A Caribbean Feast!

Every year starting on the memorial day weekend we take a week long beach trip with several of our closest friends. This tradition started when we all went on our post-high school graduation beach week trip way back when. We look forward to this trip all year long and have so much fun relaxing (and partying) by the sea!

One of the many traditions we started on this annual beach extravaganza is how we do dinners. Each night a couple cooks a meal for the whole house. We all rotate and then we each only have to cook once. We love doing this and in recent years have started adding signature cocktails to go along with the amazing dinners we have! This year Ryan and I decided to do Caribbean night and came up with what I thought was an outstanding meal.

We started with a salad of papaya and avocado. I cheated and used the canned papaya to make it easier, but it was just as good. I dressed it with a simple mixture of fresh orange, lemon and lime juice and soy sauce.

 

 My favorite part of the meal was the jerk chicken. I have an awesome recipe for jerk chicken, but that recipe will be remaining my little secret :-)

For the sides (and the main course for the vegetarians) I made coconut red beans and rice and glazed sweet potatoes. For the rice I started by sauteing garlic, red onion and a diced habanero pepper. I added in the rice and browned it slightly before adding in the coconut milk, vegetable broth brown sugar and red beans. I then let it simmer for about 20 minutes until all the liquid is absorbed.

For the sweet potatoes, I just cut them up and glazed them with a mixture of lime juice, honey and Caribbean spices.

 For our signature cocktail we made Rum Apple Punch which was such a hit I did not even get a picture!

This whole meal was pretty easy to make and everyone seemed to really like it! We threw on some tropical tunes and Ryan wore his Hawaiian shirt and we made it a party!

Briana enjoying a sweet potato (before throwing it at uncle Trey!)

Happy Eating!