Salsa Verde Chicken Cheese Enchiladas

The siren went off on a Tuesday at four-fifteen in the afternoon, and my hands started shaking before my brain had caught up to why.

I want to tell you about that, because if I’m going to write down what cooking looks like in this house, I have to write down what cooking looks like on the days the cooking is the only thing keeping me upright. Tuesday was one of those days. The siren was a tornado warning — spring in Oklahoma, the storms come in waves and the sirens get exercised like clockwork — and I had just put a pot of water on the stove for spaghetti when the long, low wail started up from the tower over by the high school, and my body decided, before I could decide anything, that I was eleven years old again and the house was coming apart over my head.

I should explain. When I was eleven, an EF-4 tornado came through the neighborhood. Three years ago this May. I was in the bathtub with my mama and my brother and my dad, and the roof of our house left in pieces while we were under it, and three of our neighbors did not make it through the night. We lived in a FEMA trailer for seven months while the insurance argued about what was covered and what wasn’t. Mama cooked on a two-burner camp stove out the back of that trailer for the first three weeks until they hooked up the electric, and then she cooked on a hot plate, and we ate sitting on a fold-out couch and she did not cry once where I could see her, which I have decided is a kind of strength most adults do not have.

That’s the part of the story where most people would tell you we made it through. And we did. We are here. The trailer is gone. The house got rebuilt and we’re back in it, on the same lot, with new siding and a new roof and a furnace that works most of the time. But my body did not get the memo about making it through. My body still hears that siren and goes back to the bathtub. My body starts shaking before I’ve consciously remembered why.

I sat down on the kitchen floor on Tuesday with my back against the lower cabinet and I waited for the shaking to stop. The water on the stove kept boiling. The sirens went on for six minutes, which I know because I counted by the second hand on the kitchen clock. Mama was at Dollar General. Cody was wherever Cody goes. I was alone in the house, fourteen years old, sitting on a kitchen floor, willing my hands to stop. They didn’t stop until the sirens did, and they didn’t fully stop even then. I got up. I added salt to the water. I broke the noodles in half because the pot is too small for full-length spaghetti, the way it always is.

The storm passed without touching down. Within an hour the warning was downgraded to a watch and the watch fizzled out by dark and the news anchor on Channel Six was telling everyone we’d gotten lucky again. We had. I know we had. That is not the same thing as my body knowing.

Cody came home around nine. He stood in the doorway of the kitchen for about three seconds longer than he needed to and then he walked past me without saying anything and went to his room and shut the door. He had the look I’m starting to recognize and starting to hate, the one where his eyes won’t quite settle on whatever they’re trying to focus on. He’s sixteen. He’s been hanging out at a house on North Peoria with people who are older than him and selling things they shouldn’t sell. I have not figured out yet what to do about it. There is no help-line for fourteen-year-old sisters. I have looked.

I want to tell you what I cooked, because the cooking is the part that I can hold on to. I am writing this in my notebook the next morning, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee Mama made before her shift, and the spaghetti is gone and the sirens are quiet and the leftovers from last week’s casserole are in the fridge waiting to become tonight’s dinner.

And what I want to write about is enchiladas. I tried to make them on Sunday and I want to tell you how they came out, and I want to tell you about the recipe I was working from, and I want to tell you what I changed because I had to and what I would change next time even if I didn’t have to. The recipe is salsa verde chicken cheese enchiladas, and I found it in a magazine in the school library where I sometimes go at lunch when I don’t want to be in the cafeteria. I copied it down on the back of a math worksheet I was already failing, and I tried it Sunday afternoon while Mama was at work, and they were the closest thing to a real grown-up dinner that has come out of my kitchen.

I had to substitute things. I am going to say that out loud. I did not have salsa verde so I bought the cheapest jar of green salsa at Walmart, eighty-nine cents, and I do not know if that’s the same thing but it was green and it was salsa and it tasted right. I did not have rotisserie chicken because rotisserie chicken at Walmart is six dollars and I cannot spend six dollars on one ingredient, so I bought a package of chicken thighs on the markdown rack — $2.49 for a pound and a half, marked down because they were one day from sell-by — and I baked them in the oven with salt and pepper and shredded the meat off the bones with two forks. I did not use Monterey Jack because Monterey Jack is fancy. I used the bag of pre-shredded mexican blend on sale at Dollar General for $1.89, which is real cheese mixed with the cheap kind of cheese and is good enough for a fourteen-year-old kitchen. I used flour tortillas instead of corn because they were eighty-nine cents for a pack of ten and the corn ones were $2.50 for a pack of ten and the math is the math.

I made eight enchiladas. I made them on a Sunday afternoon before Mama got home, because I wanted her to walk in the door and find dinner already plated and steaming on the kitchen table. The whole pan, with all the substitutions, came in at $4.62. I checked the receipts twice, because I have started keeping a column in the back of my notebook that tracks what every meal costs me, and I am proud of that column the way other girls might be proud of trophies. The pan fed three of us if Cody came home, which he did not, and it gave us two leftover dinners and a lunch.

Mama walked in at nine-fifteen. She had the look she gets after a closing shift, like every joint in her body is filing a complaint with management, and she sat down at the kitchen table and looked at the plate and looked at me and said, Kaylee, this looks like restaurant food. And I said, It’s the salsa verde from the cheap jar, Mama, but I think it works. And she ate two enchiladas and went to bed in her work polo without changing, the way she does when the day has used up all the words she had.

The sirens are quiet tonight. We are still here. The cooking is what I can hold on to, and the cooking on Sunday came out good, and that is the only thing I am sure of this week. Everything else I have to wait and see about.

I am going to give you the actual recipe the way the magazine wrote it, not the way I scribbled it on the back of an algebra worksheet, because I want you to have the real version even if the real version costs more than mine. Use rotisserie chicken if you can; use baked chicken thighs if you have to. Use salsa verde from a good jar if you can find one; use the cheap green salsa from Dollar General if that’s where you are. Either way, the math works out. Either way, the pan steams when you cut into it. Either way, somebody walks in tired and sits down and eats.

Prep Time: 45 min | Cook Time: 30 min | Total Time: 1 hr 15 min | Servings: 5

Ingredients

1 pound mixed boneless skinless chicken breasts and thighs (any combination is fine)
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons butter
4 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
1 1/2 cups sour cream
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
3 cups Green Tomato Salsa Verde, divided
8 ounces Monterey Jack cheese
8 ounces sharp white cheddar cheese
10 6-inch corn tortillas
Fresh chopped cilantro, for garnish
Fresh lime wedges, for garnish

Instructions

Preheat the oven. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
Prep the dish. Spray a 9x13-inch casserole dish with non-stick cooking spray.
Trim the chicken. Trim chicken of fat and connecting tissue. Butterfly breasts if thick so they are the same thickness as the thighs.
Heat the skillet. Heat a large skillet over medium high heat and once hot add the olive oil.
Brown the chicken. Once oil is hot, add all chicken pieces so they sit flat and cook to brown one side, about 2-3 minutes.
Cook through and shred. Flip each piece over, cover and turn burner to low heat and cook for about 8-10 minutes or until the center of the thickest piece is no longer pink. Immediately remove from heat to a platter to cool, then shred and mix the white and dark meat together.
Save the drippings. Do not discard the pan liquid. There should be about one-quarter cup of liquid.
Start the sauce. In a large sauce pan over medium heat, melt butter and add flour and stir and cook for three minutes.
Build the cream sauce. Whisk while adding in heavy cream and continue whisking while adding sour cream. Whisk in salt and pepper. Whisk in the reserved quarter cup of pan drippings. (If using rotisserie chicken instead of fresh, use a quarter cup of canned chicken broth in this step to flavor the sauce.)
Layer the dish. Remove one cup of the sauce and place on bottom of prepared baking dish.
Add the salsa verde. Add one cup of the Green Tomato Salsa Verde to the remaining sauce in the pan and set aside.
Prep the cheese. Shred both cheese types and combine.
Warm the tortillas. Use the pan you cooked the chicken in and heat corn tortillas for a few seconds on each side to make them pliable.
Set up for filling. Lay out all ten tortillas either on your counter or on a sheet tray and begin filling.
Add cheese. Place a little shredded cheese on each one in a strip across the center.
Add chicken. Divide the shredded chicken between each one over the cheese.
Add sauce and salsa. Spoon a little sauce over the chicken and about a teaspoon of Salsa Verde.
Roll and place. Pull up the front and back and overlap. Lift and turn seam down into the prepared baking dish, into two rows of five.
Top with sauce. Spoon sauce over each one covering all of the exposed tortillas. Any leftover sauce can be served hot with the meal.
Top with cheese. Divide the remaining cheese over each one in the pan, using all of the cheese.
Bake. Bake for 30 minutes then place under the broiler to brown.
Rest and serve. Let sit ten minutes then serve two per portion topped with fresh chopped cilantro, fresh lime wedges and Green Tomato Salsa Verde.

Nutrition (per serving)

Salsa Verde Chicken Cheese Enchiladas — The Night the Sirens Went Off and Dinner Still Had to Happen