Chile relleno and chicken casserole

Roommate really likes spicy food, and so I am frequently forced to up the spice content of my recipes right before I serve them, usually through liberal dustings of cayenne pepper. This one, not so much.

The inspiration for this dish came from yet another blog I love, called For the Love of Cooking. I fell in love with this blog when the first thing I looked at was toast/egg cups with bacon. What is not to love about eggs baked in bread with bacon?

She made a Mexican-style chile relleno casserole, which I thought looked ok, but maybe a little saucy for me. So I riffed it. Plus, she made hers because she thought it was HEALTHIER than true chile rellenos. Hah. Like I care about that.

So first, I blistered some Cubanel chiles (I hate my grocery store, Cubanels are all they had, and while good, I don't like them nearly as much as Anaheims or Poblanos.... I hate my grocery store.) Blistering chiles is something I had done before, so it didn't scare me, but in case you never have, word to the wise. When they say charred they mean CHARRED. Every millimeter needs to be totally black. Otherwise, the skin won't blister away from the flesh, and you will waste tons of chile. So burn those suckers. For example, this one here, NOT CHARRED ENOUGH. MORE FIRE NEEDED.

However, my three chiles were insufficient to cover my pan, so I added a layer of spinach on top of them, just to keep the egg-mixture from hitting the pan.

On top of the spinach/chiles came the egg, flour, cream cheese mixture (I had no low-fat sour cream, work with me here). Then the spiced chicken and black bean mixture. Here is where I brought the heat. I did two tbs of chili flakes, plus a cup of hot salsa verde in the chicken while I browned it. It was still dull, so on top of the blackbean/chicken, I added more slasa verde, then sliced pepperjack cheese.

Recipes always seem to call for grated cheese in casseroles. I don't get why. sliced is so much faster, and has the same effect. Plus, my cheese grater terrifies me. I think it wins the "most likely to cause lost fingers" award of anything in my kitchen, and I have a rusty can opener. So you should get how afraid I am of those.

Anywho, then I repeated the whole thing, spinach, egg-y-stuff, meat and beans, cheese, salsa, and cooked it in the oven at 350 till I decided it was done. This is it pre-baking.

May I say, delicious. Vying for favorite thing ever cooked with the turkish-spice chicken patties. I think maybe I just like cooking ground chicken, I dunno. Either way, delicious.

And it made TONS of leftovers, so I will estimate I got 8 meals out of this, for about $9 total? The most expensive part here was the chicken, the rest I got on super sale, like the cheese and beans. Also, full disclosure, all the spices I used here would have been expensive, but I have a killer spice box (in my bedroom, but I already complained about that). So yeah, cheap for me, but even if you have to re-buy chile flakes, paprkia, cayenne pepper and salsa verde, still pretty cheap.