Guatemalan Basil Chimichurri on Chicken is a meal for friends that Jon Jakubowski discovered while doing missionary work.

“I’ve had chimichurri in Guatemala. Missy got this, originally off Pinterest,” he said about his wife finding the recipe. “This has some extra spice to it. Guatemalan food isn’t spicy. It’s surprisingly mild, versus Mexico.”

“Chimimurri is a common sauce for a lot of Guatemalan dishes. Missy is really good at figuring stuff out and we have found it to be really good on the chicken and steaks we like to grill.”

Jakubowski’s day job is the director of SmartSolve, a water-soluble paper products development company, but he is most well known in Wood County as the chairman of the Wood County Republican Party.

His family has close ties with Guatemala, where he discovered the favorite dish.

He and his wife Missy have four children and live in Bowling Green. They enjoy sharing this recipe when hosting family, friends and football players.

He attended Bowling Green State University and played on the football team for five year. He now mentors football players and often has the big eaters over to the house. The dish is a favorite for many team members.

“A lot of people love it. We have a lot of great taste-testers with the football team here all the time,” Jakubowski said.

Missy Jakubowski said that this chimichurri recipe should serve six to eight people, but it varies.

“It kind of depends on who’s eating it. Some people dump it on. It has a little bit of a kick to it and some like to really smother (the chicken) with it,” she said.

The couple tend to use more red pepper flakes when they don’t have guests, but Jakubowski said that in contrast to many Mexican dishes, Guatemalan meals do not typically have many hot spices.

“I put a bowl of the marinade by the grill. So while it’s grilling on one side, marinade is falling off. When I flip it, I dip it in the marinade again. I do a lot of rotations of the chicken while cooking,” he said.

He also recommends poking holes in the chicken to make the marinade really seep in.

Jakubowski first went to Guatemala as a missionary during high school, but has since been back more than 100 times, working with the non-profit he founded in 2008 called Champions in Action.

“The organization is a soccer camp that brings children from the most dangerous zones, the red zones, and pairs them with mentors that we hand pick from churches in those communities. So it is a high poverty, high violence and high fatherless community,” Jakubowski said. “Most of the kids have never left the city before, and then we introduce them to the Gospel.

“Hopefully, they can find light in a very dark place.”

He describes it as a five-star week-long camp with chartered buses and three meals a day with prime soccer fields where they are showed the love of Christ, which they can then take back to their neighborhoods.

“Missy and I, in 2008, our first year of marriage, was when it was founded. So it was a labor of love and sacrifice for us, as we were putting in the first pennies to get it off the ground,” Jakubowski said. “I had no idea what I was doing. I had never launched an organization before.”

Today, he is the chairman of the board, but not the owner of the 501(c)(3) organization which has sent 3,500 kids through the program.

Jakubowski met future brother-in-law Jose Mendez through the program. Mendez was one of the mentors.

“He was so good as a mentor that he was hired on to the staff. Then my sister met him through it and that’s what led to their getting married,” Jakubowski said.

To go with the chicken, Missy Jakubowski cooks fresh French bread, and to make it a complete and balanced meal includes vegetables such as broccoli, onions and asparagus cooked in tin foil on the grill. She just adds olive oil and garlic salt to season the vegetables.

“The secret is, when Missy puts on a basic level of garlic salt, but when I finish cooking it, I go back through and easily double or triple it,” Jakubowski says of the couple’s co-grilling method.