Quesadilla Pie

I am a huge fan of one dish meals. I love getting everything I need nutritionally and tastitionally in one bite. You can then imagine my huge disappointment when I screw up a one dish meal and it becomes a two dish meal. Oh well. Mike did remind me that he was quite capable of putting a bite of each onto one forkful and then it becomes one. He is so logical. It was still two dishes for me. I got this recipe from Simply Recipes, one of my favorite blogs. Another thing I love about this dish is that the instructions are easy and there are little to no measurements increasing the creativity. So here's the deal, anything you can imagine would be quesadilla-ish, goes into it. The original blog has more options, I'll just tell you what I did (and how I would change it).


Ingredients

4 lg tortillas (about the size of the pie dish you're using)
butter
grated cheese
(those are the basics - gotta have them)

shredded chicken - cooked
tomatoes
garlic
onions
shallots
red pepper
pablano pepper
cooked black beans
olive oil
cumin
sour cream


Preheat your oven to 350F. Butter the bottom of your pie dish.

Hint: I used a fairly shallow pie dish and didn't get as many layers as I wanted. If you have a deep one, I would use it.

Saute the garlic, onions, and shallots until soft. I got a little garlic happy and used 3 cloves. I wont do that again. Two at most. Add in both peppers so they are warm but still a little crispy. (Again, I don't know if this makes a difference, but it felt right).

Cook your chicken and then shred it. This is really only a texture thing. I went through many different thoughts about how to create the dish, so I diced the chicken, cooked it, thought I wanted a different texture than diced and consequently took a knife and chopped it to pieces so as to appear shredded. Still tasted like chicken.

You are essentially creating layers out of what you make. I did it in whatever order I wanted, so I assume you can do the same. You start with a tortilla and then load on what you want. I started with the chicken and sauted mixture, put on some cheese and top with a tortilla. I then did a layer of tomatoes and another of the chicken mixture. It is at this point that I fogot the black beans and there was no way to incorporate them as much as I tried. Hence, two dishes. I topped off the last tortilla with a little bit of cheese. Somewhere in the process add the cumin to taste.

Put aluminum foil over the top and bake in over for 30ish minutes. Then take off the foil and bake for another 15 at 400F. Garnish with a bit of sour cream (and black beans...).

If I were to make this dish again, I would use more seasoning, less garlic, and hotter ingredients like jalepenos. Otherwise it was delicious.