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Recipe Review

This enchilada sauce from the Happy Herbivore Abroad cookbook was a big hit with my family! It was very flavourful yet mild enough for our children to enjoy it. When I was looking through the recipe, I wasn’t sure about adding cocoa powder because it seems like it should be more of a savoury spicy tomato sauce and I had only added cocoa powder to desserts before. However, I was surprised that it worked perfectly and and tasted like enchilada sauce I used to purchase in the US.

We are currently living in England (although we will be moving to Texas in a few weeks) so Mexican food is not very popular here. It is one of many things that my family and I really miss from when we lived in Arizona. We have lived in Arizona our whole lives before moving to England in 2021 so we ate Mexican food often growing up and it was in my regular rotation of meals to make.

At first, we struggled a bit to adjust with a lack of authentic ingredients available to even recreate the Mexican or Tex-Mex restaurant dishes we were craving. I have only found enchilada once in a grocery store here in the UK and it was quite expensive so I didn’t buy it. Also, it comes in a soda can so I must have walked past it a dozen times while grocery shopping and not even realized what it was.

When I tried this recipe I was amazed at how authentic it tasted. It was such a simple recipe but it brought me back to a more familiar place. I was so excited to finally be able to make homemade vegan enchilada sauce so I could start making some of my favorite Mexican dishes for dinner again.

To serve the enchilada sauce, I added a few spoonfuls to some refried beans and Mexican rice in a whole wheat tortilla and added some shredded lettuce. I then rolled up the burritos and warmed them up in a non-stick skillet. Once they were golden on each side, I plated the burritos and added a substantial amount of sauce to the top. Although, we kept adding more sauce to our burritos as we ate because it was so good. One of my children decided that it looks too spicy and that refried beans have a weird texture so I made them a toasted tortilla with peanut butter and bananas instead. Not the same at all but at least we were all having burritos for dinner.

Have you tried this recipe? If so, what did you think of it? Let us know in the comments below. 

Recipe Ratings:

Difficulty:  Super Easy

Did my kids like it? Yes, every kid that tried it, liked it. The kid that didn’t try it said “it looks spicy.”

Will I make it again? Yes

Overall: 5 out of 5 stars 

This recipe can be found on page 201 in Happy Herbivore Abroad: A Travelogue and Over 135 Fat-Free and Low-Fat Vegan Recipes from Around the World

For reviews of other recipes in this cookbook and an overall review, see: Happy Herbivore Abroad Cookbook Review