Easy Enchilada Casserole (your new go-to dinner, I swear)

What happened? It was summer and summer and summer and then it wasn't summer anymore.

"This would be so good with bacon!" I thought to myself, with a lightbulb over my head.

As you now, this is not a graceful time of year for me and my family. Everybody is sad and lies in a sad pile and staggers around frowningly or pretends to be sick and reads in bed all day. Okay, that last thing was just me, and I was reading this, which was fantastic, but still.

Birdy wanted to eat half a watermelon with a melon baller, and did. #goalsetting

Birdy is in 8th grade and is, accordingly, 8 feet tall. After the door shuts behind her, the cat runs to me, depressed, and sits in my depressed lap all morning.

Ben grew cucamelons, which are a cross between cucumbers and melons, neither of which he likes. Don't worry, that's my old-lady hand, not his.

Ben is a junior. He is about to get his driver's license, which I have been joking about for so long, as a way of hamming up the passage of time, that now I am out of jokes. The fact that I do not cling to him crying and also crying, "Never leave us!" every second of every day is a huge maternal victory for me.

I made wild grape soda. If you find the grapes, it's easy to do. Just cook them in a pot with a splash of water until they're soft (about 15 minutes), mashing them up as they cook. Strain them and add sugar, stirring to dissolve. Then put a few tablespoons in a glass and top with seltzer. 

The only silver lining, really the only one I can think of at all, is that once school starts I stop dreading the fall, if that makes sense. Then I can enjoy the full fallishness of it--the wild grapes and turning leaves and cooling nights and mushrooms everywhere. Last night Michael and I walked on the golf course near our house as the darkness was pulling down over the sky, and bats were diving and swooping near us, and I kept saying, "I'm not even scared!" But then I was screaming and covering my head with the paper bag I'd brought in case we found mushrooms, and it turned out I was scared, but in a good way. That, for example, was not the worst 15 minutes of my life. I offer that grudgingly.

Anyhoo. In compensation for how lame I've been about posting, I am offering you not any of the summer recipes I had been documenting and planning to post here (I am no longer in the mood for gazpacho, waah waah waah) but this humdinger instead, my ace in the hole, the famous Enchilada Casserole. It is in the oven ten minutes after you first think about making it, and everyone loves it every time. Which is a lot, because it's easy and we always have the stuff to make it. And, weirdly, it's not only a great desperation dinner, it's also a great dinner-party dinner because it is so crazily delicious and crowd-pleasing. Like enchiladas, minus all of the work and mess. I don't even grate the cheese myself!

Ingredients.

Tortillas sprayed with oil (ew) and cut in half.

Exact science.

Layering.

More layering. The thing I don't mention in the recipe that you don't recognize is called "chicken mushrooms" and I found them on a stump. Just ignore them. 

I try to make the top layer neater. #fancy

Easy Enchilada Casserole

Serves 6

This is not only delicious and crazily easy—it is also easily doubled! Make it in a regular-size lasagna pan, and use roughly twice the amount of everything. Please note that while I am using homemade greenenchilada sauce, this is good with any color or storeboughtness of enchilada sauce! It would probably even work fine with salsa, but then it wouldn’t taste like enchiladas. Oh, also, you can add shredded chicken to this—pulled off of a rotisserie chicken or leftover or whatever—and it’s great that way, if you have chicken-eaters in the house.

Olive-oil spray (or olive oil)

1 ½ cups enchilada sauce (this one, or another homemade or store-bought one of your choosing)

8 corn tortillas

1 (15-ounce) can black beans, drained

1-2 cups corn kernels (fresh, or frozen and thawed)

10 ounces shredded cheese ( I use the better part of a 12-ounce bag of Trader Joe’s shredded 3-Cheese Blend, which is cheddar, Monterey Jack, and mozzarella. If what you have is an 8-ounce block of something, that will be enough.)

Heat the oven to 375 and grease a 7- by 11-inch or equivalent sized (equivalently sized? what?) baking dish. Please note that this is not a full-size lasagna dish, but the, like, half-sized one.

Do the tortillas. So, if you fry each one in a little bit of oil, the way you would if you were making real enchiladas, the casserole will be sublime. Sometimes you will do this, and sometimes you will be lazy. When you’re lazy, which I 90% of the time am, simply spray each tortilla, back and front, with the olive oil spray (or brush them with oil). Stack them and cut them in half.

Layer the casserole: pour ½ cup sauce in the bottom of the pan and tilt it to distribute. Arrange 5 tortilla halves so that they more or less cover the bottom without overlapping. This is not an exact science. Distribute half of the beans and half of the corn over the tortillas, then sprinkle with a third of the cheese.

Now add another layer of tortillas, top these with ½ cup of sauce, then the remaining beans and corn, and half of the remaining cheese.

Top with a final layer of tortillas, then the remaining sauce and cheese, and a seal with a piece of foil that you’ve sprayed with olive-oil spray so that all the cheese won’t stick to it and pull off.

Bake for ½ hour, then uncover and bake 10 minutes longer, until the casserole is bubbling and browning. Let it rest 5 minutes before you cut it.