“Enchiladas”
I hate to admit it, but I am on a diet. Somewhere
between the gnocchi, the dumplings and (oh god) the tortelloni, I have come to
the sickening and saddening realization that something must change, other than
my expanding waistline. I am jumping on the low-carb bandwagon.
My main hatred of dieting stems from my
love of cooking and eating real food. Diets don’t care about real food
– they advocate “quotation mark” food: “spaghetti”
and meatballs, macaroni and “cheese.” What exactly are we dealing
with here? No really, tell me, because I’d much rather sit down to a
plate of cauliflower puree than ‘mashed “potato”
surprise.’ I find this practice totally exasperating – and
that’s just quotation mark issue, we haven’t addressed the non-fat
fats and the non-sugar sweeteners. Those are just gross.
Sigh. But sometimes you have to swallow
your pride, if for nothing else than to fit into your favorite jeans, and it is
for that reason that I made chicken “enchiladas” for dinner last
night.
Let me explain. A couple of
weeks ago, Cristina and I decided to make dinner together, and she suggested a
recipe for chicken enchiladas that she had made before to great success. We
boiled and shredded some chicken breast, tossed it with cilantro, green onions,
cayenne, cumin, oregano, salt and pepper, and mixed it up with grated cheese,
cream cheese, sour cream and salsa. Then we rolled this filling in some flour
tortillas, doused them with some more salsa, sprinkled some cheese on top, and
baked them till they were melted and bubbly.
Oh. My. Lord. They were amazing! We
must give credit to Sara Moulton– the recipe is hers. I have been craving
them ever since, couldn’t wait to make them again (especially so that
I’d have leftovers to bring to work), and made sure to get all the
ingredients for them last time I went grocery shopping. Then I went on the
diet.
The theory behind such diets as
Atkins, South Beach and the Zone is that limiting certain carbohydrates
regulates one’s insulin levels and results in the body’s increased
ability to burn stored fat. High-glycemic carbohydrates like sugar and
processed grains are absorbed very quickly into the blood stream and burn out
fast, leaving you feeling hungry. Proteins, fats, most vegetables and whole
grains are slow-burning, keeping you sustained for a longer period of time.
Some of the low-carb diets call for an initial system re-boot, in which the
first two weeks require a total withdrawal from starchy carb-sources. So for
me, it’s two weeks of no sugar, wheat, potato, rice, or fruit – and
no tortillas.
This diet is actually
very suited to my habits, despite what you might surmise from my previous
articles. The only problem is my overwhelming obsession these days with those
damn enchiladas. The thought of them won’t leave me alone. Cristina even
served them again on Super Bowl Sunday, and they were even better the second
time, but one small taste made me crave them even more. (I can’t help but
think of my college roommate Pheobe, who was queen of random food benders. She
was one of the most glowingly healthy and athletic people I have ever known, so
you’d never believe by looking at her that she could subsist entirely on
vanilla ice cream coke floats for weeks at a time. At one point she was fixated
on O’s cereal. For a good long time, it was Guiltless Gourmet chips and
hummus. Good ol’ Pheobs, at last I understand – your coke float is
my enchilada!)
Diet notwithstanding, I
Would Have those damn enchiladas again. Just so long as I could stay true to my
plan – it was only day 4 after all. It didn’t take too much
finagling. The good thing about low-carb diets is that they allow broad
flexibility with proteins and fats, so my diet “enchiladas” still
contained (get this): jack cheese, cream cheese and sour cream. Just no
tortillas. What I made, in real-food terms, was an enchilada-filling-bake. And
it bombed.
I don’t know why a
simple layer of bland flour tortilla would have such a significant effect on the
taste of all those spices and flavorful ingredients, but without them, it was an
ooey gooey mess of creamy chicken stuff. It looked like slops. It tasted fine,
but was only a distant approximation of what I had yearned for. The worst thing
about it was that this quotation-mark-imposter totally obliterated my precious
memory of the original.
I suppose that
in some ways, my failure was a good thing – it solved my craving problem,
for one, and tortillas or no, these clearly are not the healthiest things one
could eat. But it also sparked my curiosity to rediscover the real McCoy, and I
think we all know that 9 days from now, I will be savoring the whole enchilada,
no quotation marks necessary.
Posted: Fri - February 6, 2004 at 02:47 PM