En-chee-laaaa-das

This was an awful week in the world of Me. Primarily work-awful, but allergy/sinus infection/head cold awful, too. But instead of spending my time venting, I thought instead I'd share my Enchilada recipe, and along the way maybe some of the vent will...vent.

Triplet update: All is well, all is normal. Nicole is cranky, Nick is excited, I'm bored knitting baby things after only three little hats and three sockies. End of July is the expectated due date. The babies are fraternal, not identical, and one of the girls has Mom's name as her middle name.

Red Chicken Enchiladas
This is a medium-hot to hot enchilada dish. You can make it more or less spicy by adjusting the mix of enchilada sauce and adding or eliminating jalapenos. A little chipotle sauce sprinkled on top of the sour cream when you serve adds an interesting smokey note. We use Búfalo Chipotle.


This recipe began almost 19 years ago, right after Kent and I were married. We had gobs of leftover champagne from the wedding, and we were in the mood for Mexican...enchiladas, specifically. We boiled chicken breasts in champagne and allspice, and used that in the enchiladas. The recipe hasn't changed much since then, but it is really based on a recipe I received from my mom for white chicken enchiladas. I don't think this bears much resemblance to her original recipe, or if she even remembers it, but I speak the truth. I seam to recall thinking "roux? eewwww, I think I'll just substitute red enchilada sauce." Mom will deny all of it. She now has a wonderful enchilada recipe from my brother which is similar in spirit if not in specifics to mine. We both created our recipes independently of one another. Must be genetic.

We buy a better champagne these days and prefer to drink it rather than use it to boil chicken. Although if it goes flat...

• 3 or 4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, boiled, baked, or somehow cooked, your choice.
  (or one of those deli-rotisseried chickens)
  (or deli-rotisseried turkey)
  (or leftover baked chicken)
  (or a combination of any of the above)
  *the pictures show the turkey option
• 1 cereal bowl of shredded white cheese
  Think monterey jack or Oaxaca quesadilla cheese. Mozzarella is a little too rubbery and mild for this. The Oaxaca is a little saltier than mozzarella, and shreds beautifully, and jack is a good old stand-by. Pepper jack would be interesting.
• 1 cereal bowl of shredded cheddar - we use our store-brand sharp cheddar
  If you want really cheesy, double these amounts
• 1 cereal bowl of chopped not-green bell peppers
• 3 fresh green onions, chopped (or one small onion, chopped and sauteed)
• 2 or 3 fresh jalapeno peppers, finely diced
• 2 10-oz can regular/mild enchilada sauce
• 2 10-oz can hot enchilada sauce
• 1 pack of a 12 to 20 medium-sized flour tortillas
  not the super-ginormous ones, you know what I'm talking about.
• Sour cream, salsa, and more chopped green onions as toppings
  
  
• One 13x9 glass baking dish and, possibly, one 9x9 glass baking dish.
  The tortillas fit perfectly side by side like little soldiers in the Pyrex dishes. Whether you use one or two depends on how much meat you have. A rotisseried turkey yeilded enough for one 13x9 pan of enchiladas. You'd probably need two rotisseried chickens (they're pretty puny, yes?). With four chicken breasts, we always used the 13x9 plus the 9x9.
  

Get your chicken cooked up, removed from it's bones, shredded or chopped, whichever is appropriate. I like chopped because I get a cleaner bite when I stick my fork into the cooked enchilada. If you don't like getting shredded poultry in your teeth, go with chopped. If you really dig the acting of using two forks to shred up the bird (and I know those who do), then knock yourself out! Put the chopped or shredded chicken into a large bowl.


Chop up your bell peppers, onion (we used sauteed white onion in this photo), and jalapeno, and dump it all into the bowl with the chicken. Shred the cheeses and put most of that into the bowl. Reserve a large handful of mixed cheeses to sprinkle over the top. If you are using green onions, reserve a couple tablespoons of that to sprinkle over the top, too.

Everything should be in your big bowl, so use your hands or a big wooden spoon or some implement and fold the ingredients together so everything appears to be well distributed. This is now called The Filling.

Open the cans of enchilada sauce and mix them together. I use a 4-cup glass measure because it has a spout. Lightly oil the glass baking dish(es) (yes, Pam and it's type work fine) and pour a just enough sauce in to coat. Tilt the pan around so the sauce clings to the bottom and sides. It helps extract the enchiladas when it's time to serve.

Stir a little enchilada sauce, say no more than 1/2 cup, into the big bowl of The Filling. Hands, big spoon, tossing in the air (dangerous but also effective), whatever stirring method floats your boat. The purpose of the sauce in The Filling is to bind it together some while you are getting it into the tortilla.

Remove the flour tortillas and heat them.

There are several different ways to heat up these tortillas. The objective is to soften them so they don't crack when you roll 'em around the filling. My favorite way, time consuming though it is, is to cook them over a flame. No pan needed. This works best with a gas burner, and you just gently and slowly flip the tortillas back and forth over the flame. It cooks the floury taste out and warms them up nicely. These don't need to be COOKED and charred up, just warmed. Don't go nuts. However, the fast trick is to wrap the stack of tortillas in a barely damp towel, and zap them for a minute (on high) in the microwave. Or wrap them in aluminum foil and keep them warm in the oven. It isn't as culinarily romantic but it's effective. My heart thinks the stove-top cooked ones taste better but I'm probably wrong. Warning: don't do this with an electric stove top or a glass/ceramic/smooth-top stove top. You have to have the heat up a little higher to achieve the same end and they are likely to stick if you aren't careful. Trust me on this. And anyway it's still just not the same.

Okay. Now you have warmed your tortillas in some wonderful romantic or wonderfully efficient way, and you need to set up a little assembly line. I go from right to left: bowl of The Filling, my stack of tortillas, my empty pan(s), and a big spoon.


Take off your jewelry, this can be messy. I like to use one of those big soup spoons, or a small serving spoon to do this. Scoop a couple of spoons of filling into the center of the tortilla. Carefully roll up the tortilla and place it seam-side-down into the baking pan. Keep doing this until the pan is full. If you have extra tortillas and extra filling, use the 9x9 dish.
**If you have leftover tortillas but no leftover filling, save them for quesadillas or make your own chips.
**If you have extra filling but no extra tortillas, this stuff is great on these grilled nachos. I give them 5 stars.

All the tortillas are panned up; pour the remainder of your sauce over them to coat. Use a spoon to spread it around. The edges of the tortillas need to be coated or they get hard and crunchy. Unless you like that :) Live dangerously. Sprinkle the reserved cheese and green onions over the top.

< Kent's two cents worth.


Bake in a 350°F oven for 30 minutes, or until the top is nice and bubbly and the enchiladas are heated through. Remove and let rest for five minutes or so while you get out condiments.

Enchiladas, cooked, having a rest >

I recommend sour cream, a fresh chunky salsa, maybe a few more green onions. Black olives are tasty, too.

Yum!

Tre Bambini

This is what Tasha does when she wants something. Will you look at that sad little face? "Erin, I'm a starving little dog! When will you ever feed me?"

Well, Mom's been wondering when I was going to "put pen to paper" on this topic. Kent and I are expectant grandparents of triplets!!!!!!!! Oh, you want proof you say? well, check this out:

Count 'em: Baby A (Boy), Baby B (Girl), and Baby C (Girl). I think that's how it worked out.

Nicole is five months preggers and is as big as a house (must have picture, that front porch is really something) and carrying like she's going to deliver any day. Nick says it's all baby weight, except for that front porch I mentioned.

I'm the Knittin' Grammy (much better than Gramma and I need to distinguish myself - Nicole's mother can be Gramma). For my part, I've bought baby clothes for a boy and two girls, knit three preemie beanies, and am working on a little sweater for when someone gets to about 6 months. Everything was always way too big for either of the boys when they were little, and they were kinda little when they were little. The sweater looks ginormous compared to what I THINK should be the right size, but I'm just going with it. Blankies? No, I'm not knitting any blankies. Not yet anyway. Heck, I'd have to knit three. That's a lot of blankies. No, I'm interested in sticking with quick projects.

Yeah, yeah, I know the arguments. "Well, knitting a blankie is fast, it can just be garter stitch with a border. You can crank it right out." How boring is that? It just isn't for those of us with a short attention span. I can be fairly tenacious with more complex items. They are interesting. They hold my attention. If you go out to Ravelry and look me up (erinkristi, but I guess you have to have an account to do that...Flickr has a Knits folder that has all the photos I post to Ravelry), and look at my projects, you'll see this lovely black sweater in stockinette. Gorgeous, yummy Jaeger Extra Fine Merino...it's a UFO.

For the uninitiated, non-knitting readers: UFO is, in knitting parlance "UnFinished Object." It's surprisingly apt.

Anyway, the purple and white striped sweater could work for any of them, but it's going to scream "girlie" after I add the pink and yellow doo-dads. After the sweater are some booties, then another sweater, then more little sockies, then another sweater. The bambini will probably birth sometime during the latter part of the second sweater (at least I didn't call it a "sweatie") or the beginning of the second set of socks.

This weekend I'm buying diapers at Costco.

I don't know when Nicole's baby shower is. Lester (one of Nick's friends) told Nick that Nick will have to be "Nicole's bitch" during the baby shower. I told Nick I thought Lester was pulling his leg. Lester is a sweet guy, and at the top of our list of Nick's Friends We Really Like. Lester has a bit of a sense of humor, and it's quite possible that he's pulling Nick's leg right out of it's socket. But then, it's been a very long time since I've been involved in any baby showers, so maybe that's the way it is these days. The Funky Stork has a cute article about having a celebration for the expectant dad. Actually, it's a cool site and all about the Dad part of having a baby. Their logo is especially slick, and the whole place is very Manly Man. They don't mention a thing about the dad being the mom's bitch during the shower ;)

I tagged this as photography, too, because I hate how my photos of yarn and projects turned out! ugh! Did I forget all my skills? Does my lighting suck? Well, the lighting clearly does suck, and I tried to fix it using a low-end image editing tool (stoooopid). It's not the fault of the image editing tool. IrfanView, which is my absolute favorite quick image editing tool for tasks that don't require Photoshop, doesn't do the kind of heavy lifting that these photos required. I use IrfanView for cropping, sizing, lite editing, and viewing all manner of weird image formats because it's very fast. Small application footprint. BUT: don't give it images whose white balance so screwed up that new images are required. I think that's where we are with these. Shame, too, because I spent quality time on that activity. There are few things on which I'm willing to perform this level of rework. My photography of my yarn. No, I just can't let it go. This is a problem of Erin versus The Flash. I will win.

Yes, we have no snowbrerro

The weather outside was frightful...when we were at my mother's in Silverdale over the Christmas holiday. Kent identified the snowbrero, a round patio table with a round planter in the middle of it. Covered in snow, it resembled a sombrero, just in case you didn't guess that.

I brought this up because I was reminded of it when it snowed around early March in Norfolk. Of course it didn't last long, but it was about the only snow we saw around here and it's, ahem, exciting when it happens. So anyway, I had started this post at that time...well...it was a diversion. More important things have come up in the meantime...to be continued!

Old House, This

If you ever again hear the words"We're buying a fixer-upper" come out of my mouth, take me out back and shoot me because clearly I've lost my grip on reality. It seems like just when we're ready to make an improvement, something breaks and we end up spending money on that broken thing, and the improvement is delayed once again.

No, no, nothing major happened. It was just a small sequence of events in a 100-yr old house. The the two-year-old dishwasher died...again. A year ago the motor had to be replaced. Under warranty. Now it's the "harness assembly." Not under warranty. A basement drain backed up. This happens when the wind blows from just the right direction, pushing the bay and it's tributaries inland, which makes it harder for the runoff to drain properly. A new pump station was installed a few blocks away but the problem has actually gotten worse. These events have all come together at the same time, but I don't know if they are causal. In any case, I did a load of laundry yesterday and there's rinse water all over my basement floor. I was reminded of this awful cycle of horrors. Houses always cost so much more to maintain than I expect in both time and money. Makes condo living look veeerrrrrry attractive.

Okay, the dishwasher wasn't part of the "old house" thing, but still...

One Year Later...

Yes, it's been nearly a year since I posted a blog entry. I feel I've lost a certain anonymity that I prized for so long. Is the time for anonymity gone, and am I being completely unrealistic? Probably. Maybe I don't know how to be who I am online. And yet it feels pretty good to lay down some words and walk away.

In other words, I'm ambivelent about this entire blogging thing. And maybe that's exactly who I am and I just don't need to apologize for that. An epiphany a day it good for the soul.

Much Ado About No Snowthing. We were scheduled to get 2-5" of snow yesterday. It stopped in Raleigh and then went out to sea. I know the state border is a virtual boundary but you'd think it was physical the way the storm just bumped along it. All the schools were closed. City services were closed. Many people got a four-day weekend out of it. To this storms credit, about twenty-three snowflakes fell in the driveway. Can you have snow that is less than flurries? We did. For five minutes. The 2009 Blizzard That Wasn't.

Compare that to the fourteen inches of snow we got over Christmas at Mom's house.

MANY projects underway. Two pairs of knitted socks, two knitted hats, a 10-link bracelet, three pendants. Not much photography at the moment but I think that'll be picking up a little. I'll at least photograph my projects.

FSW Flute Convention

Was it everything it was cracked up to be? For one day, sure. Did I mention that Susan cheerfully drove Amy and me to DC and back, and that Kent and David dropped us off and picked us up at her house in Williamsburg, respectively? Did I mention that Mary allowed the three of us to bunk in her room Friday night? Amy and I, variable that we are, were thinking eh, maybe we'd stay through Sunday. Or maybe i'd stay through Sunday and Amy would go back Saturday night with Susan. Or maybe we'd both go back on Saturday. In the end, we figured we'd seen all there was, attended the clinics we were most interested in, and decided that an extra weekend day was worth hitting the road Saturday night. So, we came back with Susan. We relied on so many people for this! Susan, David, Kent, Mary. Big kudos to them all for their helping hand.

In other news, I officially report to a new manager in a different team. Haven't met the new manager yet, but I have plenty on my plate because me and my duties moved, lock stock and barrel, over to a new team that specializes the stuff that I do. Analytics, trending, etc. More on this as it develops.

Nick is NOT moving to Maryland in March. Erica is moving to Norfolk in May.

Too much computer, not enough other

That's what it feels like, anyway.

We're still camped in the dining room because it's the only place to spread out and record the record albums and have both laptops on the table. Yesterday I recorded the Village People's Macho Man. This one wasn't mine. In fact, I can't seem to find any of mine, like my Music Minus One and a handful of others I've been carrying around for 20-odd years. Nonetheless, we have an interesting collection that includes all of Kent's mother's collection. Remember these great classics?

Right, then. At any rate, I'm spending a lot of time converting our old record albums to mp3s. We have a few 45s, and a nice stack of 78s.

I'm still working on acquiring the Miyazawa in used form. J.L. Smith is sending a PA-202 with the MZ-6 headjoint, and Katies Flute Shop is sending me a pre-owned 300RH, today's 402. I had no luck at the DC Flute Fair. I still keep coming back to this 402. On the other hand, there was good sheet music to be had.

The music project I having looming is a duet for Flute and Alto Flute from the Mikado. I found a piano reduction and from that I (we) will transcribe a piece to play for the Flute Choir Recital Night in May. Or a piece already written for Flute and Alto Flute if I can't make this work. I haven't given myself much time in my opinion. We shall see.

Knitting wise, I actually finished a block and began another block of the modern quilt scarf that's been hanging out in a bag on my floor.

The Fairest One Of Them All

A name that makes hearts of flutists everywhere sing good...good...good...good vibratioooooooo...ba...ba..badop....

At the Hampton Roads Flute Faire today (faire....who the h-e-double-toothpicks calls it a faire!) J.L. Smith & Co. was there hawking flutes. I tried, I liked, I took a one week trial. Miyazawa!

This is the fairest flute of them all, and I tried them all.

No, seriously, there were about twenty flutes on the table, and I tried twenty flutes and I kept coming back to this 402. So I decided to take it out on trial for a week. Tonight I don't get to play because of Nick's party, but tomorrow I will play many hours. Next weekend is the National Flute Convention in DC. and just maybe I can find this flute in a price range a few $$$$ lower than the new one I'm trying out.

Hanging out with like-minded people is inspiring on so many levels. During yesterday's YFB I refined an idea for stitch markers that a certain secret pal is gonna love, and came up with another earring design. Then, yesterday during the Bonita Boyd concert I came up with an earring and bracelet set based on the railings around the concert hall.

Regarding this concert. I could skipped hearing the Bach Sonata in E minor for the umpteenth time. She's a fine musician but there wasn't anything particularly outstanding that any other good musician couldn't have done. The Poulanc piece was really nice, though, and she shared an interesting story about the composer, that he was the black sheep in his circle of friends (Les Six) and considered the least likely to succeed. As it turned out, he succeeded just fine, thank you very much, and his flute sonata is very popular among flutists. I think I have a copy, too. She also did an interesting contemporary piece at the end that sounded a like scale exercises, but I'm going to look into that.

I arrived at the thing in a foul mood, though, thinking that I'd missed all the good clinics in the morning. I certainly missed the competitions, which I'd have dearly loved to have seen, but wonderful Susan informed me that I arrived in time for the really good stuff, and the rest was, well, Amateur night at the Bijoux, as a very dear friend is fond of saying. Please not that that's my characterization, not Susan's. HOWEVER, there was the table of J.L. Smith flutes. After our concert we swarmed the table. Swarmed, I tell you!

Susan saved the day, and I slept well. On with the day!