Cinco de Mayo

At least since taking Spanish in middle school, I've always celebrated Cinco de Mayo, through food. When it falls on weekends, I've gone out for Mexican with my parents (when I've been home), and this year I decided to try to cook the most authentic meal I could.

I'm still not at the point where I am making my own recipes, especially for ethnic stuff. But at least that maintains some of their authenticity, right? For our cinco de mayo feast we made Enchiladas verdes (which are probably my favorite Mexican food), stuffed peppers and flan! It was a lot of work, but it was delicious! Actually, the flan was the only thing that was particularly hard, but coordinating everything around that wasn't easy. I apparently am terrible at melting sugar and putting it evenly into custard cups. I'll post the recipes below, and just to note, we made 8 custard cups, which meant we needed a little extra sugar to spread over the bottoms. But I can do it now, at least. A better flan recipe is surely out there, but I liked this one because it was made to serve 4, my family of 4 even had leftovers (probably because a serving was what the recipe called half a serving). Unfortunately, I do not have the recipe for rice (my mom made it) used to stuff the peppers, but we basically stuffed peppers with Spanish rice and baked them with a little cheese on top (we wanted to keep them vegetarian and simple as to not overpower the enchiladas). I should have blanched the peppers ahead of time, but we didn't have any clean pans after making the flan and I just wanted to get them started.
Enchiladas- I (obviously) added cilantro to the green sauce. Apparently they were kind of spicy, I didn't really notice in taste, but they definitely cleared my sinuses. If you don't like spicy, back off on the peppers (or at least seed them, I didn't because I just chopped off the tops and threw them in the water. I thought it was the perfect level of spiciness, but hey, that's just me. I think my heat tolerance has increased a lot this year (it was pretty decent to begin with) from all the Asian/Indian food we eat out.
Flan-Like I said, there are definitely better recipes out there (and probably easier, if you make it in one dish, rather than individual ones), but this one served four.