Casa Mamita Chicken & Cheese Enchiladas
Glance through any Mexican restaurant’s menu and you’ll spot classics such as burritos, tacos, tamales, fajitas, quesadillas, and nachos. You practically can’t go wrong ordering anything off the menu. My husband likes chimichangas. I like to order street tacos specifically from one of our local restaurants. One of my daughters loves nachos.
Another common item on the menu is enchiladas. This dish consisting of corn tortillas with some type of filling topped with a sauce is easy to make at home, but it can also be fun to order enchiladas at a restaurant. In my childhood hometown, I remember one local restaurant served a dish that featured three enchiladas with one covered in salsa verde, one covered in white queso, and one covered in red sauce, as a nod to the Mexican flag.
Besides making your own enchiladas or buying them from a restaurant, for a limited time, you can get ready made enchiladas at Aldi. The weekly ad recently featured a giant box full of frozen enchiladas with enough to serve the whole family. The box reminded me of large family size frozen lasagnas I sometimes get from Aldi, except instead of Italian food, this features Mexican food.
Casa Mamita Family Size Chicken & Cheese Enchiladas cost $14.79 at the time of publication for a 57-ounce package. The package describes this as “corn tortillas filled with a blend of chicken and vegetables with seasoned rice, beans, and peppers topped with a blend of cheese.”
This is an Aldi Find, so it’s only in stores for a limited time. Each store receives one shipment, and after that sells out, they’re gone unless Aldi decides to bring them back later, if ever. If it isn’t in stock at your local store, you can’t order it online from Aldi.
If you’re watching out for allergens, this contains milk.
The rest of the ingredients include parboiled rice, tortillas, cooked chicken, various cheeses, diced green chiles, green salsa, sour cream, onion, chicken base, cilantro, rice bran oil, serrano pepper, garlic powder, salt, cornstarch, cumin and onion powder. Some of those components do contain processed ingredients such as natural flavoring and gums, as well as anticaking agents and mold inhibitors in the cheese (which are common in any shredded cheese you buy at grocery stores).
One box contains about eight servings. One serving (201 grams) has 280 calories, 11 grams of total fat (14% DV), 5 grams of saturated fat (25% DV), 570 mg of sodium (25% DV), 28 grams of total carbohydrates (10% DV), 3 grams of total sugars, no added sugar, and 16 grams of protein.
The back of the box has baking instructions. Preheat a conventional oven to 400 degrees. Cook the enchiladas from frozen. Remove the lid, bend the lid slightly, and then place the lid back over the tray so it is elevated over the enchiladas. Place the tray on a baking sheet on the center rack in the oven. Bake for 75 minutes. Remove the aluminum lid and continue baking for an additional 5 minutes or until the product reaches an internal temperature of 165 degrees. Carefully remove the tray from the oven. Let stand for 5 minutes before serving.
These baked up exactly as the directions indicated, and the house also started to smell delicious after these had been in the oven for about 10 or 15 minutes. We didn’t have any cold spots in the middle after baking this for the recommended amount of time (which is a problem I sometimes have with other large frozen dinners like this, such as when I cook frozen lasagna). This is one of those meals that requires a little planning because it takes a long time to cook in the oven, so you can’t start dinner at the last minute. However, once you pop it in the oven, you can do other things while dinner bakes. Maybe spend some of that time mixing up some fresh guacamole to serve on the side?
These were what I expected, with tender corn tortillas filled with diced chicken and green chiles. They’re not topped with a sauce like many enchiladas are. Instead, they have melted cheese. My family thought the chicken in these was a little on the dry side, but otherwise they are decent. One of our teen taste testers declared them “amazing.” I liked that the tray these enchiladas baked in had rice on the bottom, so it felt more like a complete meal. These have a very mild amount of spice, but I wouldn’t necessarily call them spicy.
These are a nice option if you want an easy Mexican dinner that can serve the whole family. Serve them with some chips with salsa and guacamole for dipping!
The Verdict:
Casa Mamita Family Size Chicken & Cheese Enchiladas feature tender corn tortillas filled with diced chicken, along with rice, green chiles, cheese, and seasonings. They’re not very spicy. We thought the chicken was a little on the dry side, and it might have been good if these had more sauce instead of just melted cheese. If you like enchiladas, though, these are not bad. They make a nice Mexican meal that can feed several people. Don’t forget to pick up some chips and salsa to serve on the side.
Tried this as an easy meal for my family. First off, no way would this feed 8 as it stays on the box. I really wanted to like this.
It was too mushy. Texture was bad. As post stated, not much flavor. Definitely needed more sauce. Overall, I cannot recommend this dish and it is in no way a decent value at $15.
My family did not enjoy this at all. I thought it was terrible. The texture was the worst part. That says alot because it also looks awful. The chicken was like ground mush. The whole thing was mush. What a let down. For the price I thought it would be much better
I agree with the comments I’m an enchilada maker come from a family of them as well and I was so disappointed the small package I purchased to just taste them in the five minutes directed from frozen to microwave. Left the corn tortilla like mush as opposed to the picture where you see shredded white meat chicken. I don’t know what these were filled with, but it looked like ground up mush. I never saw any chicken. I never tasted any chicken. There wasn’t much cheese on them either. I definitely would not buy these again.