Cafe Rio recipes

So for my birthday we made Cafe Rio style salads - they were absolutely delicious. Tasted as good as the real thing. Mmmm.... Not claiming to have Cafe Rio's exact recipes by any means but after some tweaking around with different recipes these have seemed the best to us!

I'll try to start from the bottom up...

Tortillas - gotta have the uncooked kind, we get ours from Costco. Just throw them on the stove for a minute, I like mine barely cooked... but they taste so fresh! I know they sell them at Wal-Mart now too - near the cream cheese...

Rice - not a deal breaker but it's fun to make it a little fancy, Cafe Rio style too! I'm not sure exactly how A&B made the rice that night but here's one option:

4 cups water
2 cups white rice
4 tsp chicken bouillon
2 garlic gloves
1/2 onion, chopped
1 large lime
1/2 bunch cilantro, chopped fine

Chop onion, garlic, and cilantro small
Bring water and lime juice (make it 4 cups liquid total) with bouillon to a boil.
When it comes to a boil, add onion, garlic, cilantro and rice. Cover and cook 25 minutes, or as long as package calls for.

Beans - just a regular can of black beans

Meat - love, love, love the Cafe Rio Sweet Pork. Here's the way it was cooked that night and we've done it lots of times this way and always loved it!

3-4 lb. pork roast (boneless)

1 1/2 cup brown sugar
3 cups salsa (I like to mix some mild & medium)
6-8 oz Coke

Mix sugar and salsa, pour over pork. Cook in crock pot for 8 hrs. on low. (Can do it for 4 hours on high but better on low!) When done shred with two forks and return to juice in crock pot and allow liquid to absorb.

Seriously it's soooo good! This size roast makes enough to feed 6 ish people and still have some leftover. I like to freeze the leftovers and then enjoy the rest another day!

Lettuce - just any kind of lettuce, I like to cut it thin, kind of shredded style

Guac - my sister Taba makes the best guac... she's so good at it though she doesn't use a recipe so I will tell you what goes in it and try to guess at the proportions.

4-6 avocados
1/2 red onion, finely chopped
2 Roma tomatoes, seeded and diced
juice from 1/2 a lime, or more to taste
lots of salt - ground sea salt
a little pepper

Tab - did I miss anything? I'm not as good at it as she is but it's a critical part of the salad!

Pico - I got the idea to try making my own pico one day when I was making Cindy's amazing black bean salsa - I can NOT find the link to that right now but I'll keep looking and update it - but the point is when doing some of the steps I realized, hey, this could be pico.... so I looked up some pico recipes and then tried it! This is the one I used and then I just added a bunch of green onions to it and I didn't add the jalapeno because we had a lot of kids eating with us and wasn't sure how spicy it'd be and we aren't in love with hot hot stuff anyway.

8-10 Roma tomatoes (seeded)
1/2-1 red onion (to taste)
1 jalapeno pepper (or more to taste)
2 medium cloves garlic
juice of one lime
1 tablespoon olive oil
4 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
1 teaspoon coarse salt
1/2 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper

Seed and dice tomatoes. Chop onion, jalapeno and garlic to a fine consistency. To these ingredients, add the fresh cilantro, salt, pepper, olive oil and lime. Mix well.

Cover and refrigerate for at least 3 hours. Best if served the next day.

Dressing - this is the best version of homemade dressing I've had! Got this recipe from the Kentland's Cookbook, it's Diane Romney's recipe (my SIL's MIL, does that make sense?).

Rio Grande Creamy Cilantro Salad Dressing
3 fresh tomatillos, cut into quarters
1 pkg Ranch Buttermilk Dressing mix
1 cup mayonnaise
1/3 to 1/2 cup buttermilk
1 cup fresh cilantro
2 cloves crushed garlic
1/4 tsp crushed cayenne pepper

Combine all ingredients in a blender and refrigerate at least one hour.

I made this and the pico the night before last time I did this and they both tasted great that way! Also, I doubled the dressing recipe and then froze it in small portions to pull out for later use!

And ps, tomatillos look like funny green tomatoes with a crunchy wrapper on them and they are sticky and stinky (see to the left). But I washed them, cut them up and threw them in the blender and blended them first to make sure it looked normal and sure enough it did.

Cheese - if I'd thought of it I would've looked for some Cojita cheese like Cafe Rio uses but I didn't and we just used a shredded mexican blend and it worked great.

Tortilla strips - I love the crunchy tortilla strips on top but we just used regular tortilla chips which you can crumple up on top or use to eat as you go.

Garnishes - I like to add a handful of fresh cilantro on top and squeeze a lime wedge on the whole thing...

Sorry I don't have more pictures - boring! Oh well it's taken me forever to post these so I better just do it and not wait for pictures! :)