Sour Cream Chicken Enchiladas: A Simple Meal for Guys Trying to Survive

Time for another ‘Guys Trying to Survive.’  You’ve cleaned the refrig and made a pie.  Give yourself a hand.  Now, let’s make a quick and simple meal:  Sour Cream Chicken Enchiladas.  My kids pump their fists and say “Yes!” when they find out these are for dinner.  Good reviews are hard to come by, so I take ‘em when I can get ‘em.

Enchiladas on a Plate

1.  The Ingredients and Utensils

We’re going to be opening some cans, but we’re trying to survive, not become French chefs.  Anyway, why would a French chef make Sour Cream Chicken Enchiladas?

Pick up these easy ingredients from the grocery store:

1.  Flour Tortillas (20 count bag of fajita size; these will be a smaller size than wraps.)

2.  Grated Cheese (Grab a 4 cup bag of grated cheese.  You can grate a block of cheese yourself, but the pre-grated saves you time and mess.  Look for Colby/Jack or Fiesta blends.)

3.  Sour Cream (16 ounces.  I get the regular sour cream.  When things go low-fat, I wonder what the food companies had to add to get the same taste and texture.  More often than not, it’s sugar.  You end up being a label reader, which takes extra time in the grocery aisles but hopefully saves time medically.)

4.  Chicken (Here I go for the quickest, which is a 10 ounce can of white/dark meat chicken.  If you don’t want canned chicken but don’t want to cook chicken either, then get a couple of 6 ounce bags of fajita chicken that are pre-cooked.  If you’re ambitious, you can cook some raw chicken.  For this recipe, that’s a mess and time-consuming.  Anyway, my kids complain if I get away from the can chicken.  So, I don’t argue if I get away with the easy path.)

5.  Cream of Chicken Soup (One 10 ¾ ounce can is enough.)

6.  Diced Chili Peppers (A small 4 ounce can of these little green guys mostly hides out among the picante sauces and the like.)

7.  Onion (Most white or yellow onions are about the size of a baseball.  We’ll use half of one.)

8.  Canola Cooking Spray (Always have this little spray can on hand.  Makes serving and clean-up easier.)

Enchilada Ingredients

In your kitchen you should have or need to obtain these tools:

1.  Oven

2.  Food Processor (If you have one for making pie crusts, then you can use it to dice up your onions without weeping over them.)

3.  Casserole Dishes (You’ll need one 9×13 glass casserole and one more that’s either 9×13 or a bit smaller.)

4.  Large Mixing Bowl

5.  Aluminum Foil

6.  Tablespoon (For stirring and for filling the tortillas.)

7.  Can Opener

8.  Measuring Cup (1 cup measure.)

9.  Kitchen Knife

10.  Cutting Board (Get one that’s acrylic and can go into the dishwasher.)

11. Oven Mitts (Third degree burns are not sexy.)

12. Trivets (I’ve said it before:  Always know where you’re going to set something before you take it out of the oven.  And have everyone stand clear.)

2.  Assembly

Let’s start with that darn onion.  Wash and peel off the outer layer.  Use the cutting board to keep onion juice off your counter.  Slice off the onion ends with the kitchen knife.  Now just cut in quarters or eighths and throw half the onion in the food processor.

I have some little glass storage bowls that hold about a cup of whatever.  I dice up an onion in the food processor and store half an onion in one of these bowls with the lid snapped on tight and put it in the refrigerator’s vegetable drawer.  Now I have half an onion already diced when I need it.  The other half of the onion (1 cup) goes straight into your large mixing bowl.

Pulse or process shortly as a food processor can make an onion into onion puree in short order.

Remember, be careful with that blade.  It will cut.  No one wants blood in their onion or onion in their cut.  Yikes!

The rest is easy.

Dump in the bowl 16 oz of sour cream, 1 can (10 oz) chicken, 1 can (10 ¾ oz) cream of chicken soup, and 1 can (4 oz) diced chili peppers.  Mix these up well with your tablespoon.

Over your bowl, measure out 1 cup of the grated cheese and set this aside for later.  The reason you measure it out over the bowl, because any spillage of cheese is no big deal because you’re dumping the rest of the cheese into the bowl.  That’s 3 cups grated cheese into the bowl.

Enchilada Assembly

Mix well.  Spray the casserole dishes with cooking spray.  Put about a heaping tablespoon of your mixture goo into a tortilla and roll.  You’re going to have 20 tortillas to do this.  You always end up with a bit too much or not quite enough, so leave the last half dozen tortillas open until you’re done distributing so you can even out a little if needed.

Enchiladas Rolled and Ready

Line these little dudes up in your casserole dishes as you go, cover with foil, and we’re ready for baking.

3.  Baking

Before you start your assembly, preheat the oven to 350°.  If you have a convection oven, you can use the convection setting to shave off some time.  I’m all for that.

Since you’ve used cooked chicken, the baking here is to heat the enchiladas through.

Bake the tortillas covered with the foil for 25 minutes in a conventional oven or 20 minutes in a convection oven.  If you don’t cover the tortillas, they’ll dry out and get crisp.  No so easy to eat.

Enchiladas Topped

Time this and when the timer goes off, open the oven, use oven mitts to remove the foil and sprinkle on the 1 cup of grated cheese you had saved back.  Do you notice the oven mitts in the photo?  Use them!

Bake for 5 minutes more.  Remove from the oven – with mitts! – and serve.

Enchiladas Done

You’re surviving…

And eating enchiladas!  O yeah.