Ok, so I know that my blog is titled “baking adventures”, and the last few posts, including this one, have been about healthy dinners. However, they are all dinners that were BAKED in the oven, so it counts, right? Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to bake a lot of pretty desserts lately. Between work and my side hustles, it’s all I can do to find time to make healthy dinners and blog about them. But we’ll all adjust, right?!

So apparently I’ve been on an enchilada kick lately. I was searching for low carb chicken dishes online and came across one for low carb chicken enchiladas. I was very puzzled by this for obvious reasons, but figured it was worth a look. The secret ingredient? Cabbage! I can feel a few of you rolling your eyes at me right now, but hang in there. Have any of you been to P.F. Chang’s? If you have, chances are you’ve had the lettuce wraps, and you loved them. This is the same concept except you bake the rolls after assembling.

So if you look at the recipe, it’s pretty simple. I didn’t have time to go to the store before I made these so I substituted Salsa Verde for the green chiles. I’m no expert at enchiladas, but this worked perfectly, taste-wise. However, I made the mistake of not letting the chicken broth come to a boil before I dumped the sour cream and salsa verde in. This caused the sour cream to form little lumps instead of dissolving completely. Oops. It didn’t affect the taste, but you can see further down that the texture/appearance was a little lumpy.

I also added a handful of cilantro into the chicken mixture. I had some left over from another meal and figured it shouldn’t go to waste. I’m one of those people who will put cilantro on any Mexican dish and be insanely happy.

Now, on to the wrap itself. The instructions warn you to be careful when peeling the cabbage so that you don’t tear the leaves. It recommends that you run the head of cabbage under warm water while you peel it to prevent tearing. Yeah, this didn’t help much. It might be the shape of this particular cabbage that was working against me. The one I grabbed from the store was kind of small and flat, so the leaves wrapped all of the way around to the stem again and spanned the whole width of the head. It was very difficult to get the leaves unwrapped without tearing them. I successfully pulled off 8 leaves with minor ripping, boiled them for a few minutes, and then laid them out to dry.

*Tip: If you poached your chicken on the stop-top before shredding it, keep this water to boil your cabbage leaves in. It’s already hot, and totally fine if you want the leaves to taste like chicken!

After letting the cabbage leaves dry for about 10 minutes, I got to the business of stuffing and rolling them.

Next you simply fold over the edges of cabbage leaves until you have a neatly wrapped enchilada! The fact that my leaves tore a little was fine because it gave me little sections to layer on top of each other when sealing. Lay the wraps in your baking dish and top with the remaining sauce and shredded cheese.

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Then you bake and wait for the magic to happen. I just ate lunch, but I’m starting to get hungry again typing this.

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I let these cool for a few minutes after pulling them out of the oven. It’s difficult to tell from this picture, but the cabbage leaves held up really well while baking! The edges that didn’t get coated in sauce crisped up. When I cut into them, the cabbage was tender but not mushy. At a few points, me and my steak knife were wrestling with the cabbage to get it to separate. But I’d rather have that problem than it be a slimy mess.

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I’m salivating just looking at these again. The flavors inside were intense and delicious, and the sauce has just the right amount of kick to it to really allow you to enjoy this dish as if it were a regular enchilada. I was not disappointed and I will definitely be making this again! -Jen