Mexican Comfort Food... Cheesy Enchilada Soup

Adapted from Paula Deen and sufficientlygraced.com

I got off work this morning after a fairly uneventful 24 hour call shift, and to my delight it seemed as if fall had arrived overnight. It was deliciously cool and rainy, and the world was screaming at me to hurry home and get busy making soup and baked goods. The baked goods didn’t get done, but the soup was delicious! Pinned on Pinterest by Sufficiently Graced, it’s a recipe that came from Paula Deen’s magazine. I stayed mostly true to the original recipe this time, only substituting different beans because I wanted to use up what I had on hand, I used frozen corn because I like it better, and I used different cheeses because I was afraid using all pepper-jack would make it too spicy. I was thinking tortillas would be really good with this, but then I remembered how good it was last time I cut up flour tortillas and fried them to make chips. From there my thoughts progressed to tortilla strips and then those ended up being cut up into little pieces to sprinkle on top. It was perfect!

Here's the original recipe:

1 1/2 pounds ground chuck
1 onion, chopped
2 (15oz) cans tomato sauce
2 (10oz) cans enchilada sauce
1 (16oz) can chili beans, drained
1 (15.5oz) can great northern beans, drained
1 (15.25oz) can corn, drained
1 (14.5oz) fire roasted tomatoes
1 Tbsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups shredded Monterrey Jack cheese with peppers

This makes a huge pot of soup, so since it's just the two of us, I put away quite a bit in the freezer for later. Next time I will try cutting it in half.

Heat up a little olive oil in your soup pot or large Dutch oven and cook the onion over med-high heat until slightly translucent. Don’t overcook them because they will continue to cook while the soup simmers and you don’t want them mushy. Next, add the ground chuck and cook until brown and crumbly.

I added some water to the pot because I like the ground beef to cook up into a finer crumble rather than have big chunks of hamburger in the soup. The water cooks down and really doesn’t affect the finished soup.

Add all the remaining ingredients except the cheese. I’m so glad I finally broke down and bought an electric can opener! I dumped in the sauces first, and if you look at those cans you'll notice that I have two different brands of enchilada sauce… I wanted to see if there was a big difference between the Old El Paso and La Victoria brands, and there is a little. The OLP brand was milder, and the LV brand was a darker color and had a tasty little kick to it. It also cost about 20 cents more, but it was definitely worth it.

I had to search a bit to find fire roasted tomatoes among all the different brands and combinations of canned tomatoes, but I found them. If you can’t find them it would be fine to use plain diced tomatoes, or if you don’t like chunks of tomatoes, just substitute the same size can of tomato puree. I don’t think in the whole pot of soup it really matters because the flavor of the fire roasted tomatoes isn’t that different.
This reminds me a lot of making chili. The beans went in next, and I never drain them – every bit of that thick liquid goes in my pot. I used dark red kidney beans and pinto beans because that’s what I had. I hate it when I buy something and then come home and find I already had it in the cupboard, so this time I was in the store on the phone making my husband search for beans. He was thrilled.

I had both frozen and canned corn on hand, but I like frozen better so I used a whole 16 oz bag.

Once you get everything in there, let it simmer for about 30 minutes, then stir in the cheese until it all melts. Grate your own, it's required. Not really, but you're probably tired of hearing me harp on this, so just do it.

I wasn’t sure how spicy the pepper-jack would be, so I used a medium cheddar along with the pepper-jack, and grated up the Colby-jack to sprinkle on top. I’ve always been more of a dump cook, so I’m pretty sure there is a lot more than just 2 cups of cheese in this! I was skeptical about dumping all that cheese right in the pot at first, but it all really disintegrates and every bite is wonderfully cheesy but not stringy-gooey like you would expect.

Soup is done, so I turned the heat down to keep it warm and fried up the yummy flour tortilla chips. There is no big trick to this, cut up the tortillas, then just heat some oil in a pan and fry them up on both sides until nice and brown. Pile them up on paper towels to drain and cool a bit. Yum… these are better than any chips you can buy in the store.

I garnished this with a dollop of sour cream, a little cheese and a bit of fresh cilantro. Mmm mm mmmm…..

Cold Weather Comfort Food: My Mom's Lentil Soup

I know, I know... it was in the 60s again today. In January. It doesn't seem right to be writing about cozying up in the kitchen with a ginormous pot of soup, but it really is January so you know we won't make it until spring without some cold days ahead. I loved this soup growing up. My mom always served it with freshly chopped raw onions and one of those fake lemon plastic squeeze bottles of lemon juice. I'm using real lemons since I'm obsessed with lemons ever since I found whole bags of Meyer lemons at Walmart... and if you doubt me, go take a peek at my Pinterest boards. Seriously though, without the crunch of the chopped fresh onions and tang of the lemon juice, this soup might actually be boring. Wait... how can anything with bacon in it be boring? No way.

Here's what you'll need to make this:

2 bags of lentils (you need 1 1/2 bags for the soup)
1 pound bag of carrots
5 stalks of celery
2 onions (one for the soup and one to dice up to sprinkle on top when you eat it)
lemon juice (preferably freshly squeezed, but if you must use that plastic fake lemon just don't tell me!)
5 potatoes
1 pound of bacon
ham bone or ham hocks (I had leftover ham from Christmas that I had frozen, so I used that)
3-4 bay leaves
salt & pepper
2-3 quarts of water

LENTIL SOUP

First, dice up and cook the bacon. You will want a large pot for this, something that holds at least 6 quarts, but don't cook your bacon in it. I have learned that when you cook bacon in a pot with high sides, the steam that forms will keep the bacon from browning so you end up with ugly little pieces of fat that you will not want to eat.

Cook your bacon in a skillet, then set it aside while you prep your veggies, and pour some of the bacon drippings into your soup pot. Bacon drippings sounds a lot less nasty than bacon grease, right?

Mmm... BACON!!

Dice up the carrots, celery, 1 onion and potatoes. Start cooking the onions in the bacon drippings. I didn't use all of the bacon drippings and made up the difference with olive oil so there was at least some healthy oil in there but still some extra flavor from the bacon.

Throw in the carrots.

...celery

...and the taters

When it says to use 5 potatoes, it means normal sized ones, but I had some of those tiny Yukon potatoes, so this is about how many I used:

Throw it all into the pot and toss everything together. Nice steam coming off the pot! Cook everything long enough so the veggies start to get a bit translucent, but not fully cooked because this will continue to simmer for several hours when it becomes soup. If you taste it they should still be a little bit crunchy.

Now mix in your cooked bacon and diced ham.

Add the bay leaves. I used my big fat Turkish bay leaves from Penzey's.

Next, add the water. I used the full 3 quarts. Okay, I know that you know how to add water to a pot... but it's so much fun taking pictures while I cook that I couldn't help myself.

Now toss in the lentils. Lentils are very healthy, so that should cancel out the bacon, right?

Mix everything in and simmer for at least 3 hours.

...getting there

Finally... it's soup! Squirt in a little lemon juice, top with the diced fresh onion and savor. This makes a ton, but you can freeze some of the leftovers for another day when you don't feel like cooking. Thanks mom!!

Brrr... It's Chili!

It's just after 4 pm and the outside temperature is only 44 degrees, we have dropped 8 degrees in the last 3 hours. The blustery wind gusts sound like a train is heading straight for my house, and my sweet-but-neurotic Golden Retriever is hiding under my computer desk because she thinks the noise outside is something evil inside the house. In other words, it's CHILI WEATHER! Days like this make me want to crank up the stove and baby a big simmering pot of heaven, and of course have a few candles burning. Chili is one of my favorite cold weather foods because it's easy, it's inexpensive, and it's really, really good. It's good the next day, and it freezes well. Good thing too, because I've never learned to make a small pot of chili, even though my youngest son is almost 25 years old and I haven't had to cook for a whole family in years.

Everyone makes it a little bit different. Some like it spicy, and some like it without beans, but there's no right or wrong way to make it. I like to make it on the thicker side. Not so thick that you can stand your spoon up in it, but not soupy either, and not too spicy. I remember when I was a kid our church would have an annual soup supper. Each one of the "church ladies" would bring a quart of homemade chili, and then they would dump it all into one big pot. That was some tasty chili!

"Church Ladies" reminds me of one of my favorite cookbooks; "Lutheran Church Basement Women; Lutefisk, Lefse, Lunch and Jell-O", by Janet L. Martin. The book was sort of a parody of those church ladies that I remember from back when I was growing up in our little Missouri Synod Lutheran Church. I found it especially humorous that the chapter on funeral luncheons was titled "Dead Spreads". Yes, I do have a rather sick sense of humor at times. The book came with a flour sack type dish towel with a recipe for Red Jello stamped on it:

One box red Jello
2 cups water
Sliced banana for company






I also found it rather eerie that the lady pictured on the dishtowel looks way too much like my Missouri Synod Lutheran Church Basement Grandmother... from Missouri.


I think chili is on my list of comfort foods. Maybe because it's so nice and warm on a cold day. Anyway, here is my chili:


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

KAT'S CHILI

2 pounds ground beef, I usually use 85% lean because you want a little fat, but this is not too much. (Sometimes I use ground turkey, or a combination of turkey, beef and ground pork. Let yourself go!)

1 28 oz can Diced Tomatoes (I like the petite dice, or if you are a home canner, use 1 quart of your own tomatoes. Just squish them up into smaller pieces before you dump them in. Do it with your hands, because it's fun.)

1 28 oz can Crushed Tomatoes with Puree (I like the Good Value brand at WalMart because these big cans only cost $1.)

3 cans beans (any combination of chili beans, dark red kidney beans, black beans, pinto beans.. whatever blows your skirt up.)

I used dark red kidney beans, black beans and pinto beans in this batch. Aren't they pretty?






1 medium onion, diced

3 Tbsp Penzey's Regular Chili Powder (Penzey's has 3 different kinds, this is the mild one.)

1-2 Tbsp Penzey's Chili Con Carne (This adds more great chili flavor but no heat.)

1 Tbsp Penzey's Ground Ancho Chili Pepper (Again, great smoky-sweet flavor but very little heat. This is on my list of Penzey's spices that I won't do without.)

Those spice amounts are just guidelines. The packages have a suggested amount per pound, but you can go lighter or go wild. I'm pretty much a "dump cook" and I don't usually even bother to measure, I just dump some in and stir it up.




Salt - just throw a little on your ground meat while it's browning.

Brown the meat really well, it tastes better when it's good and brown. Add the diced onions and cook along with the meat. Next stir in the beans. Turn the cans upside down and shake a little to get that good stuff off the bottom. You can always make this without beans if you like. Next dump in the tomatoes, and then the spices. Let it simmer on low for awhile. Leave the lid off, and stir it occasionally. Wait at least a half hour after adding your chili powder before tasting it, that gives the flavors time to blend and you will get a better idea of whether or not you need to add more. If you think you added too much, just dump in an extra can of beans or add a cup or two of water and let it cook down. It's impossible to screw this up!

Finished product:




My husband likes "oyster" crackers on his along with some shredded cheddar or colby-jack cheese. Here's a quick and easy recipe for some tasty Ranch snack crackers that are great on chili. I got this recipe in 1993 from my dear friend and former next-door neighbor Sandra.


RANCH SOUP CRACKERS

2 pkg Premium Soup & Oyster crackers
1 cup oil
1 pkg dry Ranch dressing mix
1 tsp garlic salt (I use 1 1/2 because we like garlic.)
2 tsp lemon pepper
2 tsp dill weed (I thought this made it too "dilly" so I only use 1 tsp.)

Spread crackers on cookie sheet. Whisk remaining ingredients together and pour over crackers. Toss to coat. This would probably work better if you tossed it all together in a bowl, so I am going to try that next time. Place in 225 degree oven for about 20 minutes. Store in airtight container when cool, if there are any left.

Enjoy!