Cheesy Chicken Enchiladas with Red Sauce

Are you ready for the best chicken enchiladas of your life? While you could use a rotisserie chicken for this cheesy enchilada recipe, poaching chicken breasts in a delicately flavored liquid both creates succulently tender meat (that won’t dry out as the casserole bakes) and adds another layer of flavor to the dish. The key to successful poaching is temperature control; you want to keep your poaching liquid from ever reaching a boil. In fact, you should aim to keep the water at a state of releasing wispy spouts of steam from the surface, but never bubbling, throughout the entirety of the cooking process. (It’s not nearly as intense/difficult as it seems.) You should also try to purchase chicken breasts that are roughly the same size so that they cook at the same rate. While the total prep time on this recipe isn’t exactly what you might consider “speedy,” it’s a fun dish to prepare and assemble with another helper in the kitchen. Prep a pan (or two, so you have one for the freezer!) on Sunday to enjoy heading into a new week. Featuring smoky ancho chili powder and some of the poaching liquid, the homemade enchilada sauce is another distinguishing delight of this dish; however, if you’re looking to shave time off of the recipe, you can substitute store-bought sauce. And if you opt to use rotisserie or leftover chicken as a shortcut, but still want to make your sauce from scratch, simply substitute water and/or chicken stock for the liquid called for.