These vegetarian enchiladas are a hearty and satisfying dinner. Make them on a weeknight and you’ll enjoy leftovers for lunch the next day. Or make it on the weekend and invite friends over to make a party out of it! You could make a double batch and freeze the extras—you’ll find freezing instructions below.

You’ll love the fresh filling in these enchiladas, made of sautéed bell pepper, broccoli, onion, spinach, black beans and warming spices. These enchiladas are nicely cheesy, but not overwhelmingly cheesy like many restaurants make them.

This enchilada recipe has become quite popular since I published it nearly eight years ago. I used my spinach artichoke enchiladas as a blueprint and covered them with my go-to homemade enchilada sauce, of course. They’re just fantastic and I hope you’ll give them a try, if you haven’t already.

If you’ve never made enchiladas before, you can do it! You’ll find a detailed recipe, step-by-step photos, and an instructional video below.

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These red and green enchiladas are inspired by my trips to Santa Fe, New Mexico! I love visiting Santa Fe for my fill of saucy burritos, enchiladas and breakfast dishes. Whenever the server asks if I want red sauce, green sauce or both, the answer is always both. They call it Christmas-style or divorciadas (divorced).

Coming to you just in time for Christmas or Christmas Eve dinner, these enchiladas are a festive and delicious main dish. They’re stuffed with vibrant vegetables, spinach, black beans, and enough cheese to qualify as a holiday meal.

I’ve been keeping this recipe on reserve for the holidays, and I just now realized that I poured the enchilada sauce in the wrong fashion. In Santa Fe, they split the sauce down the middle of the enchiladas, so each enchilada features both red and green sauce. Although, my way may be a little easier to distribute (and you can always just eat two enchiladas to get one of each)!

Do as you wish—the ingredients and quantities will remain the same. You’ll find side dish suggestions to round out your meal below. Wishing you a healthy and happy holiday season!

Watch How to Make Christmas Enchiladas

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Fellow enchilada enthusiasts, I’m so pleased to introduce this green enchilada sauce. This recipe is inspired by the green chili sauces I’ve enjoyed on recent trips to New Mexico. While the real-deal sauces often feature elusive New Mexican chili peppers, this flavorful sauce is easy to make with basic grocery store ingredients. It’s a pretty ideal alternative.

Try this green enchilada sauce in place of red enchilada sauce the next time you make your favorite enchilada recipe.

To make this recipe, I experimented with combinations of readily available chili peppers, tomatillos, broth, and flour with disappointing results. Finally, I found a great shortcut that yields the best flavor, thanks to a tip from Rick Bayless. This green enchilada sauce recipe takes advantage of store-bought salsa verde! And yet, the end result tastes much nicer than store-bought enchilada sauce.

This green enchilada sauce requires only three basic ingredients—salsa verde, sour cream and cilantro. I love how simple it is to make, especially since enchiladas are always a project. This recipe is gluten free, too, if that is a consideration for you. Let’s make some.

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Quick! I’m sharing these enchiladas with you as a suggestion for a post-Thanksgiving meal this weekend (don’t forget, I have lots of vegetarian Thanksgiving options here).

The enchiladas are stuffed with creamy, hearty sweet potato, plus black beans, feta cheese, and spices. The sauce is super easy—just grab some mild salsa verde at the store. Or, you can go the extra mile and make your own.

Most restaurant enchiladas are so cheesy that I leave with a belly ache, but not these. They are delicious, satisfying and leftovers taste even better the next day. If you want to make a vegetarian dinner and hear, “I don’t even miss the meat,” these enchiladas are for you.

This recipe is actually one that I shared back in 2011, but it was missing some key instructions, like how to roast the sweet potato. So, I revisited it and tweaked it a bit, and they’re better than ever.

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It’s about time you met the vegetarian option at my family’s Thanksgiving—enchilada casserole! When I stopped eating meat several years ago, my mom was totally flummoxed on how to feed me. Granted, I was already a full-grown adult at this point, but she’s my mom and she likes to make sure I’m well fed.

Mom has a small repertoire of go-to recipes, and while we were growing up, Mexican “lasagna” was one of them. I always refused to eat it because I didn’t like ground beef (picky little Kate strikes again).

When I came across this recipe for a stacked enchilada casserole full of roasted vegetables and spinach, I sent it her way. It was a hit with the whole family, and so it joined her repertoire of recipes. She makes it (or just the roasted vegetables) for Christmas and birthdays, too.

Of course, I couldn’t help but tinker with the original recipe. I simplified the veggies a bit and divided them across two pans for maximum caramelization. Then I added some black beans for protein, and discovered that Monterey Jack produces an infinitely better end result than cheddar does.

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I’ve been working on my enchilada game lately, for both the cookbook and an upcoming enchilada recipe. There is an art to making great enchiladas, and the sauce is a key component.

I thought I’d share my tested and perfected enchilada sauce recipe today, in case you want to try it on your favorite enchilada recipe. It’s ready in under ten minutes, and I promise, it’s so tasty you won’t want to go back to the store-bought kind again.

When I developed my go-to sauce (first seen on my spinach artichoke enchiladas), I tried at least five of the top sauce recipes on Google, all with different ingredients and techniques.

I tried making sauce with tomato sauce, which tasted too raw and was kind of goopy. I tried making sauce with blended diced tomatoes, and it had the same issues. I tried sauce without any tomato ingredients, and it didn’t taste quite like the enchilada sauce I grew up eating, or the sauce at my favorite Mexican restaurants. I tried sauces made without any thickener (like flour or cornstarch), and they pooled at the bottom and turned my enchiladas into a soupy, texture-less casserole.

Finally, after some experimentation and cross-referencing with America’s Test Kitchen, I landed on the perfect enchilada sauce. Vegetable broth forms the base of the sauce, but it’s only added after you make a simple roux of flour and oil. You need a full three tablespoons of each to properly thicken the sauce. I tried making this sauce with a gluten-free flour blend and that worked great as well.

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I’m on a spinach and artichoke kick. I blame the new bar in town that offers an exceptionally tasty spinach-artichoke dip. Tessa and I order it almost every time we meet for happy hour and I daydream about it in between our weekly sessions. It’s more spinach-y than cheesy (how do they pack so much spinach in there?) and has passed for dinner more than once. I can’t get enough of the combination and Tessa can’t either, apparently!

I caught a mention of spinach-artichoke enchiladas on a menu in Austin and didn’t get a chance to try them, so here we are with my homemade version. I based them off memories of the enchiladas my mom makes at home. She is not one to change it up, so her enchiladas consistently feature green chilis, sour cream, flour tortillas and store-bought red sauce. Oh and cheese on top, of course.

I made sure to incorporate all of the above into these lightened-up vegetarian enchiladas, but took it upon myself to create a healthier from-scratch red sauce. I tried spice-based sauce first, followed by tomato-based sauce and finally settled somewhere in between. My recipe is made with common dried spices, tomato paste for some umami-rich tomato flavor, vegetable broth as base and flour to thicken it up.

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I came home from my five-day Oklahoma holiday craving vegetables, but I arrived to find an empty refrigerator. That night, I made do with some sorry-looking avocado smashed on toast from last week’s photo shoot.

When I got back to town, developing this enchilada recipe was a high priority. While I usually try to incorporate the freshest seasonal produce available, I wanted to create a simple enchilada recipe that could be enjoyed year-round.

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I don’t know where to begin with these enchiladas, so I will say this: holy smokes, they are good. Stuffed with scrambled eggs, sautéed portobello mushrooms and roasted red pepper, and smothered in a spicy, smoky homemade roasted poblano sauce with a hint of cinnamon—they’re better than good. These enchiladas are truly incredible.

Like huevos rancheros, egg enchiladas great any time of day: breakfast, brunch, lunch, or dinner. The enchiladas do require some forethought, time and effort, but they are worth it tenfold. I highly suggest making them for brunch, say, tomorrow!

These enchiladas were inspired by one of our stops during the Cleveland food tour last month. That Saturday, we ate breakfast in a warm, cozy café called Lucky’s. It’s nestled in Tremont, an eclectic old neighborhood in Cleveland that’s full of great restaurants and art galleries. I had heard Lucky’s had been on The Food Channel’s Diner’s, Drive-Ins and Dives, but that didn’t mean much because I don’t watch TV (I’ve never seen the show). I knew Lucky’s was going to be good when I saw their garden beside the building. It’s built behind the cute patio in raised beds that are handicap accessible for volunteers.

After sitting down and drooling over the menu, the owner, Heather, stopped by our table and shared a bit of her background and her philosophy with us. Part of her mission statement is to “offer our customers an alternative to the mass produced by committing our passion for the craft to creating good wholesome food.” Outrageously good, wholesome food is what we got.

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