Opening Day With Help From The Bench!

This week while my girl’s team teammate was off enjoying the warm sun and beautiful sights of the Caribbean, I was lucky enough to recruit Corey to help "Make it Happen This Monday"!

Monday also happened to be the Opening Day of the baseball season! 

(Sort of a big deal at our house) ; ) 

So we decided to try and create a popular dish served at AT&T Park. 

The Orlando Cepeda Cha Cha Bowl! 

(which coincidentally is a Caribbean dish)

Neither of us had actually tried a Cha Cha bowl at the park, preferring the more traditional baseball park food. But we had heard many people rave about these and thought it would be more of a challenge than hot dogs or garlic fries.

The Cha Cha bowl is a Caribbean dish that consists of rice, beans, jerk chicken, and a really tasty carrot and zucchini slaw. The dressing on the slaw is a combination of crushed pineapple, rice wine vinegar, olive oil, fresh limejuice, salt and pepper. We found this simple recipe on this blog.

As usual the majority of the work was in the preparation and we put our julienne peeler to use again this week. 

It was perfect for the slaw.

Corey being a master rice maker, of course took on the job of making the rice.

The rice is the base of your cha cha bowl.

Meanwhile, I heated up some Cuban spiced black beans.

We also shredded a rotisserie chicken, tossed it with some jerk seasoning and heated this mixture up.

Then it was time to toss the slaw with the dressing and a little cilantro. We assembled our bowls

and topped them off with cojito cheese.

These Cha Cha bowls were pretty delicious! The flavor combination was not something we would have usually tried. They were also quite filling! We talked about trying an authentic Cha Cha bowl the next time we are at a Giants game. I don’t know though, to some of us there is nothing better than a hot dog when you are at a game!

We rounded out our celebration of the beginning of baseball season with some other San Francisco treats, Gordon Biersch beer and a little Ghirardelli chocolate for dessert.

Thanks Corey for coming off the bench/couch and making this work this week!

 I wonder what inspiration my girls team partner will bring back with her this time?

Go Giants!