St. Patrick’s Green Enchiladas

If you’re looking for a different kind of green treat for St. Patrick’s Day, try these green-sauced chicken enchiladas with (green!) avocados.

The original recipe, courtesy of a Facebook post from High Protein Foods, is below. But I experimented and enjoyed the end result, so feel free to do so as well! Your basic ingredients are chicken, tortilla shells, avocados, cheese, sour cream or Greek yogurt, cilantro, garlic, chicken or vegetable broth, and some type of onions, peppers, and spicy addition (hot sauce to your liking)

I was making an amount for two people, so I reduced by half the ingredients listed below.

First, cook two chicken breasts. We brushed ours with oil and cooked on the barbecue, without spice, because the sauce is full of flavour.

Because I am away from home, and missing some key kitchen ingredients, I had to make some slight modifications, and I added some new ingredients I had on hand. I chopped up some onion, green chile (not too hot) pepper, and cilantro, and added some red chili flakes and hot sauce.

Fry chopped garlic in butter for about one minute. I then added the chopped onions, peppers and cilantro, deviating from the recipe, and fried a minute or two longer.

Stir in the flour, and let it cook for about two more minutes, thickening.

Then stir in chicken broth, cumin (I didn’t have any, which is why I added chili flakes and hot sauce), salt, pepper and bring to a simmer. Remove from heat. I then stirred in plain Greek yogurt instead of sour cream. It gave the sauce a bit sweeter taste but was still delicious. I did not have any salsa verde, which is also why I modified the ingredients, but I served pico de gallo on the side.

Prepare a baking dish with nonstick spray. Add about 1/2 cup sauce to the bottom of the pan and spread out until bottom of the baking dish is evenly coated.

Lay out a tortilla and add chicken, cheese, and avocado to the end of the tortilla and roll. Then place the rolled tortilla seam-side down and repeat until the pan is full.

Pour the remaining sauce over the enchiladas.

Cover with 1 cup of cheese and bake for about 20 minutes or until cheese is bubbling.

Note that I reduced the amount of cheese used in this recipe as we wanted a bit lighter meal. We had a cheese variety pack so I used pepper Monterey jack inside and a blend of cheddar on top. A lighter alternative and definitely a tasty and relatively easy St. Paddy’s meal!

Also, with a couple of slight modifications, this could be gluten-free – simply replace the flour with cornstarch and use gluten-free shells.