Journeying through the world of Mexican food recipes on the intarwub, I found something quite interesting. A gross majority of recipes, though calling for home-pulled this and home-seared that and home-mashed otherwise, came up dreadfully short in one aspect:
The fucking sauce. Emeril, the Good Eats guy, that one English prick (probably), those fancy websites with forks for stars, all list this one major MAJOR fault with a lot of their enchilada recipes. This is a no-brainer guys. If you want to impress your lady/guy/cat you don't use this pasty gunky Taco-Bell-Reject bullshit. Make it your goddamn self with this easy to follow recipe.
Three tablespoons cooking oil
1 tablespoon flour
2 cups chicken stock
1/4 cup chili powder
2 of those tiny cans of tomato paste
1 teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon cumin
a pinch or so of salt
cayenne to taste
Heat that oil in a sauce pan. Don't scorch it, use just a tad over medium heat. Toss in the flour with gusto. Make sure some gets splattered outside the pan, that's how you know you're doing it right. Cook for a minute or so while stroking smoothing the sauce with a spoon. Add the chili powder and stir it until it looks kinda nasty, grainy, like the sandbox at elementary school after a nice spring TORRENTIAL DOWNPOUR. Insert stock, paste and flavours into the database mixture and bring it to a boil. kill the heat and simmer for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.
With this being so damned easy, why would anyone default to the canned, high-fructose-corn-syrup containing, borderline tasteless, why does it have hfcs it's fucking enchilada sauce, "enchilada" sauce? There's no reason. Go throw out your cans of Old El Paso, [gender-based noun] up and make your own fucking sauce.