Supper Like the Good Ol' Days

We had some serious craving for Cafe Rio during the past little while. That was how we would splurge while we lived back in Utah: going out to eat at Cafe Rio and probably sharing a chicken salad. We live in Texas. While there's not much Cafe Rio presence, I expect we could probably find a TexMex place that would fit the bill nicely. Instead, however, we did some quick Googling and decided to try making our own.

We followed recipes from these two blogs:
favfamilyrecipes
hotoutoftheoven
The Cilantro-Lime vinaigrette was awesome (it's in the comments on the first blog).
I was amazed by the amount of garlic and cilantro that went into the production. We probably half a bulb (foot) of garlic and about half of the bunch of fresh cilantro. That was after cutting several of the recipes.
The chicken was wonderful too. The pico de gallo turned out okay (especially considering the fact that we used yellow onion instead of white). The beans were yummy. The rice was so-so, probably because we used a medium grain rice instead of long grain. I also improvised quite a bit.
If I were to judge the value of my time by minimum hourly wage, it would definitely have been cheaper to go to Cafe Rio (not considering travel costs). But I had a lot of fun putting everything together. On the other hand, it wouldn't be much more difficult or time consuming to make this for a dozen people than it was to make it for three. Then the economics would make a lot of sense. We'll have to set that up some time. It was pretty delicious. I'm looking forward to leftovers.

Caleb watched the ceiling fan while we enjoyed our dinner. He'll enjoy his portion, recycled, later on this evening.