I saw this recipe on The Food Charlatan and thought I’d give it a try. But OF COURSE I couldn’t do it properly; I had to do it MY WAY. Refer to her recipe for a full list of the proper ingredients and the proper cooking procedure.

First, she says to peel the sweet potatoes and cut them into cubes and cook them 10 minutes, then add other stuff and cook another 10 minutes. I don’t know what kind of sweet potatoes they have where y’all live, but I couldn’t get a sweet potato chunk cooked in 20 minutes to save my soul. So I cut an X in the potato skin and microwaved it for about 5 minutes, put it into cold water until I could handle it, THEN peeled it and cut it up. It was just about done through, so I figured another 20 minutes would do it. It did.

She calls for spinach, and I didn’t have spinach, but I had some leftover kale and onions, so I used that. I also omitted the onion powder, because: kale and onions.

She calls for cilantro, and I didn’t have any fresh cilantro, but I had some chimichurri sauce that #4 Daughter, the amazing Sara Marian, made fresh from her herbs, so I used that.

The Amazing Sara Marian’s Amazing Chimichurri Sauce

1.5 cups parsley, finely chopped
1/2 cup cilantro, finely chopped
1 tsp dried oregano
1 shallot, minced
3/4 cup olive oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
3 Tbs red wine vinegar
2 Tbs lemon juice
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp red pepper flakes (less if you don’t want spicy)

I crushed everything with mortar & pestle first, but that didn’t get it fine enough for my liking so I put it in the blender and pulsed it till it looked right.

So here’s what my filling looked like:

The Food Charlatan wanted me to use homemade enchilada sauce, but guess what? Now, let’s not always see the same hands. Yes, that’s right: fuck that noise. I would have used store-bought, but I turned out not to have any.

I rolled that filling up in flour tortillas, along with some store-bought salsa and some “Mexican Blend” cheese, and packed them into an oiled casserole dish. There was a little filling left over, so I put that on top and added a healthy scoop of store-bought salsa verde (green sauce).

Then OF COURSE, I smothered it with a metric fuckton of cheese. If I had access to good vegan “cheddar”, I would have used that.

I wish I had put the cheese on first, and then the filling/salsa, because it looked so pretty. But it looked pretty, anyway. Baked at 375F (~190.5C) for half an hour.

Cut one open and see this:

We loaded on more salsa verde and mmmmmmmm….

A WRITING PROMPT FROM ME TO YOU: An ingredient given by someone else.

MA