Garden Enchiladas

Enchiladas, Spanish rice, and sauteed corn and bell pepper.

It seems early for a kitchen garden post yet here we are. The combination of a mild winter and plentiful plantings last year brought a Saturday vegetable harvest. There were collards, kale, cilantro, and spring onions growing in last year’s planting areas. Volunteer garlic came up where I plan tomatoes this year. After harvest, I cleaned the produce and made dinner with it. We had enchiladas, Spanish rice, and corn sauteed with bell pepper. I also used preserved guajillo chili sauce from last year. My recipe for enchiladas is here.

This meal has a lot of steps yet is worth the effort. The point I make today is while I enjoy plate photos like the one above, the sought end result is fleeting creativity in the kitchen, set in time, as I use ingredients picked an hour or two before. It is of such fleeting essences our lives are made.

During my time I viewed many television cooking shows, and lately, short-form videos about cooking. Rarely does any one of them stand out. Some are formulaic, some a brief distraction. There were so many of them, all the recipes and processes began to look alike. I mean, we know the combination of onion, carrot and celery with bay leaves makes a delicious soup base. We should know the Louisiana “holy trinity” is onions, bell peppers, and celery. How many times do we need to hear it? I imagine most of us have heard it enough.

It is possible to be a creative person. Creativity has some end goal in mind, with cooking, perhaps a plate photo or making a memory of a specific meal. Yet it is the process for which we live. I would never have put collard greens in the filling of an enchilada, except that’s what I found in the garden that day. I found fresh cilantro and that unplanned addition characterized the dish. While I often have recipes in mind, they are little more than a suggestion when cooking. The best of what we eat is often the result of a process that had no recipe in mind at the beginning. At least, it can be.

Grocers have a problem with my kind of food creativity. A grocer in a big box store must stock thousands of items while waiting for some customer to come along seeking one. They rely upon an item’s popularity to cover overhead and make a profit. Popular as they are, I can’t imagine many circumstances when I would buy fresh cilantro or spring onions at the grocer, even though they stock them all year. Therein lies the difference between my kitchen garden and cooking. There is something magical about a kitchen garden that can’t be replaced by commodities from the grocer.

Enchiladas are a well-liked meal in the United States and elsewhere. Our small community has two Mexican restaurants that sell them. If I wanted a Mexican-style dinner, I could just buy take out. That would be missing the point of time in the kitchen garden.