Hawai'i Cuisine: Wrapping Up

Quite unexpectedly, I find myself out of options in Hawai'i Cuisine. It's a fairly small book to begin with, containing only five or six recipes per chapter, and when I omit the recipes for raw fish (I don't trust what's available here), and the recipes that include ingredients that are not easily accessible (ti leaves, entire ducks, veal shank) I seem to have covered most of it. There is a beef stew recipe, but I can't bring myself to make it in this heat. I'm generally not wild about stews anyway, so I'm not itching to make this one. Looking back, I realize that none of the recipes in the book involve Spam. Bummer.

This book was fun, despite its technical problems. Many recipes had little (and sometimes big) glitches that make me think the book was not well tested. Despite the problems, most of the food was good, and the dishes that I loved, I REALLY loved. Standouts were the Sweet and Sour Pork, the Moloka'i Shrimp Spinach Salad, and the Oriental Lamb Chops. The only thing I couldn't eat was that crusted ono. If I were ever in Chef Choy's restaurant, I would order this, just to see what it's supposed to taste like. I have a hunch that the epic failure I served was the result of a poorly written recipe, not a bad concept.

I say this book is a keeper. I don't see it as a book I'll cook from frequently, but there are a few recipes that I'll happily make again when I'm tired of the same old flavors. The Chinese food is awful where I live, so that Sweet and Sour Pork alone earns Hawai'i Cuisine a permanent spot on my shelf. Huzzah!

Hawai'i Cuisine: Shrimp Curry with Coconut Milk and Sugar Snap Peas

Shrimp Curry with Coconut Milk and Sugar Snap Peas (pg 77) was rich. Too rich. As in, it made me feel sick once the food had a few minutes to settle in my belly. With lots of heavy cream, a bit of coconut milk, and a good amount of butter and oil, it wasn't really a surprise, but it was an unpleasant side effect.

I always think of curries as packing a lot of flavor. This one didn't, even though I doubled the curry powder. Maybe all that cream washed it out. The only spices are curry powder, fresh ginger, salt, pepper, and sugar. Chef Choy sure does like to use sugar in savory dishes. I've never cooked so many dinners that involved sugar before.

One problem in the instructions is that he has you make a roux. He says to stir the flour in the melted butter for five minutes. Unless I was supposed to turn the heat way down, which he did not say to do, I don't see how this is possible. After a minute and a half, mine was dark brown and started to smell burned. I suspect that the "stir for five minutes" instruction should have followed the next step, which was to add the fluids and stir constantly until smooth and thick. It was a lot of fluid, and it took about five minutes to cook down. 

Conclusion: Just okay. For me, this one was pretty unmemorable, apart from the discomfort. I can't decide whether to call it Charlie Approved or not. My strange little man enjoyed the sauce straight from the wooden spoon I'd used for stirring, but wanted nothing to do with it once I dared mix it into his rice, nor would he touch the shrimp or peas.

Proof!

So picky! I guess I won't label it as Charlie Approved since he didn't really eat anything of substance. Grrr. What a noodge. At least he's a cute noodge.

A Few Good Ones

I've been too busy jumping in circles at the news that I'm moving to Naples to stop and blog. My calves will look awesome by the time I calm down. I've managed to stand still long enough to cook a few things, so I'll play a quick catch-up now.

Sam Choy's Southpoint Chowder (pg 16 of Hawai'i Cuisine) was everything you'd want a seafood chowder to be: creamy, stuffed with critters (mussels, tilapia, shrimp, scallops, and bacon), and with the right amount of starch--in this case, white potato, sweet potato, and corn--to get just a bit with every bite of fish. This chowder perfectly balanced the sweet flavors with the fishy.

Conclusion: Loved it. Simple to make (since I used store-bought fish stock, instead of making my own), delicious, and filling. Oh, and it's Charlie-approved. For unknown reasons, he now refuses to eat shrimp, which he used to inhale, but through this dish, we discovered that he likes bay scallops. Score!

Sweet and Sour Pineapple Pork (pg 48) blew every Chinese take-out version of this clear out of the water. The difference is that, although it's sweet, it's not just sweet. I never taste a sour element when I order this. Homemade, it was sweet, sour, fruity, a touch spicy, and ginger and garlic lurked in background. Also, the pork was rolled in corn starch instead of being drowned in batter, which made it crisp and meaty, rather than doughy.

I used many dishes and it took a lot of prep work, but it was well worth the effort. I marinated, then deep fried the pork. While the pork marinated, I made sweet and sour sauce with a whole hodge-podge of ingredients. I knew vinegar and pineapple juice would be used, but there were several ingredients that surprised me, including ketchup, orange marmalade, and hot sauce. Wacky. Something tells me this is not a traditional Chinese dish, despite it's popularity in the States. Ha! I added the sauce and the pork to sauteed vegetables, and had found my new favorite way to cure a Chinese food craving.

Conclusion: Loved it. I'll never order sweet and sour pork again.

My friend and I made plans for Saturday to watch Jane Eyre and whine about how much we hate Corpus Christi (despite my exciting next home, I still have to suffer another year here, and my friend will be here even longer. Blah.) Cheesecake Brownies (pg 195 of Ready For Dessert) seemed like a perfectly self-indulgent, woe-is-me kind of treat. They're exactly what they sound like: brownies topped with cheesecake.

A little bit of this brownie goes a looong way.

At room temperature or slightly cool, I would prefer to either have a brownie or cheesecake. The flavors and textures didn't really seem to gel. However, yesterday I froze the remaining brownies for some future dessert, per Lebovitz's suggestion. That future dessert came a few hours later, when I ate one straight from the freezer. The brownie and the cheesecake had frozen to the same chewy consistency. Fresh, the cheesecake was kind of light and airy, and didn't really stand up to the dense brownie. Frozen, they were equals.

Conclusion: Liked it.

Hawai'i Cuisine: Chicken Salad Chinese-Style with "Dabest" Sauce

I love those wacky Hawaiians and their "da"s. I also love Sam Choy and his salads. Now, I'm not a salad girl, but he makes salads just the way I like them, with everything he can think of thrown into one bowl. Chicken Salad Chinese-Style with "Dabest" Sauce (pg 22) was another winner.

The salad is a crunchy mix of lettuce, napa cabbage, cucumber, celery, green pepper, carrots, chicken, shrimp, and fried wonton strips. The sauce is made up of sugar (big surprise), rice vinegar, oil, ginger, soy sauce, sesame seeds, and green onions.

There is so much going on in this bowl that my mouth didn't get bored, which is always the danger I face when eating salads. My only complaint is that the shrimp would have been better if they were sauteed in garlic, instead of simply being boiled.

Conclusion: Liked it. Crunchy and sweet.

I was feeling a little celebratey, because, oh, we just found out we're MOVING TO ITALY next summer. YA-HA-HA-HOOOOOEEEY!! Thank you, US Navy!! Anyway, I wanted to make some dessert without running to the store. Peaches in Red Wine (pg 109) from Ready for Dessert sounded elegant and fun. Plus, it was simple. Dissolve sugar in red wine. Add peaches (or, in my case, nectarines). Chill for a few hours.

David Lebovitz owes me a bottle of red.

I really thought this would be good. It tasted like cough syrup. What a waste of decent wine and juicy nectarines. We couldn't eat it. It was that bad. Sugar in wine, left to sit, is a bad idea. Bad. Bad, bad, bad. That's okay, though, because moving to Italy is good, good, good. YEEEEE!!!

Conclusion: Hated it. It had to happen eventually.

Hawai'i Cuisine: Steamed Clams with Ginger Pesto Butter

Technically, Steamed Clams with Ginger Pesto Butter (pg 7) is supposed to be an appetizer. I decided to play with it and turn it into a full meal. That was a mistake. Don't get me wrong, this was still tasty. I'm certain it would be better without my meddling, though.

The original recipe has you make a "pesto" out of a load of ginger, a load of garlic, cilantro, green onion, butter and olive oil. This packs some kick. A spoonful will clear your sinuses right out. (Heeeere, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. I've got something for you.)

As for the clams, I'm not totally clear on what the finished product is supposed to be. The directions say:
"Place clams, onions, garlic, and chicken stock in a small pot. Steam for 1 minute."Just so I'm clear, clams in 3 cups of stock would be boiled, not steamed, right? Add shiitake mushrooms, mustard cabbage (I used napa, which I'm sure is nothing like whatever mustard cabbage is), onion, and green onion to the broth and cook for 3 more minutes. Then, "Divide clams into 4 serving bowls. Dollop each serving with 1 tablespoon of Ginger Pesto Butter." I took that to mean that all that vegetable matter was just a broth-flavoring agent and is left behind in the pot. Yes? No?

That seemed like a waste of a decent pile of produce to me. On the other hand, if you are supposed to eat the veg, there has to be a better way than to boil it.

My not-so-brilliant solution was to boil the clams, some onion and garlic in the stock for the full amount of time, without adding the veg. I stir-fried the cabbage, onions, and mushrooms in oil and a generous spoonful of the pesto butter. Once everything had cooked down, I threw some cooked pasta in and topped with the clams, some broth, and another small dollop of pesto.

In my head, that should have created a decent meal. In reality, all that bulk diluted the pesto too much. It lost its kick. My bad.

Conclusion: Liked it as (I think) it was supposed to be. Not so great with my tweaks.

This book suffers from a case of unclear instructions. Chef Choy would benefit from an editor and a test group to give his recipes a dry run before they're published.

Choy Bomb

I would like to think that something went terribly, terribly wrong with the way I prepared last night's dinner of Crusted Ono as Featured at Sam Choy's Restaurants (pg 64)--yes, that is the full name--but I think it's just a poorly written recipe. This is one that I've had my eye on from the beginning, so I'm disappointed that it turned out to be inedible.

First, marinate ono (wahoo) fillets in olive oil, garlic, ginger, salt and pepper. It doesn't say for how long. I did it for about 30 minutes. So far, so good. Wahoo was not available (big surprise), so I used mahi mahi, which, I assume, is cut much thicker, as I had to double the specified time to cook it through. That wasn't what went wrong, though.

Mash together a butt-load of butter, Ritz cracker crumbs, chopped macadamia nuts, paprika, and fresh basil and thyme and pat it on top of the fish. Using the correct amounts of everything, this created a VERY thick layer of "crust." I put crust in quotation marks, because I think of crusts as crunchy. This was a soggy, salty, soft mess, and left the fish sitting in a pool of grease. The picture in the book shows a thin layer, as if the fish were lightly coated, which is not the effect that the instructions produced. We couldn't eat it.

How can such a delicious line-up of ingredients create such a monstrosity?

The little intro to the recipe says that it's one of Chef Choy's bestsellers, and "it has a kind of reputation, but it works." What reputation does it have? Beats me. I tried to google it, and came up empty. (Any local input, Pauline??) 

Conclusion: Hated it. The picture in the book looks really good, though.

This is served with a Papaya-Mango Salsa, which was actually very good. I was worried, because I always think I'm going to like papaya, but I never do. Mixed in with mango, red pepper, red onion, cilantro, chili flakes, vinegar, cumin, and sugar (I only used 1/3rd of the sugar), there was enough going on that I couldn't distinguish it.

I ate cereal and papaya-mango salsa for dinner. Booooo!

Conclusion: Liked it.

To use up some buttermilk that I had laying around, I made Buttermilk Panna Cotta with Blueberry Compote (pg 135) from Ready for Dessert. I have to say, I did not love this. I've only had panna cotta once before at Salumeria Rossi in NYC (WONDERFUL charcuterie. Go there if you're ever in the city). I remember it being light and soft. This version was the solid consistency of jello. It had a nice flavor, as the half-and-half is steeped with lemon zest and cinnamon sticks, but I didn't enjoy the texture.

Conclusion: Just okay.

We planned to have friends over for brunch this morning, but I caught a cold and then gave it to Charlie, so we rescheduled. I'd already made Blackberry-Brown Butter Financiers (pg 108) to serve alongside the bagels I planned to make, so obviously we needed to eat them anyway, with or without company.

I've never had a financier before, but they are a not-so-sweet almond cake with blackberries in the top. Traditionally, they are baked in small rectangular pans to resemble gold bars, but Lebovitz adapted the recipe for cupcake pans. Once again, this made fewer servings than he says they will, but in this instance, I blame myself. I filled the pan like I would for cupcakes, so only got 9 instead of 12 cakes. Oh well. No harm done.

Hmmmm...now I have four egg yolks to find a use for. What's that you say, David? Your flan needs four yolks? Well, if I must. 

Conclusion: Loved them. I would eat these instead of a muffin any day of the week. They're perfect with a cup of coffee.

Hawaiian Cuisine: Chicken and Coconut Milk

I hesitated for the briefest of seconds when I read the recipe for Chicken and Coconut Milk (pg 54), because I couldn't imagine how the five ingredients listed--chicken breast, coconut milk, chicken broth, spinach, and salt--could possibly amount to much. Lured by the fact that I already had all the ingredients and wouldn't have to run to the store, I forged ahead with it anyway. After all, the teeny intro says "This is a quick Hawaiian favorite that can look as if you cooked all day." Yeah, right. Nice one, Chef Choy. You got me. I should have listened to my gut.

This wasn't awful, but it's nothing I would make again. It basically tastes like chicken soup. Bland chicken soup, with no carrots or onions. All you do is simmer chunked chicken breast in the broth and coconut milk, for about an hour, then add the spinach and some salt. I expected the liquid to simmer down to a thicker sauce, but it didn't.

Conclusion: Just okay. We ate our portions, but neither of us went back for seconds.

I have much higher hopes for the next few days, because I've got my eye on several seafood recipes, which, presumably, would be Hawaiian cooking's strong suit. We shall see!

A Round-up

I've made a few things in the past two days.

For Friday's dinner, I made Hawaiian Pulehu Tri-Tip Steak (pg 46) and Black Goma Asparagus (pg 86). I think the steak is a big gimmick. It appeals to a tourist's notions of exotic cooking, but isn't actually a good way to make a steak.

First, you cake a tri-tip steak with a mixture of garlic, pepper, sugar, and sea salt. Like, A LOT of sea salt.

 Let it sit for half hour and go light up the BBQ. The thing that makes this steak unique is that you lay it directly on the coals and flip it every four minutes. Chef Choy says it will be "crusty on the outside and rare on the inside." What he means is it will be charred on the outside and raw on the inside, except for the ends, which will cook through and be dry as boards.

The biggest problem is that the recommended cut of beef is not the same width all the way through. This would work better with a london broil or something that is flat and even.

Because it was soooo rare, and I don't think tri-tip is a particularly tender cut to begin with (or at least this one wasn't), it was too chewy for me. I prefer to focus on the pleasures, rather than the mechanics, of eating, and that was very hard to do here.

The meat looks like it's cooked to a medium here, but trust me. It was still chilly in the middle.

On the plus side, I expected this to be a salt-bomb, and it wasn't. Maybe a lot of the salt burned off or was transferred to the coals?

Conclusion: Dislike. On a different cut of meat, cooked a more even, reliable way, the salt rub would have been good, but that wasn't the recipe. It takes a lot for me not to finish my steak, and I left most of it on my plate.

I wish I could say that the Black Goma Asparagus was better, but it's really just asparagus with soy sauce on it. Add a bit of ginger, a bit of sugar, and black sesame seeds (I used white), but all you taste is soy sauce. Plus, a certain toddler who shall remain nameless distracted me while I was cooking them, so they were mushy.

Conclusion: Just okay.

Now, on to brighter pastures!!

Last night, I made Moloka'i Shrimp Spinach Salad. It had many components, which started to annoy me as time passed and my kitchen sink filled to the brim with dishes, but it was worth it.

Marinate shrimp in a brown sugar/soy sauce/red pepper flake mixture with a bunch of spices thrown in.

Toss spinach with a sweet, warm balsamic vinaigrette, then top with the shrimp, sliced roasted red pepper, boiled eggs, and minced macadamia nuts. The vinaigrette was supposed to have 1/2 cup (!!!) of pine nuts in it, but I must have used up what I had last time I made pesto. I didn't miss them.

This salad was slightly too spicy for me. I think I have a sensitivity to red pepper flakes, as opposed to other pepper products. No matter how small of a pinch I use, they always seem too spicy to me, so the three teaspoons used here was more than I'm used to. The egg had the surprising effect of mediating the heat, though. This salad kept a beautiful balance between sweet (red pepper, sugar, balsamic), salty (soy sauce, macadamia nuts), and spicy (red pepper flakes, ginger, white pepper).

Conclusion: LOVED it. Matt said that he's never eaten a salad so fast in his life.

I asked Matt to pick out  a dessert from Ready For Dessert. He's not a big sweets guy, and my hope was that if he picked the treat, he'd eat more than a sliver of it. He chose Apricot Souffles (pg 131), which I never would have picked, because our universal disappointment with Dorie's cheese souffle turned me off to wasting my time on another.

I am so glad he picked this. It was amazing.

For a few minutes, you simmer dried apricot halves in white wine, with the contents and pod of a vanilla bean, then leave it to sit for about an hour (or, in my case, most of the afternoon). When you're ready to make the souffle, puree the mixture (sans vanilla pod), sugar, and an egg yolk. Then you assemble it like any other souffle, whipping up the egg whites, then gently folding them in. This recipe is for four smaller servings, instead of one giant souffle, so it only cooks for about nine minutes.

Hello, new friend.

I like knowing that souffles really aren't as difficult or as scary to make as their legend would suggest.
Lebovitz recommends serving this souffle with raspberry sauce. Perfection. The souffle tastes like pure apricot concentrate, and the tart raspberry sauce provides a masterful counterpoint. I was afraid, after my previous cheesy experience, that it would taste eggy, but it didn't.

Conclusion: Loved it! Light, melt-in-your-mouth, fruity goodness. Now I want to try Lebovitz's other sweet souffles.

Hawai'i Cuisine: Rotisserie (Huli Huli) Chicken

According to the book, "huli" means to turn, and "huli huli" means to turn over and over. I enjoy saying "huli huli," so I planned to make Rotisserie (Huli Huli) Chicken (pg 60), knowing full well that I would annoy the crap out of anyone in earshot. Matt must have caught on, and conveniently scheduled an overnight work trip to San Antonio for today. Charlie didn't mind my celebration of the hulis, as long as I didn't place myself between him and Finding Nemo. 

I like the idea of this recipe, because Chef Choy gives a couple of alternative cooking methods if you don't have a rotisserie. He also provides instructions for cooking the chicken on a hibachi or under the broiler, turning it every 10-15 minutes, or to just bake it in the oven, untouched. I chose the broiling/turning method.

I don't know the purpose of the first step, but it's fun and barbaric. He instructs you to split the bird down the backbone and remove the neck bone. I chanted some ferocious "Huli Hulis" as I sawed through the ribcage with my almost-not-sharp-enough knife. My knife was definitely not sharp enough to cut through the neck bone, so I cut along the other side of the spine, too, and pulled the whole thing out. This process was so satisfying that I'm tempted to go buy another chicken so I can do it again.

Isn't it ghastly? I love it.

After rubbing garlic and oil into the skin and letting it marinate for half hour, I sprinkled a spice blend of salt, paprika, coriander, and pepper onto the bird and popped it under the broiler.

I popped it a bit too close to the broiler. I inhaled a face-full of smoke when I opened the oven door fifteen minutes later to huli my victim. After that, I put it on a lower rack, and didn't have that problem again.

All the charred bits are from that first 15 minutes. Woops.

The meat tasted like and had the same juiciness of any other chicken I've ever roasted, meaning that it was good, but I'm not sure it was worth all the dismemberment and flipping. The spice mix, on the other hand, is my new favorite blend for roasting a chicken. The crispy bits of skin were deeeelicious.

Conclusion: Liked it. I'll use the seasonings, but not the method again.

Huli.           Okay, that was the last one. Promise.

Hawai'i Cuisine: Oriental Lamb Chops with Rotelli Pasta

Lesson #2 about Hawaiian cooking: the base of many recipes is ginger, cilantro, and garlic.
Lesson #3 about Hawaiian cooking: moderation is not a factor. A recipe for mashed potatoes, which I will not be making, involves two sticks of butter and a good splosh of heavy cream for four people. Holy moly. I'll bet it's delicious, but my conscience just can't do it.

I'm trying to decide if the recipe for Oriental Lamb Chops with Rotelli Pasta (pg 50-51) has a typo. It says that the lamb chop marinade includes 3/4 CUP of minced garlic. Whaaaaat?? Could that possibly be correct? Even if I had the patience to mince that much garlic, which I don't, the half-a-head I had on hand wasn't going to get me to 3/4 cup. I also needed some for the pasta, so four cloves went in the marinade and three were reserved for the pasta.

Also in the marinade: soy sauce, fresh ginger, a lot of brown sugar, red pepper flakes, fresh basil, fresh cilantro, and salt. This wasn't hard to throw together. I just had to remind myself at noon to do it. The instructions say to massage the marinade into the meat for 5-10 minutes. I felt ridiculous when I started doing this, but after about two minutes, I could tell that the meat was tenderizing, and by the end of five minutes, it was practically falling off the bone, uncooked. After they sit in the fridge for 4-6 hours, broil them for 3 minutes per side. The book says that will give you a medium rare. That gave me a raw. I threw it back under the broiler for a minute, and the chops came out perfectly. 

Heeeeere, lamby, lamby, lamby!

I would never want to eat a bowl of the Creamy Rotelli Pasta on its own, but with the chops, it was delicious. Stir-fry julienned carrot, zucchini, cilantro, and shiitake mushrooms in garlic, oil, and butter provide the flavor. I added basil, too, because I lopped more than I needed off of my plant for the marinade. Heavy cream and parmesan cheese are added at the end. Think of it as a dry Alfredo sauce.

The chops were sweet and tender, and the drippings that mixed into the pasta made everything even more delicious. Flavors of ginger, garlic, and soy were all there, but subtly.

As I ate this, I flashed back to a dish my Dad made just a few times when I was growing up. He'd taken a Chinese cooking class, and had a few favorites that he would make over and over. My favorite, and one that I don't remember him making often (blast!) was a sweet, caramelized fried pork. Obviously, lamb and pork taste nothing alike, but eating this lamb zapped me right to that pork. I have the binder where Dad kept all of his Chinese recipes. The ingredient list is so very very specific--as in, you are instructed not to deviate from the recommended brands--that I've just been hanging on to it as a keepsake and haven't attempted to cook from it yet. This lamb makes me want to try, though I think it's a lost cause until I can get my hands on a good Asian market.

Conclusion: I loved this lamb. I'd worried that it would be salty from all that soy sauce, but it wasn't. It was a lovely balance of salty, sweet, and herbal. We're off to a good start. I liked the pasta, but in the future, would probably just stir-fry some vegetables and serve it on rice.

I'm going to do my best to steer away from the cream and butter-based dishes. We'll see.

As a side comment, I was a little put off that the pic that accompanies this dish in the book shows none of the vegetables specified, but does show strips of red pepper, which are not in the recipe. Weird.

Wrapping Up So Easy, and Up Next (This One's for You, Pauline!)

Time of death: 3:14, Friday, August 26. I couldn't tolerate more than ten days of this book. So Easy contained a few standouts--the corn salad, the mocha java smoothie, and the pork piccata--but the bulk of the recipes I tried were mediocre, at best. I've cooked all the recipes that caught my optimistic eye, and most of them turned out lousy anyway. If those that I wanted to make didn't turn out well, I have no hope for the remainder, which I don't want to make.

These recipes are so uninspiring that I'm beginning to question my affection for The Food You Crave. 

Obviously, I'm tossing this book as soon as I copy out those few good recipes.

And now, for something completely different.

One of my best friends had the extreme good fortune of finding a job in Honolulu a few years back. She sent me a cookbook, Hawai'i Cuisine: A Sampler of Favorite Island Recipes by Chef Sam Choy, to ensure that I represent her adopted home on this little blog.

What do I know about Hawaiian food after my two visits to Oahu? I know that I love poi, preferably a day or two old. I know that I'll eat as much Kalua Pig as you put in front of me. I know that fruity drinks taste even better when the sunset over the ocean mirrors what's in your glass. What do I know about cooking Hawaiian food? Nothing.

Part of the reason Pauline chose this particular book was because Chef Choy makes the recipes accessible for a home cook, so you don't need to have an entire pig and a fire pit in your backyard. Where does one even get an entire pig?? I'm glad I don't need to find out.