I bought Tenderheart: A Book About Vegetables and Unbreakable Family Bonds by Hetty Lui McKinnon before Christmas and hadn’t had a chance to cook anything out of it … and so begins a new series where I plan to cook every recipe in it. I won’t be posting every recipe here, you’ll need to buy the cookbook for that, but I will give you the quick rundown on each recipe across all the points that are important to me: are the ingredients usually found in my pantry or fridge, how much prep-work (I can get bored if I need to do a lot of chopping), dirty dishes, taste, family friendly and worthy of adding to our regular rotation of meals.

Up first is Spinach and Balck Bean Enchilada Bake (p352)

The quick lowdown:

• Ingredients: pretty standard.
• Prep-work: Very little. You’ll only need to chop the garlic and green onions.
• Dirty dishes: Not too bad. A saucepan, baking dish, knife, chopping board and food processor (this because I couldn’t be bothered grating the cheese)
• Taste: seriously yummy, comfort food.
• Family Friendly: yes, unless you have two daughters who don’t like cheese. Fortunately, we’ve kicked them out, and now we can eat cheese whenever we want. Hubby gave it the big tick.
• Regular rotation worthy: Yes!

This is how I made it:

Ingredients:

• olive oil
• 20 small corn tortillas (the cookbook has 24 small flour or corn tortillas, but mine came in packets of 10. I think the flour tortilla would hold together more once baked, so they might give a different texture to the dish. I’d like to try them next time.)
• 280g spinach leaves (this was a family pack at our supermarket, the recipe says 300g)
• 4 green onions, finely slices
• 4 cups grated tasty, parmesan and mozzarella (I just grabbed the last bits of these cheeses that I had in the fridge and whizzed them up in the food processor)
• Salt, black pepper
• 250g cooked black beans (I had these in the fridge, I’d cooked a big pot earlier in the week.)
• 4 garlic cloves
• 1 tbs ground cumin (I’d run out of cumin seeds. I think the full seeds would give a nice crunch)
• 2 tsp ground coriander
• 1/2 tsp chilli flakes
• 800g can crushed tomatoes
• 500 ml vegetable stock
• 1 tbs white sugar
• What I didn’t have: 1 tsp smoked paprika. I’d run out earlier in the week and wasn’t heading out to the shops for that. It was great without but would be better with.

Method:

Preheat the oven to 200C

Fry up the garlic, coriander, cumin and red chilli flakes in olive oil over medium heat in a medium saucepan (a couple of minutes). Add the tomatoes, stock and sugar, and season with salt and pepper. Cover with a lid and cook for 15mins. After this, I reduced it with the lid off because it seemed a bit watery to me. I’m glad I did this because the finished bake was certainly liquid enough.

Oil the inside of a 30cm x 22cm baking dish. Add a few tablespoons of the tomato sauce and spread around. Lay five tortillas on the sauce, top with half the spinach, 1/4 of the spring onions, 1/4 of the remaining tomato sauce and 1 cup of cheese. Then layer this with another five tortillas. Spread the black beans over this, then add 1/3 of the tomato sauce and green onions and 1 cup of cheese. Layer this up with five tortillas and then the rest of the spinach, 1/2 the remaining tomato sauce and green onions with 1 cup of cheese. Finally, finish with another layer of tortillas, green onions, tomato sauce and cheese. You’ll end up with an almost overflowing dish; you’ll probably need to push down the tortillas to squash the spinach and get the final layer in. Season with salt and pepper.

Bake in the oven for 30 mins, then allow it to rest for 10 mins before cutting up and devouring. We did not eat anything else with it.