Archive for In the Kitchen and Foodstuff
June 24, 2009 at 7:05 pm · Filed under In the Kitchen and Foodstuff, Travels
I lose the right to talk about my Hawaii trip at the end of this month so I’d better hop to it! I continue with my presentation of Kauai in categories. Today we talk about an exciting one: fooood.
If you forget the overpriced Mexican food our hungry souls settled for as a first meal and the cheese and cracker supper later, our first real Hawaiian meal was pineapple for breakfast:
(…and mini wheats with soy milk.)
All winter we looked forward to fresh tropical fruit and we were not disappointed. We found fruit stands on country roads operating on the honour system and masking tape prices:
I learned how to eat lychee (not whole like below):
and was astounded by how bananas grow:
We went to the Kauai Coffee Company to buy green beans for friends that roast their own. The samples we tried were good. Surprising given the coffee served by cafés on the island. It was pretty bad and made us proud of what we could produce with store-bought grinds and a coffee filter held over a travel mug.
On to cooked food…
The first distinctively Hawaii meal we had was the teriyaki burger from Duane’s Ono-Char Burger. Note: when I say Hawaiian in reference to food I don’t mean Hawaiian as was originally on the island but Hawaiian mixed with Japanese and American. Hence the teriyaki burger. We waited for 20, maybe even 30 minutes at the small road-side kitchen with order window. It wasn’t waiting in a line-up, just for a delicious burger to cook so it was worth every minute.
That would have been my fill of burger for the trip but I had promised myself that I would try the loco moco. Oh boy. Rice topped with two hamburger patties, gravy, and two friend eggs. It came in a plate lunch so there was the traditional side of macaroni salad (I substituted a regular salad that was essentially iceberg lettuce swimming in macaroni salad mayo-dressing) and a side of noodles. I ate wondering what people on the island do to burn these calories. Probably something that I wouldn’t be doing that day so I saved half for dinner. My conclusion was that loco moco was tasty and satisfying in a carb-meat-fried-sauce way but I felt really out of character eating it. Like I do if I eat chicken pot pie or other meat and pastry combinations.
Later in the trip we tried plate lunches from Fish Express (a place you have to try if you go to Kauai). I had the kalua pig:
Kalua means to cook in an underground oven and Kalua pig is shredded pork from a salted pig cooked underground all day long (think luau pig). To me Kalua now means the best pig you will ever ever eat.
Faron had the Laulau. This is pork wrapped in taro leaves and cooked in the underground oven. It was tasty but if you try it, don’t eat kalua pig first because the laulau will not compare.
The pink cubes on the side are salmon and tuna poke: an appetizer of marinated cubes of raw fish. Common marinade ingredients are salt, soy sauce, nori, and sesame. Another must try in Hawaii.
A final dish of note was the saimin, a noodle soup dish much like ramen. We had it at Hamura’s Saimin Stand so I assumed it was mostly from the Japanese but it did have wontons in it. Wikipedia: “The dish is composed of elements taken from each of the original sugarcane and pineapple plantation laborer ethnicities of the early 20th century: Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Hawaiian, Portuguese” Ahh. I was worried that I’d compare saimin to ramen but it stood strong as a noodle soup of its own. Plus the atmosphere at Hamura’s was great. U-shaped counters and closely packed stools always occupied by tourists like us or locals.
Okay! That was a lot of post. I guess we ate a lot of food in a week. And still made room for dessert:
Shaved ice. I think this is the Japanese kakigori but in Hawaii, particularly at JoJo’s Shaved Ice in Waimea (not the newer one run by the punk white guy but the one around the corner), they have perfected ice shaving so that the treat melts in your mouth (of course) but like butter. I can’t remember the name of this combination but it had vanilla ice cream on the button, strawberry cheesecake, vanilla, and banana syrups, and sweetened condensed milk drizzled on top.
I’m waiting for a plane in Calgary. Michael Jackson died and when they show news reports everyone watches. That’s impact.
June 8, 2009 at 2:06 pm · Filed under In the Kitchen and Foodstuff
Friday evening we fed on Vietnamese food and then had a beer listening to blues from a man with white socks, bare knees, and a weathered face. Not a lot of time for a Portland tour but Faron’s parents suggested ending the night with a stop at Voodoo Doughnuts.
They knew exactly what would impress me.
Pink boxes?!! And cereal covered doughnuts…?!!
A 24-hr doughnut shop somewhere downtown with a line-up (but a very short, quick, tolerable one) of people seeking after-bar/club calories. A rotating case displays the insane creations; some look too good to eat, some to strange and others confirm to you that yes, love does exist.
We bought half a dozen:
* a bacon maple bar
* a plain donut with a blue (fruity) glaze and pink sprinkles (hello, simpsons donut?)
* what they call “Triple Chocolate Penetration” (chocolate doughnut, chocolate glaze, and cocoa-puffs)
* a fruit loop donut
* a captain crunch donut
* AND what I think they call “Dirty Snowball” (chocolate cake doughnut covered with pink marshmallow glaze and surprise filling)
I tried every one and they were all glorious. A few a little weird (Dirty Snowball) but wonderful nonetheless. I give them 2 sticky thumbs up!
August 17, 2008 at 4:12 pm · Filed under In the Kitchen and Foodstuff
On July 7th Eric emailed me this blog post detailing an experiment in mixing two delicious things: bacon and chocolate chip cookies. In the subject line he asked, “wanna bake some cookies?”. Yes, of course I did. Various summer going-ons delayed our cookie date but yesterday we finally got the chance to try this experiment ourselves.
Muffin was so great at documenting her experience so I’ll try to give the recipe without too many embellishments. We started with your standard chocolate chip cookie dough recipe:
3/4 cup butter (She suggests trying 1 cup because her cookies may have been a bit dry. I only had 3/4 of a cup in the fridge and did find the dough a bit too dry so added a smidgen of vegetable oil.)
2/3 cup packed brown sugar
2/3 cup white sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract (She uses 1/2 tsp as well as 1 tsp of hazelnut extract. I didn’t want to introduce other complicated flavours and only used vanilla.)
2 1/2 cups flour (If you are only using 3/4 cup of butter, I would reduce the flour to maybe 2 cups…?)
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips (She uses 1 cup of white chocolate and 1 cup of semi-sweet chocolate but Eric and I both agreed the white chocolate would be a bit too festive.)
2 cups of bacon bits – the real-deal bacon bits, not simulated
We bought two jars of these bacon bits at Stong’s, each having just under 1 cup of bits:
The cookie dough was assembled like any other cookie dough and the bacon bits were mixed in at the end (at the same time as the chocolate chips):
This is the finished dough:
Doesn’t it look wonderful? A taste test left me drunk with cookie anticipation while we rolled the dough into small balls:
Each pan went into the oven at 350 F for 10-11 minutes. In the meantime, we fried the topping bacon. We used a whole package, I don’t know how many pounds it was, but your standard package size of bacon:
Baking cookies in the oven and frying bacon on the stove might not be the most comfortable activity for a hot, humid day in August. Luckily the sun was going down and we were gifted with a beautiful, calm and cooling sunset sky:
While the cookies and bacon cooled a little, we prepared the maple glaze. Muffin was so smart to include the maple glaze. It acts as both a adhesive for the bacon topping and a bridge between salty savory bacon and the sweeter cookie. The glaze was made with:
2 cups icing sugar
1 1/2 tablespoon maple extract
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
some cinnamon
milk to make a thicker glaze (She uses water but I didn’t feel right about that.)
We spread the glaze on each cookie and topped with a piece (or a few) of the fried bacon. The results:
The conclusion: these are some of the most incredible cookies that I have ever eaten. The salty bacon compliments the cookie and chocolate so well. The layers of flavour leave you feeling like you have just eaten a delicious breakfast meal in cookie form. I have never had such satisfaction out of a cookie as I do with these. I can’t imagine anyone who is not a vegetarian not liking these cookies. Make them. Eat them.
August 7, 2008 at 8:52 pm · Filed under Food Holidays, In the Kitchen and Foodstuff
Not much to be said here. Raspberries and cream, whipped cream. The perfect compliment to raspberry tartness.
Raspberries and cream day is like a finishing nod to the raspberry season so it’s a little sad. I’ve eaten pints and pints of berries and cherries in the past few months and will miss them come fall.
August 6, 2008 at 9:15 am · Filed under Food Holidays, In the Kitchen and Foodstuff
Having recently celebrated ice cream soda day, I wasn’t really up for a root beer float even with leftover root beer and ice cream at my disposal. To be honest, I don’t really like soda/pop hence think floats are kind of a waste of ice cream. Maybe that’s what A&W was thinking when they started selling bottled ice cream floats. Pushing it a little. Not really a float anymore is it? The Great Root Bear probably didn’t have much of a say in making bottled floats. In fact, I wonder how much they ever listened to his opinion. They keep him around because the kids love bears and that jingle but we can’t even begin to imagine the agony of hearing ba-dum-dah-dum everywhere you walk.
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