Deb's Night: Healthy Enchiladas

"Would you call this...a bunch of spinach?"

The problem with Deb's cooking nights is that we have to follow the recipe.  So a bunch of spinach means...erm...well, it depends if you ask Hungry Deb or Full Deb.  This month's Deb is on a juice fast, though, so basically anything that requires chewing is the best food in the world.  And as a result, all the food is still trying to follow a healthy theme, and mostly comes from health food blogs.  The bad news is that it's health food.  The good news is that we have the recipes!  And the links to the original pages, too.

Colcannon Puffs

Ingredients

• 1½ pounds potatoes (you can peel if you want, but I didn’t)
• 6 ounces kale

• 2 tablespoons nutritional yeast
• 2 teaspoons salt (or to taste)
• 1 teaspoon onion powder
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1/2 teaspoon thyme
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 2 tablespoons soymilk
• 2 tablespoons potato starch or corn starch

Instructions

1. Cut the potatoes into small cubes (about 1/2-inch), put them in a large pot, and cover with water. Bring to a boil and cook until potatoes are tender.
2. While the potatoes are cooking, remove the center stalk from the kale and slice the leaves into strips. When the potatoes are done, lift them out with a slotted spoon and place in a large mixing bowl. Put the kale into the potato water and cook for 6 minutes or until kale is tender. Remove kale with a slotted spoon to a food processor. Add 1/4 cup of the cooking liquid and pulse to chop fine.
3. Preheat oven to 425 F. Mash the potatoes and add the kale and all remaining ingredients. Stir well. Using a well-rounded tablespoon, form into balls about 1 inch across. Place them on an oiled baking sheet or, preferably, a baking sheet covered with a silicone mat or parchment paper. Bake for 20 minutes. Carefully turn over and bake fore 20 minutes more, until lightly browned.

Here are the half-cooked colcannon
puffs before going back in the oven.

A colcannon puff, in case you're not Irish, or an Ireland-enthusiast, or a reader of the ridiculously buff firemen who read this recipe from fat free vegan, is a potato-kale ball that involves a lot of boiling.  And if that doesn't sound enticing...then you're just not hungry enough.  Hopefully the powdered goodness of nutritional yeast, onion powder and other seasonings will make it extra delicious.  Barring that, well, that's what health food is for.  Nourish your soul with healing energy and your body will...um...who cares about your body if your soul is nourished?

"How'd you get kale on your forehead?"

After lots of mashing and spicing, you get to roll them into balls, which is always delightful.  Hungry Deb made some gigantic balls, in that not-at-all-sexual-but-actually-just-really-very-hungry way.  Yeah.

And mysteriously enough, we managed to get the salt wrong (or was this an especially salty recipe?)  It might have been smart to taste before baking, especially since they were all vegan-y and didn't have anything that required cooking...

Served hot, the puffs should be crispy on the outside and moist on the inside.

 

Enchiladas

Ingredients

• ½ large yellow onion, chopped
• 1 bell pepper, diced
• ½ teaspoon garlic powder
• 1 teaspoon oregano
• ½ teaspoon dried basil
• 1 teaspoon chili powder
• Some cumin and cinnamon
• 1 can diced tomatoes (or ½ box Pomi crushed tomatoes)
• 1 can black or pinto beans
• 1 can corn
• ½ bunch greens (spinach, collards, chard or kale)
• 8-10 lightly steamed corn tortillas

Instructions

1. Sauce: Preheat oven to 400. Line the bottom of a rectangular baking dish with parchment paper. In a skillet sauté the onion and bell pepper on medium-high with a little water for 5 minutes. Add spices and mix, followed by the diced tomatoes, beans and corn, and cook for another 5 minutes. Add in greens and cook for 2 more minutes, and turn off heat. Place 1 cup of sauce into a blender and blend until smooth; set aside.

2. Rolling enchiladas: Fill each steamed tortilla (so they won’t crack) with ½ cup of sauce and roll tortilla snugly, placing it seam side down in the baking dish. Continue until dish is full of rolled enchiladas, all placed closely together. Pour the blended sauce over the top, and bake uncovered for 20 minutes on the center rack. When done, let sit for 5 minutes before serving.

3. Guacamole topping: With a fork, mash the avocados with the lime juice, cumin and garlic powder. Mix in cilantro and tomatoes. Spoon mixture on top of enchiladas. Garnish with green onions and pumpkin seeds (optional). You can make this ahead of time if you like, so that the flavors mingle.

Recipe from StraightUpFood.

One of the dangers of making super healthy vegan enchiladas is that only super healthy vegans can be really, truly enthusiastic about them.  Thus, Jim and Brian made meat (meat?!?) to put in their enchiladas, and Jim brought cheese.


An interesting facet of this recipe was steaming the tortillas.  Normally, people steam them in that magic box at the burrito joint that you pump on and melt your slice of American cheese, but barring that, you actually have to do it on the stovetop!  It looks goofy, but it seems to have worked out alright.  Apparently, not steaming the tortillas results in them turning all crispy-sad in the oven.  Sounds right to me!

Steaming tortillas is almost as fun as eating them.  Right, Bri?

The most important part of the enchiladas was definitely the sauce, and I thankfully was figuring out how to blog this entry while that sauce happened, so it's a mysterious mystery from where I stand!  The sauce ended up getting cooked on the stovetop, but the beans got added before the blending of the sauce.  End result?  Kind of a hummos-y bean-y topping for the enchiladas, rather than a sauce-y topping with a bean-y filling.

Enchilada sauce - definitely
good with some extra hot sauce!

The guacamole that goes on top required ripe avocados, which the supermarket didn't have.  (Somehow, avocados aren't in season in Boston?  What?)  So we have vacuum sealed guac, and we're fancying it up with tomatoes and fresh cilantro.

It seems like maybe we should have ended up with a lot more sauce to smother the enchiladas - there was some exposed tortilla in there at the end.

The toasted pepitas on top of the
guacamole made for a delicious addition!

Chocolate Cherry Cake

Ingredients

• 20 frozen pitted cherries (about 1 cup)
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon rum extract (optional)
• 1/3 cup brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons cocoa
• 1 teaspoon cornstarch
• 1/2 cup unbleached flour
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1 1/2 tablespoons cocoa
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 tablespoons soy yogurt
• 1/4 cup vanilla soymilk (or other non-dairy milk)
• boiling water

Instructions

1. Cut the frozen cherries in half (it’s easiest to do this while they’re frozen). Put them in a bowl and stir in 1 teaspoon sugar and rum extract, if using. Allow them to sit at room temperature until they’ve completely thawed and become juicy, 1-2 hours.
2. Oil or pan spray 4 7-ounce ramekins. Preheat the oven to 350F. Mix together the brown sugar and 2 tablespoons cocoa powder and set aside.
3. Pour the juices off the cherries into a measuring cup. Press lightly on the cherries to get all of the juice (I had about 1/4 cup). Sprinkle the corn starch over the cherries and mix well. Divide the cherries equally among the 4 ramekins.
4. In a medium bowl, combine the flour, salt, 1/3 cup sugar, 1 1/2 tablespoons cocoa, and baking powder. Stir in the vanilla extract, soy yogurt, and soymilk. (Mixture will be very thick.) Drop by tablespoons over the cherries in the ramekins, dividing equally among them. Smooth to cover the cherries.
5.  Sprinkle the brown sugar mixture evenly over the batter, about 2 tablespoons per ramekin. Use a spoon to level the tops.
6.  Add boiling water to the cherry juice up to the 3/4 cup line. Pour or spoon it gently over the brown sugar in the ramekins, about 3 tablespoons per ramekin. Place the ramekins in the oven and bake for about 25-30 minutes, until tops appear mostly dry (they should be streaked with darker, wetter looking areas) and sauce is bubbling around the edges. Remove from oven and allow to cool for 15 minutes before serving.

"I've been waiting for this all week!" --Hungry Deb

What this translates to in real life is that Bri has to sort through the frozen mixed berries and isolated all of the cherries.  Mixed berry cake?  No.  Cherry cake!  Poor Hungry Deb then discovered that she was supposed to thaw those berries for several hours...so much for the recipe!  Into the microwave they go!

Afterwards, Deb had the fun job of squeezing juice out of the cherries, and then mixed the rest of the ingredients, including greek yogurt.  Unfortunately, Deb also...uh...had  no ramekins.  It's a little...experimental.  And the cake certainly has a lot of moving parts!  Pouring boiling cherry juice onto brown sugar on top of cocoa'd yogurt?  That's bold, yo.  Well, no matter how bad things get, there's always ice cream.

The cake texture was nice, but the whole
cherries inside has a kind of weird goo-like
property.  Did I mention ice cream?

Farscape

Deb: "Oh my God, so weepy."
Jim: "Pilot's entrails look suspiciously like cable covers."
Bri: "As flashback episodes go, it was pretty good."
Alex: "I watched maybe 40% of that episode."

	Alex	Brian	Deb	Jim
Colcannon Puffs	Maybe next time, we can make cheesy potato puffs...	They were...they were potato puffs.	Way too salty, but they have potential.	Even I thought they were salty.  They were Irish (read: bland)
Enchiladas	Maybe next time, we can make cheesy enchiladas...	The meat and cheese made those enchiladas!	Really good, but they didn't come together right, taste-wise.	They needed a lot more sauce!
Cake!	I think it has potential.  Maybe next time, we can make a cake WITH FAT.	I don't like the pieces of cherry either.  Buried under ice cream you can make pretend that it's not a very good sundae.	I don't like it.  I don't like the pieces of cherry.	Meh.