used some store-bought flour tortillas. (My mother always used flour tortillas as well). And I baked them, mostly because I needed the enmoladas to be out of the way while I prepared a side dish.
To start, I poached two chicken breasts in water seasoned with salt and pepper, epazote, and Mexican oregano for twenty minutes. In case you haven't poached chicken before, here is a fuller description.
Poaching chicken breasts:
1) Place chicken breasts and seasonings in a pot.
2) Cover with water and bring to the boil.
3) Reduce heat and simmer until cooked.
4) If there is time, let the chicken cool in the broth.
Once the chicken had cooled, I removed it from the broth and shredded it. I then strained the broth and kept it on hand to use for the mole.
I reheated the mole in a wide non-stick pan, adding some of the broth (a little at a time) to keep the consistency from getting to thick.
When the more was warm (not hot), I dipped the tortillas in the sauce (one at a time) and placed them in a baking dish. I filled them with the shredded chicken and some chopped spring onion (ironically, inspired by enchiladas suizas), rolled them up, covered them with foil, and baked them for twenty minutes at 170° C. I have no idea how to cook in Fahrenheit, by the way.
In the meantime, I prepared my side dish.
I got this idea from an episode of Saturday Kitchen a few years ago. I cut some courgette (zucchini) into long, thin strips like over-sized linguine.
I blanched them in boiling water, drained them, and put them in chilled water to stop them over-cooking.
I happened to have some of my coriander pesto on hand, so I heated that in a pan, added some cherry tomatoes and the courgette linguine and stir-fried it all for a bit.
By this time the enmoladas were ready to come out. Before plating up I sprinkled them with more chopped spring onion and crumbled up feta cheese.
Why feta? Because all the Mexican cookbooks I have say that feta is the nearest thing you're likely to get to Mexican queso fresco (literally "fresh cheese"), which is the most common type of cheese in Mexico.
In America, any given Mexican dish probably comes covered in yellow "American" cheese and/or white Monterey Jack.
Those of you who used to watch King of the Hill may remember Peggy berating get niece during Cinco de Mayo:
"You can't use Swiss cheese. It's not Mehican. It's American. You have to use Monterey Jack."
And she pronounced "jack" with a Spanish j: "hack".
Monterey is a real Mexican placename (meaning "mountain of the king"), but "jack" sure as hell ain't Mexican, or even Spanish, nor is any word that has the letter k. Ths letter doesn't exist in Spanish. (It wouldn't exist in English either, if it hadn't been brought to England in the 10th century by the Norse, who got it from the Goths, who got out from the Greeks.)
It's not that there is no other type of cheese in Mexico. There's even one quite similar to Jack, but it's a regional product, whereas queso fresco is pan-Mexican.
But enough about cheese and orthography. Below are some photos of my main and side dish.
I had been slightly worried ray the feta wouldn't work with the mole poblano, but the acidity actually provided a nice contrast.
The courgette linguine, however, continued to release water even after they were chilled, which eventually diluted the flavour of the coriander pesto. So I have yet to perfect that idea.
So far this blog has had over 500 pageviews but zero comments. Perhaps one of my readers might comment with some advice on keeping the courgette from washing away the seasonings in the future.