Enchilada Casserole with Kale and Sweet Potatoes

Back to the draft archives... I wrote this post on June 12, 2013. As far as I can tell, the only thing I hadn't done yet was center the photos. I can't believe I still have all of these almost-finalized posts in the archives. Time to get them posted! This one is pretty much as-written from June.

When I was at Trader Joe's earlier this week, I spontaneously picked up another bag of kale since they had a cleaned and cut variety similar to the one from Wegmans. I had no idea if it would be cheaper to get fresh whole kale, but it certainly would take much more time to prepare. I remembered seeing a recipe in my web surfing that used kale in a casserole and I definitely wanted to try that out. The recipe below is adapted from this one that I found on SparkRecipes.

Ingredients

The total cost for the casserole was about $8. We were really hungry so we ate the entire thing, but I could see this working out to 3 portions if you're not starving. It's mostly vegetables so the portion size is pretty large.

The ingredients - disregard the corn salsa as I ended up not using it

- 1 large sweet potato ($0.49)

- 1 small onion or 1/2 of one large onion ($1)

- 1/2-2/3 tsp of cumin powder (or seed) ($0)

- 1 bag of cleaned and cut kale leaves (or chopped leaves from 1 bunch of kale) ($1.99)

- 1 can of black beans ($0.75)

- 1 can of tomato sauce ($1.49)

- 1/4-1/3 cup of chipotle salsa ($0.60)

- 1/2 cup of cheddar jack (or similar) cheese ($0.80)

- 3 green onions ($0.43)

- 7 corn tortillas cut in strips ($0.32)

Process

Step 1:  Prepare the vegetables. Chop the onions and green onions. Grate the sweet potato.

Step 2:  Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Step 3:  Coat baking dish (13x9x2) with cooking spray and place grated sweet potato as the bottom layer.

Step 4:  Add a layer of onions.

Step 5:  Sprinkle on cumin. 

Step 6:  Add the kale leaves. [They were higher than the baking dish once we layered them in.]

Step 7:  Drain and rinse the can of black beans. Add the layer of beans to the dish.

Step 8:  Add the can of tomato sauce and the chipotle salsa and layer as evenly as possible.

Step 9:  Add the green onions.

Step 10:  Sprinkle on as much cheese as you like. We love cheddar jack, especially when it's all melted and cheesy.

Step 11:  Cover the dish with corn tortillas. The original recipe called for 4, but that barely covered the dish so I used 7. I think it was just to weigh down the kale, so perhaps it didn't need to be fully covered and could have had some space inbetween.

Step 12:  Cover the dish and bake for 25 minutes.

Step 13:  Eat!

Review

The casserole was pretty good. It was really tasty, the kale was soft (better than the last kale recipe), and all the vegetables came out well. The corn tortillas were crispy on top and I didn't particularly love them, but otherwise all the ingredients were delicious.

The only unexpected thing was that the casserole came out really watery. Most of the water did soak up by the time we went back for seconds, but it wasn't what we were expecting when we first spooned it out.

Would we make it again? (The true measure of a recipe.) I think we would, but maybe I would use only half the kale since it's not really that easy of a vegetable to digest. Maybe add some other vegetables and make a big vegetable casserole. So healthy and tasty!