Enchiladas: DOUBLE FAIL!

You know how there are meals you’ve eaten hundreds of times? You’ve watched your mom, sister, aunt, grandmother, whatever, make this meal dozens of times. You could list the ingredients from memory since you were seven years old. That’s how my mom’s beef enchiladas are; insanely easy to make with only four ingredients.

Since I’ve lived most of my life in the south, in one state or another, we ate lots of Mexican food. Who am I kidding? We still do! My mom could live off of Mexican food, and my dad has no taste buds left from all the spicy food he grew up eating (see my previous post). So being the genius that I am, I suggested we have enchiladas for my dad’s birthday, and hey, I’ll even do the cooking and we can have chicken enchiladas too (I needed something to post on my blog after all).

Saturday rolled around. I had the cake made, some fun cupcakes frosted, and all of the ingredients were waiting for me at my parents’ house. I cooked the ground beef and began assembling (my mom had cooked the chicken in the crock pot so it was already ready for me). My mom’s enchiladas are different. We don’t eat them rolled. I didn’t even know you were supposed to roll enchiladas until I was a teenager. We always ate them lasagna style (mixing Italian with Mexican, gotta love it).

I put the two pans side by side in the oven and waited for the ooey goodness to be ready. I had been complaining that the last few times we’d had enchiladas, they’d been runny. I used less enchilada sauce on the beef to try and combat this (I wanted good pictures for you guys after all). That was my downfall. The beef ones came out dry and just this side of burned. The chicken ones came out super runny (my mom had snuck in before I put it in the oven and added more of the chicken mixture). They still tasted good, but they were an epic fail.

Next time, I’ll just do like my mom does and deal with it being a bit runny (you hear that, Mom, I learned my lesson). I promise to have an actual recipe sometime this week. For now I’ll just tease you with the pictures of my failure (although I didn’t get any pictures of the end result).