This Challenge definitely lived up to its vocation. Let me count the new things I discovered and experienced through it:
1. I finally went to Perola's, in Kensington.
2. I cooked with tomatillos for the first time.
3. I also handled poblanos for the first time (the recipe actually called for Anaheim chiles; this seemed like a "safe" substitute).
4. I roasted peppers for the first time (you can kind of make out the blisters in the dismal picture above).
5. I used the broiler in my gas oven for the first time (you had to be there to understand just how much of a success this is)!
Here are the two stacks I prepared (obviously, I halved the recipe), moments before they went into the oven:
I ran out of the chile-tomatillo sauce, so I wasn't able to cover the last tortilla. The outer layer came out correspondingly crispy:
The sauce was too spicy for me - it was too hard on my poor taste buds. But from what I could discern of the other flavours, it tasted pretty good. A minor miracle, considering peppers and I aren't the best of chums.
My biggest complaint was that the enchiladas were hard to eat, much like the desserts on that episode of Chopped where the remaining two contestants had to make something out of dried chipotles, blueberries, violet mustard, and, you guessed it, tortillas. I don't know if I over-fried them, or whether they're just always hard to eat when baked (or fried) and attacked with a knife and fork.
That's a question for future experiments. Much like the matter of what I'm going to do with the handful of leftover tomatillos.
In the meantime, though, I'm inordinately pleased to be able to add these feathers to my cooking cap.
