6 pts per serving

Serves 4 / Featuring yogurt in the chicken coating and dipping sauce, this Indian-spiced dinner dish offers a good dose of calcium. Prep tip: Increase heat by adjusting spice amounts to taste. Serving tip: Great with brown rice.

Freezer Chicken Enchiladas

Preparing enchiladas can be a multi-hour, labor-intensive endeavor. There’s the sauce to prep and the filling to cook, and finally, all the rolling. We wanted to find a way to streamline chicken enchiladas and make them freezable so that they could be prepared well ahead of time and stored at the ready. Here’s what we discovered:

Test Kitchen Discoveries

• Freeze the rolled enchiladas and sauce separately; otherwise they will turn into a mushy mess.
• Spray the tortillas with vegetable oil cooking spray and briefly heat them in the oven to make them pliant enough to roll easily.
• Bake the enchiladas while still frozen. We found that defrosting them actually leads to a dried-out texture once baked.
• Partially bake the enchiladas “naked,” or without sauce. A light coat of vegetable oil spray will keep the tortillas from drying out too much.
• For authentic flavor, puree and “fry” the sauce until the flavor and color has intensified. Most Mexican sauces are prepared in this fashion.
• Smoky chipotle chiles add both heat and a rich flavor to the sauce. These chiles, which are smoked jalapeños, come packed in a tomato-based adobo sauce. They are found in the Mexican foods section of most supermarkets.

Use leftover cooked chicken or a store-bought rotisserie chicken in this recipe. Note that you won’t need 1 1/2 cups of the cheese until you bake the enchiladas. Serve with avocado, pickled jalapeños, shredded lettuce, and/or sour cream.

This Indian dish, featured for “International Favorites” week, is a winner. Add a half teaspoon of ground red pepper to the mix for a spicier flavor.
Level of Difficulty: Easy
POINTS® Value: 3

To crush the corn flakes, place them inside a plastic bag and use a rolling pin to break them into pieces no smaller than 1/2 inch.

Want to serve Oven-Fried Chicken after work? Marinate the chicken in the buttermilk mixture and combine the dry ingredients in a zipper-lock bag (all but the oil) the night before or in the morning before heading out. When you come home, all you’ll have to do is heat the oven, toss the crumb mixture with oil, coat the chicken, and bake.