Tastes Like Chicken

Holy cow, I haven't posted anything since October!! Well, I have been expecting since then and until January I was really sick and completely stayed out of the kitchen. I couldn't even stand to smell the kitchen. And then since January we have been living in hotels where I only cooked two meals total. But now we are in Alaska, mostly out of boxes and I have cooked every meal we have eaten since we moved here (except for one pizza slice at Costco), because I will never eat at a restaurant again. Hotels and restaurants are great once in a while, but every day for 6 weeks is a nightmare. I got food fatigue before dinner on the first day. Ok anyway, back to cooking-in case I have never said it before in these words, Garth and I both agree that the best vegetarian dishes are actually meaty dishes reconstructed with a meat substitute. Most other vegetarian dishes either use cheese or eggs instead of meat, or they are not very substantial and husbands start going to burger king after dinner, or they are overly complicated and require a lot of special fresh ingredients which are difficult to find and expensive in Alaska. (But most vegetarian cookbooks have lots of great side dishes, and other inspiring ideas-although after making a main dish I usually just put some fruit in a bowl next to it and call it a meal-but someday I might make a side dish from one of those vegetarian cookbooks because they look tasty.) My latest attempt to convert a meat dish is this recipe for enchiladas:

1 cup of brown rice (and some cooked wheat berries if you want)
1 packet of fajita, nacho, enchilada or taco seasoning
1 fresh tomato chopped
1 cup of corn
1/2 medium onion chopped
1 green or red bell pepper chopped
about 8 large tortillas
1 can of enchilada sauce
salsa or pico de gallo

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Cook the rice and add the wheatberries if you want after the rice is all cooked. Add all or most of the enchilada, fajita (I think this tastes the most like meat), nacho or taco seasoning packet and mix it into the rice. Add the chopped tomato, onion, bell pepper and corn to the rice and mix it all up uniformly. Get a big casserole dish and pour enchilada sauce until it covers the bottom of the dish. Take a tortilla and lay it flat in the dish so the back gets covered in sauce. Add a spoonful or two of rice mix to the tortilla and roll it up like a burrito so that the whole outside of the tortilla is covered with sauce, and slide it to one end of the casserole. Put another tortilla in the dish so it gets saucy and repeat this process until the pan is full of rolled up tortillas. (Obviously it will get kind of hard to get the last few tortillas completely saucy, so just keep adding sauce on top of the rolled up enchiladas and roll the last few on top of them-it doesn't' matter how you get them covered in sauce, just find a way.) When the pan is full, pour on the remaining enchilada sauce and bake for 15-20 minutes. After taking the enchiladas out of the oven, pour some fresh salsa or pico de gallo on top of the enchiladas and serve. In the picture above, I also cut up and avocado and mixed it with this amazing mango salsa from Costco. I didn't miss the meat at all in this recipe, and I doubt I would have noticed if some ground beef or chicken had been in there somewhere anyway. Ok maybe I would have noticed, but this actually was a very meat like substitute and it was yummy. Have fun.