Enfrijoladas

I'm a hopeless student of languages. Hopeless in the sense of interminably curious and hopeless in the sense that I know bits and pieces of so many of them that they are trampling each other in my brain to the point where I will never be able to master any of them. In fact, as I've added more languages to the mix, my spelling in English, the one language that I have mastered, has become suspect because of the melange of words in my brain.

One aspect that fascinates me is how speakers of languages create new words to describe novel things. English, for example, inherited from its German-based ancestor the tendency to jam existing words together to describe a new thing. An example: the German Bahnhof  is the marriage of the words for train and house, meaning train station.

I've noticed a tendency in the Spanish-speaking food lexicon to create adjectives (and then nouns from those adjectives) using the prefix en or em, meaning in, and a noun, the resulting adjective meaning something contained in or smothered in or by the noun. Let's take one that we pretty much all know: enchilada. Enchilado means smothered in a sauce of chile and by extension an enchilada is a tortilla rolled around a filling and smothered in a wonderful chile sauce.

Off the top of my head, I can think of several others: enmolado, smothered in mole; encebollado, smothered in onion sauce; entomatado, smothered in tomato sauce; empanada, wrapped in pan (bread); and less commonly emparedado, a sandwich (torta/bolillo) between walls (paredes), that is, walled between two slices of bread.

Enfrijoladas de Pollo

Which leads me in a roundabout fashion to enfrijoladas. Now that you know the key, you can figure out for yourself that this means smothered in a sauce of frijoles, beans, seasoned with chipotle. This is a wonderful dish that deserves the acclaim given to its cousin enchiladas. Enfrijoladas are rarely found here north of the border, but they are such good comforting peasant food that I wonder why people aren't clamoring for them.

Roasted Chicken, Onion, Cilantro, and Cotija Filling

If you've ever made enchiladas, you pretty much already know how to make enfrijoladas. Decide on what you want for a filling and prep that. For this batch, I had some chicken thighs that I roasted on a bed of onion slices leftover from another meal. I mixed the shredded chicken with the chopped roasted onions, cilantro, and a bit of cotija cheese. You can put anything, or nothing at all, in your enfrijoladas.

I have seen enfrijoladas in which the tortillas were dredged in bean sauce, folded in quarters like crepes, topped with a bit more sauce and a sprinkle of cheese, and run under the broiler to melt the cheese. That sounds like pretty good stoner food to me!

To make the bean sauce, cook a batch of frijoles de la olla, pot beans. Put some cooked beans, a whole chipotle, and several ladles of bean broth in the blender and blend briefly to get a loose bean sauce, slightly thicker than chile sauce. Season to taste.

Fry tortillas briefly in oil to soften them and to seal them against the bean sauce, just a few seconds on each side. Remove from the oil before they become crisp or take on any color.

Assembling Enfrijoladas

To assemble the enfrijoladas, put some of the bean sauce in a plate. Dip both sides of the tortilla in the sauce and lay on some filling. Roll the tortilla around the filling and transfer to an oiled casserole dish. When all the enfrijoladas are assembled, pour a little more sauce over the top of the dish and bake in a moderate (350F) oven until the dish is heated through, perhaps 20 minutes.

As you can see in the top photo, I cooked the leftover bean sauce down into refried beans and put some of those on a plate. Then I put a couple enfrijoladas on top of that. I garnished the dish with a bit of crema, a touch of cotija, and a sprig of cilantro.

"Stupid good!" said Ann.