Sunday, July 25, 2010

Piña ChaiLada

PinaChaiLada1

Last night, we got together with the neighbors to do our seasonal progressive dinner. We each take turns doing either appetizers, dinner and desserts and rotate among our three houses, starting at around 7 PM and ending around midnight. It is a good way to catch up on the neighborhood gossip and sample everyone's good cooking. By the end of the night, we all regret not having worn elastic pants because we've stuffed ourselves silly.

For this progressive dinner, the assigned food theme of the evening was Pineapple. We all whipped up a variety of pineapple concoctions ranging from grilled pineapple to pineapple pie.

With this theme in mind, I worked on tweaking a tea recipe I had tried a month or so back, which had never made it to this blog until now. I adjusted a few ingredients and asked my neighbors to sample it. They gave it their seal of approval, so I'm finally able to post this nice, refreshing summery beverage recipe here today:


Piña ChaiLada

Ingredients:
1 cup water
2 Coconut Chai tea sachets ("Zhena's Gypsy Tea" brand)
3 Tbsp. Sugar
1/2 cup Pineapple Juice
1/2 cup Cream of Coconut (Either "Coco Re'al" or "Coco Lopez" Brand)
Pineapple Slices for garnish
Ice (I prefer crushed ice for easy blending)

CocChaiTea

CocChaiLadaIng

Boil water; add sugar and stir to dissolve. Add tea bags and allow tea to steep for 4-5 minutes. Fill Blender with ice. Pour tea mixture, pineapple juice and cream of coconut into blender and blend until smooth. Pour into glasses and add pineapple to garnish. If you want more pineapple flavor, you can also add chopped pineapple before blending.

Serves 2.