A few words about Cojita cheese: crumbly, salty. It’s a perfect cheese for pairing with crab. It doesn’t melt and run all over the place like jack or cheddar. It tempers the spinach and onion flavors and enhances the seafood taste. It made the enchiladas shout crab without screaming.
Filling:
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Mix all four ingredients together in a bowl.
For the shells, I purchased a 20 pack of 6 inch corn tortillas. Most of the recipes that I read in preparation for cooking this dinner said to prepare the tortillas by soaking or at least wetting them in broth or enchilada sauce. Since I didn’t want to overpower the crab or add any heat to the dish. I settled for a cup of veggie broth. It was deep enough in the bowl to work with three or four tortillas at a time. Pull out a wet tortilla, place a handful of filling in the center, and roll it into a tube. Put the tube in your greased baking dish and repeat. After you’ve filled up the baking dish, pour a half cup of the broth over the enchiladas. They are going to be as much steamed as baked.
I used a shortcut on the sauce. Did you know that gravy is gravy because it has animal fat as a base? If you follow the recipe for white gravy but use butter instead it’s a bechamel. So if you purchase a white gravy mix that is vegetarian, you’ve got an instant white sauce. Add a quarter cup (or more) sour cream for each cup of sauce and you’ve got a fast and nearly foolproof sour cream sauce. You should have two and half cups of it. Distribute the sauce evenly over the uncooked enchiladas. You can stop here. Or you can carry on and decorate the top of the enchiladas with a quarter cup of Mexican-4-cheese, black olive slices, and chopped cilantro. (I had to omit the cilantro as Anne is averse to it.)
Cover the baking dish with foil (if it doesn’t have a top) and bake at 350°F for thirty minutes. Remove from the oven. Remove the foil. Let rest for five minutes. Serve.
