adventures in low-fat cooking: green chile chicken enchiladas

Words cannot express how much we love green chile chicken enchiladas. Or their holiday incarnation with leftover turkey. It is the cheesiest, creamiest, brown crispy crustiest, warm chile can’t stop eating it -iest food on earth.

Here’s the photo from our Thanksgiving enchilada – meant to blog about that whole week. May still go back and do that. So much happened!

Today is Scott’s birthday. He requested that I come up with a low-fat version for his celebration dinner. Heresy, I know.

I tried. I will call this rev. 1 because I realize now that I could have cut down on the condensed mushroom soup, and added nonfat yogurt instead…

Low-Fat Green Chile Chicken Enchiladas (Rev. 1)

1 lb skinless boneless chicken breast tenders
2 boxes Pacific brand condensed cream of mushroom soup
1 cup Hatch green chile (roasted, peeled, seeded, and chopped)
1 lb grated Cabot brand 50% low-fat cheddar
9 organic corn tortillas
cumin, coriander, Mexican oregano

Preheat oven to 375

Brown tenders in batches in a minimally-oiled fry pan, 2 minutes per side. Place all in medium or large rectangular pyrex and bake 5 minutes. Cut into cubes and set aside.

In a medium saucepan, heat condensed soup, green chile (even more than 8 oz is good – if you can get frozen chile from New Mexico, that is much better than the canned stuff), liberal amounts of cumin, coriander, and oregano. Simmer for a short while till flavors combine -ish.

Grate cheese. Into the same pyrex you used to bake the chicken, layer tortillas on the bottom, soup mixture next, then cheese and so on, ending with cheese on top.

Note: The cheese that goes into the inner layers gets a bit lost. Use less on those, and more for the top.

Bake 30 minutes or until browned and bubbling. Let sit 15 minutes before serving. Usually tastes even better the next day.

So here’s how the modified version stacks up against the original in terms of calories and fat:

The original version, which uses full-fat cheese (and for the purposes of this comparison we’ll pretend I could restrain myself and only add 1lb), Amy’s condensed cream of mushroom (same calories as Pacific but more than twice as much fat), and light and dark meat chicken, skin on:

Full pan = 3764 calories and 203 grams of fat

Tonight’s low-fat version:

Full pan = 2800 calories and 101 grams of fat

Scott said it was delicious and that he was quite pleased.

I, of course, have plans for future modifications. This version seemed a little too mushroom-y and soup-y to me.

I might try cutting down to 1-1/2 or even 1 box of the soup diluted with water. Or I might use Imagine creamy portabello instead, which I’ve used before in a pinch and I recall it being just fine. The Imagine soup in the same quantities would add 240 calories and 9 grams of fat (vs. 600 calories and 15 or 36 grams in Pacific or Amy’s condensed, respectively). Which then might give some wiggle room for adding a little more fat in the cheese? Because I think that was the area where I missed the fat the most. Reduced-fat cheese has a tendency to get a little stiff and chewy when melted. As opposed to cheeses that are naturally lower in fat, though still surprisingly fatty, like part-skim mozzarella or Heini’s yogurt cheese or queso fresco, both of which are made from low-fat milk.

What surprised me the most is that tortillas have fat. Only 6.75 grams, but still, may investigate other brands. It’s like a puzzle I’m trying to solve. Shave a bit here, add there.

You’ll notice I put the amounts for the whole pan. The truth is, Scott and I can each put away 1/4 of a pan. Sensible people would eat less than that.

(Or rather, as Scott says, what fool wouldn’t eat a quarter of the pan???)