How to make enchiladas in Bogota.

How to make enchiladas in Bogota. 

Let me first start by saying that it seems that every country has some sort of national cuisine except for The United States.  We are such a melting pot that we have a little bit of everything  but if I were to classify the cuisine of Texas where I hail from I would call it anything fried (even vegetables), TexMex, casserole, gravy soaked.  We are very eclectic with our food in the United States which makes it very hard for this gringa to cook anything in Bogota.

 Traditional Colombian food is very simple and reminds me a bit of typical southern food.  Contrary to what some Americans might believe it is not spicy at all.  There are no chiles or peppers.  The food mostly consists of large red beans, white rice, meat, white potatoes.  There are many variations of this and I don’t pretend that this is all that the locals eat here (there many types of soups, fish, etc. as well) but those are the basics of the Colombian meal as I have come to know it. 

I am not a great cook but I do love food and I love to eat.  I spend a large part of my day thinking about what I’m going to eat next.  Most of the dishes that I know how to make come off of the back of a Campbell’s soup can.  I never really learned how to cook until I got married and let’s face it my mom was about the same caliber of chef that I am so there was no family cooking tradition to really pass on.  So it should be no surprise that when I arrived in Bogota I promptly found an empleada (maid) to cook for myself and my family.  She is an amazing cook and makes everything from scratch.  My daughter who survived on macaroni and cheese in Texas loves her soups and arroz con pollo (chicken and rice).   The ingredients are all very natural, not a lot of processed food here.  Of course globalization is helping the American ways to creep into the Colombian diet but that is a whole other issue. 

I was very content eating the local fare but last week I was feeling homesick and wanted some comfort food (i.e. processed food).  I decided I wanted to make an enchilada casserole, simple right?  Wrong.  The typical ingredients for enchiladas a la gringa typically include corn tortillas, canned enchilada sauce, chicken, and shredded “Mexican” cheese; see I told you I can’t cook.  You cannot walk into just any supermarket in Colombia and find these ingredients.  I took a trip to one of the stores that carry this sort of processed, canned, goodness to acquire my ingredients.  First of all, anything in a can or box is imported in this country making it outrageously expensive because Colombians don’t typically eat food out of cans as do our refined American relatives.  Second, they don’t always have exactly what a gringa needs to make said processed food, hence the whole reason for this little story; they didn’t have what I needed so I had to improvise.  I found the tortillas, chicken, and sauce that I needed but could not for the life of me find shredded “Mexican” or even cheddar cheese so I proceeded to go to three different stores looking for cheese.  Some people I asked knew what it was but said yeah, we are all out of that.  I ended up finding an imported jar of “queso”.  If you are from Texas you know what that is, a jar of gooey processed cheese for dipping tortilla chips.  I poured it all over the top of my enchilada concoction instead of the shredded cheese and stuck it in the oven after I looked up the Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion online because I have already learned that just turning your oven up to oh say 400 or so is not a good idea. 

The dish came out looking a bit more like yellow colored lasagna but my husband declared that it was great and named it Texican Lasagna but I would call it something more like White Trash Lasagna.  Whatever you want to call it, it was good and satisfied my craving for something cheesy and processed.  It cost me about $20 to make due to import prices but I think it was worth it because there are no leftovers in the fridge, we ate it all.