With a little more time to cook on a Saturday, we decided to make Real Simple’s Enchiladas with Mushrooms, Beans and Cheese, with some of our own creative and special twists. Kim tells how it went:

I love mushrooms and poblano peppers and when I saw this recipe in the December 2014 issue of Real Simple, I knew I wanted to make it. I was not disappointed!

In reading the recipe, I noticed that it used a can of red chili enchilada sauce, but I thought I could probably make my own. Some Internet sleuthing turned up a tasty-sounding and  easy recipe by Emeril Lagasse called . I decided to go for it.

I started by making the enchilada sauce and decided to cut in half because that was all I needed. I’ll put it right out there—I’m sorry I did. The sauce was so tasty, I wish I had made the whole recipe and saved half for another round of enchiladas. Lesson learned. I followed the directions exactly (they worked perfectly), with one modification that I would definitely recommend. Rather than using just regular chili powder, I used a mix of half regular chili powder and half ancho chili powder. It was a wonderful change that made the sauce somewhat smoky and gave it a real depth of flavor. I absolutely agree with the statement in the directions that the sauce smooths out. I felt it tasted even better after it cooled a bit and sat as I was assembling the enchiladas.

With the sauce done, I then began making the enchiladas, first starting with the prepping of the onions, poblanos and mushrooms; grating the cheese; and draining and rinsing the black beans. The minimum order for poblanos on Fresh Direct was two so I used two in this dish and it worked out just fine. (They were on the small to medium side and not very spicy.) I then got to sautéing the onions and poblanos and the apartment was already starting to smell great when combined with the nice, smoky enchilada sauce I had made. I added the mushrooms and they browned in about five minutes, just as the recipe indicated. I opted then to add the black beans but not half the cheese as the recipe suggested as I thought it might make a big sticky mess in my pan!

As suggested, I put a layer of the delicious enchilada sauce at the bottom of the casserole dish. I then turned to warming the tortillas in a small skillet on medium low heat in a little olive oil. This is highly recommended as it makes it much easier to roll them up. I added the filling to the tortilla and then sprinkled a little cheese inside and gently placed it in the casserole dish. I had a bit of extra filling left so I just sprinkled it around—which worked out just great! I topped with the rest of the enchilada sauce (again, wondering why I didn’t make more!) and the remaining cheese. Into the oven it went, leaving time for quick clean-up of the kitchen.

Out of the oven it came, bubbly and gooey as expected. Since we didn’t have cilantro, I topped it with sliced scallions.

We loved the combination of the mushrooms, poblanos, and beans. I loved that there was a nice amount of cheese but it wasn’t overwhelming. After the ease of making my own enchilada sauce, I would never consider buying canned. Finally, we loved that we could get four servings out of this—it’s made for excellent lunches this week!