Remember the Ingredients

The recipe is basically making a filling, rolling it up in flour tortillas, and baking. There's a lot of variations on all these steps, though.

FILLING

Start with the garlic and onions: smash and mince the garlic and cook them up in oil or butter for a minute. Cut up the mushrooms and add them, until they get all delicious. Cube the potato and add them to the pan as well, till they're edible. Slice up any peppers you like and add them, as well.

When everything's cooked to your liking, put the filling bits in a bowl, stir in a can or so of beans, and add sour cream until it's creamy but stiff—you don't want it too thin. You should be able to sculpt with it. Add cheese to taste, probably about the same by volume as the filling. Mix it up well.

You can season the filling a variety of ways. Sometimes I like to put those canned green chiles in, or some red chili powder, or even sriracha sauce. Sauteed peppers, if you want to get fancy. But really, just meat/sour cream/cheese will get the job done just fine, just fine.

PREPARE THE PAN

There's one major decision to make here: sauce, or no sauce? It's tricky. There are upsides and downsides to both. Sauce is delicious, and makes the dish slightly less reprehensibly free of veggies. However, it also makes the enchiladas much harder to eat as refrigerated finger-food later on (and, you could always add sauce to plain cheesy ones later). Anyway, you should probably make saucy ones first, but the non-saucy ones are seriously good leftovers.

For sauces I've tried several things. Plain old Pace-style thickened pureed salsa works well, but it's a little chunky. Enchilada sauce is great but it's hard to find one that doesn't get super smoky when you bake it. I like El Pato ("The Duck"), it costs $0.60 and comes in a little can with a duck on it, buy a ton of it if you find it cause it's the best sauce ever.

If you're using sauce, put a thin layer on the bottom of a rectangular casserole pan; if you're not using sauce, just lightly oil the the pan, so the tortillas don't stick too bad.

TORTILLAS

Flour tortillas are the only real tortillas. I usually use burrito sized ones. Spoon a forkful onto a tortilla, roll it up, and place it into the pan. Feel free to crowd them in, it doesn't hurt. Fuller enchiladas are, obviously, tastier, but that means you get less of them — use your best judgement.

Once the tortillas are in the pan, add another layer of sauce if you're doing saucy enchiladas, and then top with more shredded cheese. This is the kind of gross part, because you're going to use way more cheese than seems healthy, but having an airtight melted cheese seal is really important to lock in moisture and make your enchiladas savory decadent. So really go to town. Sometimes I put individual black olives between the sauce and the cheese, they make nice little buried treasures, but that's optional.

BAKE at 325° for about 12-15 minutes, until the cheese is bubbly and any tortilla bits poking out start to brown.

Food!