The Stovetop Enchiladas This New Mexican Grandma Has Been Making Her Whole Life

Most summer evenings in Taos, when the thunderclouds roll in over the mesa and darken the New Mexican big sky, Anita Rodríguez can be found in her spacious kitchen, assembling her favorite meal from a lifetime of being steeped in New Mexican cuisine: stovetop enchiladas. “As you age, your food tastes change and you can learn new recipes,” she says, “but my fallback is always New Mexican food.”

Along the walls are her paintings, striking landscapes of mountains and deserts, and the recurring motif of skeletons harkening back to Mexican folklore. Her house was built in the traditional adobe way—all white walls, flying vigas, and “zoquete” floors—and she and her daughter built it themselves. “The dome over the entryway is 35 years old,” she says, her mellifluous voice occasionally punctuated with her sage, sharp humor.

All her life, whether Rodríguez has been honing her craft as a builder, artist, or cook, she’s been a storyteller—and what a story she has to tell. In 2016, she published Coyota in the Kitchen: A Memoir of New and Old Mexico. A fusion of memoir and cookbook, the book uses stories of her colorful life lived on the mesa as the context for family recipes and other cooking techniques she learned while pursuing her passions across the Southwest and Mexico.

And just like the way enchiladas can be stuffed with just about any filling and still fashion that delightful unity of creamy cheese, reassuring corn tortilla, and the zing of chile, Anita Rodríguez’s life story is a testament to the New Mexican art of making do; that the old folkways of the region can be versatile containers for a vibrant life, even as Northern New Mexico increasingly faces the specter of tourism and gentrification, with home prices recently skyrocketing in the region.

She begins making her enchiladas by slicing twelve corn tortillas in half—a mechanical process evocative of her career in construction as an enjarradora, a female plasterer of adobe buildings. She learned her trade through the advice of Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, who experimented with adobe housing in the Middle East, as well as elder women in the Taos community who knew the ins and outs of the ancient indigenous technology. According to her book, these women knew “how to concoct a mud-plaster formula from any kind of soil” hidden in the area’s canyons and arroyos.

Next, she pulls out a supermarket pack of pre-grated sharp Cheddar and two eggs to set aside. Her book’s title, “coyota,” refers to a local derogatory name for a person of mixed-race ancestry, a term that she has sought to reclaim. Her mother, Grace King, was a white woman from Austin, Texas, who drove her Model T to Taos in 1941 to study art in a burgeoning artist colony still defined by a Wild West character. Her first night in the Taos Plaza, she observed a man stumble out of a bar and collapse, his belly slashed in a fight. The pharmacist, a Hispanic New Mexican, who helped carry off the victim to the town doctor, ended up becoming her husband. Anita was born later that year, but her mixed identity brought about conflict, as schoolyard bullies dismissed her with the loaded term, coyota. “I’m reclaiming it,” she says, “and taking control of it.”

Her prep complete, it’s time to bring out her main tool for this dish—a wok. While the wok isn’t authentic to New Mexican cuisine, Rodríguez assembles the enchiladas on it because the curved walls of the pan provide the ideal structure, she says, for the layering of the sliced tortillas around the wok’s circumference. 

She proceeds by arranging half of the tortillas along the wok’s walls into a ring, leaving a well in the middle for her red chile sauce. Made by combining water, powdered red chile, chicken stock, and garlic into a jar that she then shakes to dissolve, Rodríguez’s homemade sauce is the key to her dish. “There is no life if you don’t have red and green chile,” she says. “You will mentally deteriorate. You will begin to have nightmares and hallucinations. You try and get between a New Mexican and their chile—yeah, you’re a dead man.” After pouring the sauce into the well, she’ll let it simmer for a while, until the tortillas are soft.

During the high chile season every August, Rodríguez usually buys a bushel from the local supermarket, where the chiles are tumble-roasted at a kiosk in the parking lot, generating a tantalizing scent as the wire-mesh canister containing the chiles turns over a flame. At home, she freezes the chiles without peeling them, which will last her until winter. “I put in like six in a Ziploc and freeze it,” she says. “Then when I thaw them, that’s when they’re easiest to peel.”

Much like her chile-freezing technique, Rodríguez is fond of “life hacks.” For one, crockpots make cooking her frijoles much easier. “A crockpot is like having a wife,” she says. But she recalls the times when she cooked much more intensely in a communal style, assisting Navajo women on feast days. “Learning how to feed 50 people with no refrigeration,” she says—that’s “a different kind of on-your-feet experience.”

At the same time, cooking at that scale taught her that there’s also an intricate dance that can form among women who cook together. “There is something about the way women who know how to cook work together, something that flows with instantaneous, continuous understanding,” Rodríguez writes in her book. “Complicated recipes like tamales, chicos de horno, and mole, each with as many as thirty ingredients and many steps requiring many hands, were invented by groups of women all working in concert.”

But stovetop enchiladas are simple. After she sprinkles cheese over the ring of tortillas, she adds a second layer of tortillas on top, leaving the well of sauce open in the middle, before adding another layer of cheese atop the tortillas until she’s run out. With the layers fully assembled, her tortilla-cheese ring has circled this well of sauce in the pan, and the dish sizzles as the cheese melts and the sauce simmers and thickens.

Rodríguez’s practical riff on enchiladas reflects her belief in the New Mexican art of making-do, a communal approach to survival she believes has been threatened by modern Taos’s reliance on tourism. In the Wild West days of her youth, the central Taos Plaza was a vibrant place where the entire community, including indigenous Taos Pueblo residents, gathered. When they weren’t playing horseshoes, elderly Taoseños sat under the shade of lilac trees, children wandered and played, and three languages could be heard echoing along the arcades: English, Spanish, and native Tiwa. In her memory, the Plaza was a center for public life, playing host to both fiestas and hangings, and served as the economic lifeblood of the community. “You could buy anything on the plaza,” she says, including “fabric and meat and vegetables,” but today the area is dominated by gift shops hawking turquoise jewelry. “There’s nothing on the Plaza for native and Hispanic people,” she argues. 

Her work as a painter explores the legacy of the Spanish conquest of North America. Above her mantle is a triptych she painted featuring a saint hovering among the clouds—Our Lady of Remedies—one of the most popular Catholic saints in Latin America. “Her specialty is she heals the wounds of the conquest, which is the oldest wound on the continent and is still unhealed,” she says.

Wounds may be unhealed, but as she writes in her book, “in our world, life and death shake hands over food.” By now, the summer rain outside has subsided, and the Taos evening, with the blood-red mountain light bathing over the mesa, has begun. She cracks the eggs she’s set aside into the wok and cooks them to taste (she likes the yolks a little runny). 

When they’re finished, Rodríguez plates the enchiladas by scooping out the tortillas and sauce from the wok’s edge with a big spoon and delivering the portion into a large bowl, making sure that one of the eggs rests on each serving. She’ll serve the dish alongside a salad of butter lettuce and tomatoes tossed with her own dressing (featured in her cookbook)—an aromatic combination of olive oil and rice, raspberry, and balsamic vinegars, that also features herbal notes of garlic, basil, marjoram, thyme, and rosemary. 

All told, Rodríguez says her wok-based stovetop enchiladas are perfect “for the Chicana on the run.” Rodríguez has spent her life building up her community by crafting houses and cooking meals, and her rich cultural background comes together in a dish that embodies her practicality and faith in the power of the chile. As her spoon sinks into the decadent, cheesy tortilla, the Taos way of life is affirmed—it’s time to shake hands over the food. 

Anita Rodriguez’s Quick Stovetop Enchiladas

Serves 2

Ingredients

• 5 corn tortillas
• 2 cups water
• red chile powder to taste
• 1 teaspoon minced garlic
• 1 teaspoon powdered chicken stock
• 1 cup grated cheese of your choice
• 2 eggs

Equipment

• Pint jar with a tight top
• Wok

Directions

1. Put water, chile powder, garlic, and powdered stock in a jar and shake thoroughly.  
2. Pour mixture into a wok set over medium heat and let simmer for 5 minutes.  
3. Cut tortillas in half and arrange half of them on top of simmering sauce around the edge of the wok, leaving a space in the center. Sprinkle 1/2 of the cheese on top. Repeat with remaining tortillas, making 2 layers, letting them soften in the simmering sauce.  
4. When tortillas are tender, drop 2 eggs into the center of the wok where you have left a space and cook until desired consistency. I like the whites firm, but the yolks still soft.