good good things

New Favorite Dinner

Cheesy Bean and Cheese Enchiladas

I spied this recipe over on VegWeb.com a month or so ago and knew that I had to make it. It had everything I’d ever want in a meal: beans, onions, cheesy goodness, corn tortillas, etc. I’m glad I read through most of the comments left for this recipe since they pointed out quite a few things that needed to be changed in this recipe.

***Instead of 3 cans of beans a lot of people recommended using only 2 cans, which is what I did.

***2 medium onions is just too much for this dish 1 will do you fine and speaking of fine make sure you chop the onion as fine as possible because it isn’t pre-sauteed so it cooks in the oven with everything else. The first time I made it I left the onions bigger then I should and they were as raw as could be after baking for 40 min or so. The second time I chopped them as finely as possible and they still came out pretty raw tasting. I don’t mind that but if you don’t like that taste then take an extra step and saute them before adding them to the bean mixture.

I myself added some small diced zucchini and some shredded carrots to the bean mixture as an attempt to get my 3 year old to eat more veggies. It worked out great!

I omitted the olives because EWW…I hate black olives.

I also made mine in more of a layered casserole instead of enchiladas. I find enchiladas very difficult to make. No matter what I do to the corn tortillas they always rip or fall apart so I don’t even attempt it anymore. Plus there wasn’t enough reserved enchilada sauce that you are suppose to dip your tortilla in to soften it up a bit.  What I did was spread the reserved enchilada sauce on the bottom of a large casserole pan and layered the corn tortillas like one would do when making lasagna, then scooped on the bean mixture, added another layer of tortillas and repeated a few times. Then I dumped the rest of the reserved enchilada sauce and cheese sauce on top and baked.

The first time I made it I had my parents over for dinner and they  really liked it. The second time I kept it all for the 3 of us and it fed us for 2 days straight. I even ate it for second dinner one night around 10pm. I was so hungry and it was so good I couldn’t stop myself. This recipe is definitely going to be added into my go to easy to put together recipes for after this baby is born file. I can’t wait to make it for the third, fourth, fifth time…..and so on.

2 comments March 25th, 2011

I’m trying…

Rocky Road Cookies

One goal of mine this year is to add original dessert recipes to my site. I developed  a great Plum Cake last summer and failed to post about it and now it just doesn’t make sense to post it until you all can get plums in season. I did however buy a jarred ingredient today that I’ll have plenty of leftovers and thought of using them in place of the plums. So perhaps I can post it soon! A few weeks ago I bought some Dandies Marshmallows in the hopes of creating a Rocky Road Cookie and/or a Rocky Road Muffin. So far I’ve come up with only the cookie recipe but it needs some help. They came out really good but I didn’t want to eat all of them which to me means that the recipe needs some tweaking.  They were like a cross between a cookie and a brownie, which isn’t a bad thing, but not what I was going for. Another problem is that Dandies are pretty big marshmallows! I had to cut each one in 1/2 and use my biggest ice cream scoop to scoop the cookies onto the baking sheet and still 1 or 2 cookies didn’t get a single marshmallow in them! So that needs to change also mainly because cutting marshmallows is really annoying.

Italian Plum Cake

I love creating baked goods/desserts. I just hate fine tuning the recipes but I’m trying.  :)

3 comments March 10th, 2011