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.

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!

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.

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.

Some waffle facts:

Waffles date back to the middle ages when thin, crisp cakes were baked between two iron plates connected together with a hinge and imprinted with a design, sometimes the waffle grid we know today.

Eggo had/has a 65% share of the frozen waffle market (I’m assuming both in the States and Canada).

“L’Eggo my Eggo” has been used by Eggo since 1960.

I have been called “Meggo my eggo” since 1981.

Belgian waffles are made with yeast-leavened batter, North American waffles are leavened with baking powder.

My laptop is named Waffles. This is because breakfast is the most incredible meal of the day. It is also because of Gir.

My house does not have a waffle iron :( so I ate frozen waffles this morning. I have not eaten them since a period of time in high school when I had Eggo waffles every morning. So I had a crazy wave of déjà-manger.

Waffles are incredible.

The banana chocolate chip muffin. The ones at this café were missing the bananas it seems.

So get this – chocolate chips were not produced until 1939. Can you imagine it? So much history with no chocolate chips?

In 1933 the owner of the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts, Ruth Graves Wakefield, altered a batch of butter drop cookies by adding cut-up chunks of a Nestlé semi-sweet chocolate bar. The cookies were a success at the inn and Nestlé offered Wakefield a lifetime supply of chocolate in exchange for permission to print the cookie recipe on the chocolate bar packaging. They sold the bars with a little tool for cutting them up but soon enough, they began to sell the chocolate in “morsel” form. Story from Nestlé here.

Now chocolate chips are put in everything baked (and not): muffins, cake, cookies, ice cream, loaves, bagels, waffles, cheesecake, brownies, other squares, etc. and they are not always chocolate. Bless the souls who invented butterscotch chips.

Finally, in case you were wondering, chocolate chips came after Hershey’s Kisses. So did Hershey start the standard chocolate chip “drop” shape using mini Kisses machines? Because I never see Nestlé chocolate chips in the grocery store. Only Hershey’s and Baker’s. Hmmm…someone needs to tour a few chocolate factories…

Summary of my seedless watermelon production googling:

A chemical called colchicine is used to double the number of chromosomes of a normal watermelon. If colchicine were used on us, we would probably die but the watermelons are cool with it. It actually makes them bigger and stronger so colchicine is often used in watermelon breeding. If these watermelons with extra chromosomes are crossed with normal watermelons, a sterile offspring is produced. This offspring can be used to produce seedless watermelons but the normal watermelon is still needed to provide pollen that the sterile watermelon lacks. Oh and you also need a lot of bees.

Next time I’ll buy a seeded watermelon but if I make watermelon bombe, I may make it seedless. I was never a fan of frozen chocolate chips in my sherbet.

I’ve been reading other things about watermelons: they are not actually melons in the proper melon sense (like honeydew, cantaloupe, and cucumber), there is a breed called “cream of saskatchewan” that I can’t believe I have not tried, and there are southeastern European folk legends of vampire watermelons.

According to tradition, watermelons or any kind of pumpkin kept more than ten days or after Christmas will become a vampire, rolling around on the ground and growling to pester the living. People have little fear of the vampire pumpkins and melons because of the creatures’ lack of teeth.

It’s a good thing watermelon gets eaten up so fast.

I could make my own but they are more satisfying bought individual at a store and devouring before the ice cream melts. Maybe another weekend when I’m not still working on a pie.

A close up of my un-photogenic raspberry cream pie:

What it lacked in looks it made up for in personality!! Though it’s that kind of personality you absolutely love but can only handle in small doses. This was a learning lesson and next time I’ll be prepared to make the most charismatic pie.

To start with a pie meaning well: I used this recipe for a Raspberry-Chocolate Tart from Epicurious. I don’t believe in tarts with a chocolate-crumb crust – it’s really a pie. The filling was made with pureed raspberries, whipping cream, and mascarpone cheese. I had never used mascarpone before but it’s an Italian cream cheese that gaves the filling a light, velvety texture with a bit of cream cheese sourness, enhanced by the tartness of the raspberries, but with none of that cream cheese rubber/process-y-ness if that makes sense.

After chilling overnight, the pie got a little too excited. I had visions of 3 layers of brown, pink, and white perfectly holding each other together like a neopolitan cloud. Instead of following the recipe topping of fresh raspberries and raspberry preserves, I made whipped cream and spread it on top. That was probably my first mistake. Freshly whipped cream is probably at its best dolloped onto dessert immediately before serving.

Then I went further and figured that chocolate sauce should be drizzled over the pie to balance out the chocolate bottom. I made a sauce that was probably more a ganache and dripped/globbed/mixed it over the whipped cream. Then there was the dipping of raspberries and the placement of more raspberries and the drizzling of more sauce and then ooooh…the pie was just messy.

Next time I may or may not include the chocolate sauce. If I do, it will be drizzled onto the raspberry filling. That will be stored in the fridge and immediately before serving I will place a dollop of whipped cream and bouquet of raspberries on each individual serving.

That whole lesson being said, it was still an incredibly tasty way to learn.

Pie was followed by Blocus and I think while I slept raspberry, chocolate, and cream Blocus pieces danced in my head.