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.

Ready For Dessert: A Twofer

I'm getting a late start on my Hawaiian book. Lesson #1 about Hawaiian cooking: they marinate stuff for hours. Lesson #1 about my flaws in the kitchen: I don't remember that I need to marinate stuff until I start cooking. Tonight, we're having dinner with Matt's new CO, so tomorrow will be my Hawaiian debut.

In the meantime, I've been baking from Ready for Dessert. I was supposed to go to a book club meeting on Thursday, so I made his Fresh Ginger Cake (pg 42). I've been wary of this recipe, because his other two gingerbread recipes that I tried pre-blog were bad. This, however, turned out to be the gingerbread I've been searching for. I no longer need to scour cookbooks for the perfect recipe. I've found it.

What sets this gingerbread apart from any other recipe I've tried? 4 oz. of fresh ginger, to start. In case you can't visualize, that's a pretty sizeable stick of ginger. Between the fresh ginger, cinnamon, cloves and black pepper, this cake has a nice background heat to it, and the balance of ginger to molasses is perfect.

I wound up not going to the book club, because we had the first thunderstorm of Charlie's cognizant life, and he was a bit upset by the thunder. It may be for the best, anyway, because Matt thinks that no one in their right mind would want to eat gingerbread when it's 100 degrees out, and that it would be a weird thing for me to present to a group of almost-strangers. Perhaps. More for me. To stop myself from inhaling the whole thing, I froze half of it.

Conclusion: Loved it and it's Charlie-approved! This kid's tastes are so unpredictable.

I didn't intend to bake another dessert this weekend, but I couldn't resist. Growing up, once a year, my Mom would make a plum cake during the very short span of time when Italian Plums were available in our supermarket. Her recipe was simple--she just cut the plums in half, pitted them, and placed them on top of a sheet cake pan full of boxed yellow cake mix batter. The plums would sink to the bottom and get juicy and wonderful during baking.

I saw Italian Plums, and I had to buy them. A friend was coming for dinner on Saturday, so that was all the excuse I needed. I bought a box of cake mix, but figured I'd scan through Lebovitz's book and see if I could find a similar type of recipe that I had all the ingredients for. Plum-Blueberry Upside-Down Cake (pg 40) jumped out at me.

The cake was good. The evidence speaks for itself...

Three adults ate 3/4 of a cake. Oy vey.

Something seemed wrong to me, though. In my Mom's cake, the plums are still tart and taste like plums. Here, they tasted like prunes. I don't know if I bought the wrong type of plum--they were labeled as Italian plums, so I thought it was right--or laying the plums and blueberries on brown sugar and butter amplified their sweetness so much that they turned pruney. It was good, but it did not satisfy my craving for my Mom's plain old box mix creation.

Conclusion: This recipe turned out to be different than I was hoping, but it was still good. Maryam said it had a good "plum to cake ratio", and everyone but Charlie went back for generous seconds. Liked it.

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.

So Easy: Egg, Ham, and Spinach Pizza

Egg, Ham, and Spinach Pizza (pg 99) is exactly what it sounds like. I went in thinking of it less as a pizza, and more as an open-faced sandwich. Take a store-bought whole wheat pizza crust, dump a butt-load of sliced spinach on it with a drizzle of olive oil, prosciutto, garlic, and grated parmesan cheese. Make four wells in the spinach, and break an egg into each. Then you bake for 12-15 minutes "until the spinach is wilted and the egg whites are fully cooked." In her intro to the recipe, Ellie says that the first time she had egg on a pizza "it was a revelation. When you cut into the egg, the yolk oozes out over the tender greens and crisp crust."

On closer reading, I realized that she was not waxing rhapsodic about this version of a pizza, but something she ate in Italy. I checked my pizza at 12 minutes, and the yolks were completely cooked, while the whites were not set yet. Because they were confined to these spinach wells, the white part was deeper than it would be just on a pan. By the time the whites cooked, there was no chance of any lovely oozing yolk. The yolk cooked faster than anything else on the pie, spinach and prosciutto included. Very disappointing.

I'm not opposed to having hard boiled eggs on a pizza. I ate that in Rome, and it was good. Not my favorite pizza topping of all time, but I still enjoyed it. The egg on this pizza was nasty. The texture was weird. I can't describe it. A little gritty, maybe? and the white seemed to cook in layers, so there were striations of toughness as I bit down. I pulled the rest of my egg off the pizza. Yuck.

On the plus side, the spinach did provide a nice faux-cheese layer of softness as you bit down, and the prosciutto crisped nicely, with its grease flavoring the rest of the pie.

Conclusion: Without the egg, just okay. With the egg, disliked. Since a key part of the recipe is the egg, I'm going to have to go with Dislike on this one.

Catching Up

I tried two more of Ellie's breakfast recipes. They were okay, but not anything that I'd bother making again.

First up, Chocolate and Strawberry Stuffed French Toast (pg 53). My strawberries had molded overnight, so I omitted them and had a few cherries on the side. Without the berries, this recipe is just ricotta cheese and a few chocolate chips sandwiched between bread, then you soak the whole sandwich in milk and eggs and cook it on the griddle. Ellie calls for a shocking 1.25 cups of milk per three eggs. When I make french toast, I add just enough of a splash of milk to loosen up the eggs. I would never use a full cup. I did it my way. I'd think her way would make the bread totally soggy and disgusting.

So maybe I used more than a few chocolate chips.

I thought that Charlie would love this. I mean, it's chocolate for breakfast. He wouldn't even try it, though. He is definitely his father's son: uninterested in sweets. It's better in the long run, I guess, but it makes no sense to me. After dinner the other day, I gave him a plate with a gougere and a small slice of the apple cake on it. The cheese puff wins every time. Oh well, more cake for me.

Conclusion: Just okay.

Honey Harvest Quinoa (pg 63) has lots of good stuff in it--a diced apple, dried cranberries, honey, cinnamon, and toasted pecans on top, yet it still barely surpasses mediocrity. With the pecans, this was earthier and a bit more complex. Without the pecans (I ate leftovers when I got home from the gym), it was bland. It's amazing the a difference one single ingredient can make. Those nuts really tied the dish together.

Conclusion: Just okay. The only reason I'd make this again is because Charlie ate half of what I gave him. I'm instituting a new "Charlie Approved" category. This is mostly for my own benefit, so that on days when I'm bemoaning the fact that I can't get him to eat anything, I can click on the Charlie Approved label and pull up recipes that have had some success in the past. Unless you've got a fussy toddler and are looking for ideas, pay it no mind.

Much to my surprise at this point, last night's dinner of Pork Piccata was really good. I love me some piccata, and this tasted just as it should--caper-briney, garlicky, lemony, with a strong reduction of white wine. YUM. It was so good that Matt thought I'd changed cookbooks. HA!

Conclusion: Loved it.

It's Not All Bad

Apparently I like any smoothie that crosses my path. The Mocha Java Smoothie (pg 25) from So Easy is exceptionally tasty. I didn't realize until after I dissolved the instant espresso, cocoa powder, and a touch of sugar in boiling water that the recipe was actually for two servings. I gave myself the correct amount of milk, thickened up by a frozen banana, but I doubled up on the flavor. It was a good mistake.

Chocolate + Caffeine=Happy Ma

Conclusion: Loved it. Not the most filling breakfast, but definitely delicious.

I'm on the fence about Salmon Florentine and Quinoa Pilaf with Pine Nuts (pg 197). The Florentine part, which was spinach, shallots, garlic, sun-dried tomatoes, and red pepper flakes mixed with ricotta, was flavorful and a nice twist for dinner, but it didn't mesh perfectly with the flavor of the salmon. It would be great on top of breadcrumbed chicken (which would, of course, defeat Ellie's entire healthy-cooking premise).

This meal is Charlie-approved.

I thought the Quinoa Pilaf with Pine Nuts was boring, but Matt liked it. The quinoa is just mixed with toasted pine nuts, cooked onions, and parsley. Enh.

Conclusion: Liked the Florentine, though not on salmon. The Quinoa Pilaf was just okay.

Charlie had eaten his dinner earlier, but then he wanted mine, too, so I gave him a bit. Usually he just takes my food away from me and feeds it to the dog. Thaaaanks. I couldn't believe my eyes as he ate all of the spinach mixture and all of the quinoa I gave him. To give you some perspective on the impressiveness of this, he has spit out every single strand of spinach that has ever passed his lips. I may throw Florentine on everything from now on.