Best dinner: Pa'i 'ai and smoke meat

Top right: pa'i 'ai made with a variety of green taro (kalo) corm; 

top left: Hawaii-style smoke meat; bottom: homegrown Japanese eggplant sautéed with garlic.

I'm very lucky to come from a family where both the males and females are great cooks. My older brother is an excellent cook and a gardener and he always feeds his family well. 

Visiting him and his family in September, he loaded our bags with goodies including green pa'i 'ai. Pa'i 'ai is "hard poi," kalo pounded (pa'i) with no water added, as it is for poi. He grows a wide variety of kalo and though the corms are usually purple, this one's green. 

Pa'i 'ai* and poi match well with salty meats like kalua pig and smoke meat. My brother also gave us a big bag of homemade smoke meat — one of the best batches I've ever had. Usually the flavor of smoke meat is enhanced by frying after smoking, but this one stood on its own. 

(* We added a few drops of water to the formerly frozen pa'i 'ai and warmed it in the microwave for a minute. The pa'i comes out nice and chewy, similar to mochi, but it tastes like delicious kalo!)

Cone sushi picnic

I'm really picky about my cone sushi. A few times, I've ordered it, taken one bite and then rejected the rest. Usual problems are that they're too dry, too vinegary or too sweet. 

These have to be juicy and full of balanced flavor. In the recipe I used, from the best cooking show on YouTube, Cooking With Dog (the dog is the cook's gray poodle who watches from a stool), every element is flavored — the aburage, the rice and the vegetables that go into the rice.

This is one of my favorite foods and this was the first time I made this from scratch. The perfect picnic food. My version doesn't look very pretty, but it tasted pretty good!

Into this: Mexican lollipops

Picked up some Mexican lollipops at American Falls, Idaho, a while back. They were covered in chili powder and came in flavors I hadn't tried before — corn and tamarind. Also picked up a mango one.

I've never been into hard candy, but the chili is more appropriate than I would have ever thought. The ones I've tried so far haven't had hot chili in them, but I think I might like a little heat.

Maybe I'll have to try making my own.

My favorite one so far is the tamarind. It seems like there's actual tamarind pulp in these.

I've only eaten these in the car so far on long drives. It's nice.

Never-going-to-give-it-up flan

I recently declared that I'll never give up flan. It has my favorite things: eggs and milk (plus sugar). I made my first batch ever from scratch. It was pretty good and I love it when you get the custard out of the mold, all the caramel spreads out over the top.

This is the way to prepare garlic scapes

I'm sure there are markets that sell garlic scapes, garlic's firm flowering stalk, but mostly it seems a specialty item, and so the gardener's treat while the bulbs continue to develop. 

 

It's my second year growing garlic and I've found that the best way to prepare the scapes is to roast them. Coat them in olive oil and a little salt. Toss them and then cook in the oven on high heat until they wilt and brown.

Raw, the scapes are firm on the outside and gel-like inside. Without roasting, the mouthfeel is a little too unctuous and the garlic flavor is subdued. Roasting concentrates the flavor, improves the texture and makes them easier to chew. Because of the tough, long fibers in the skin, cut the scapes into bite-size pieces.

This high-heat roasting method is one I often use for green beans and asparagus. Usually, the beans or asparagus are cooked at 500 degrees for just a few minutes. At 500 degrees, burning dinner is too easy, so for these scapes (which I only have so much of), I set the oven to 400 degrees instead. 

ROASTED GARLIC SCAPES

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and toss two-inch garlic scape pieces with olive oil and salt in a bowl.

2. With your fingers or tongs or chopsticks, transfer pieces onto a baking sheet with raised edges. Don't pour them out from the bowl because you don't want excess oil on the sheet. Space the pieces out and try to put the thicker sections at the edges of the group.

3. Put the baking sheet in the oven (middle rack is fine) and stay in the kitchen. After about 5 minutes, check the pieces. If they are lightly browning and starting to smell aromatic, mix them around a little bit and roast more, checking after about 3 minutes or so. If they aren't browning, just give it more time, checking every two to three minutes or so.

4. Take out when a majority of the pieces are browned and wilted, 10 minutes maximum (though every oven is different). Use as a garnish or in pasta, frittata, in tacos, on pizza (put it on last minute) or rice dishes.

(If you want to try roasting green beans, asparagus or garlic scapes at 500 degrees, you'll get crazy dark marks which translates into flavor. One step too far, though, and your food is burned. To do the scapes at 500 degrees, consider parboiling first. Pat dry and then continue on as above. Cooking times are a lot quicker though. Check after a minute and a half. Definitely don't leave the kitchen!)

What's your favorite way to prepare garlic scapes?

Lucky Peach is a brand new food mag!

 Usually I don't buy on impulse. I'll wait days, weeks, months before making a purchase. The exception is usually food. 

There's a brand new food magazine coming out this month: Lucky Peach. I just found out about it yesterday and I'm a subscriber. Issue 1, with a focus on ramen, will be here soon.

Design-conscious McSweeney's is publishing this magazine quarterly with a different food focus each time. I love the cover and I love ramen. Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of Cooking, the indispensable, no-nonsense guide to food science, is weighing in, along with other experts and artists.

Though I love food, I'm not interested in Home and Garden-type food magazines at all and Lucky Peach doesn't seem like one of those. I received a gift subscription during Christmas to another food magazine, Diner Journal, which I love and would recommend for its design and obvious reverence for food. The writing in Diner is interesting, but pretty casual. In Lucky Peach, I'm hoping for a similar enthusiasm but more rigor with the articles.

Also, in 2011, with people on the Internet all the time (me included), I appreciate print. Back in the mid-2000s, a new food mag, Chow, debuted and stopped publication after a few issues. I regretted not subscribing back then. They are now online only, at http://www.chow.com/.

I'm nostalgic for print work, so I'm subscribing.

UPDATE: I just received the first issue of Lucky Peach Wednesday, June 29. So far, I love it.

Emergency Hekka

We know a secret spot where watercress grows wild, looking like a weed to most, but like the first step on the road to hekka to us.

According to the cookbook, "What Hawaii Likes to Eat," hekka is based on sukiyaki, a dish with a sauce made of shoyu, sugar and mirin. The cookbook author says the dish was created by sugar plantation workers who used the sauce and whatever else they had on hand.

For me, hekka always had to have watercress and aburage, some kind of meat, usually chicken or pork, and it was served over rice. This is one of my favorite dishes. The watercress adds a flavor you can't recreate with anything else.

I think my love for watercress comes from my mom who loves it raw as much as she likes it cooked.

Mmm. 

Surprisingly, watercress on a simple cheese pizza is wonderful. 

Hekka

1. Stir fry thin-sliced meat in some hot oil for a minute of two. Add a chopped onion and cook for a few minutes. Carrots can be added here. Small pieces. Mushrooms (like shiitake) too.

2. Mix up a 1/3 cup each of brown sugar, shoyu and mirin. Instead of mirin, I used rice vinegar.

3. Lower the heat and simmer for five minutes or so.

4. Add ingredients that just need to be warmed through like aburage and bamboo shoots. Lastly, add a big bunch of watercress. I cut the lengths into three pieces. I add the bottom third first, then the middle section and then the top goes in.

5. Serve over rice. Chopped raw sweet onion or green onion tastes good for a garnish.

* I like the texture-variety mushrooms give in a dish like this. Shiitake would be the usual choice for me, but we used snowbank morels (see one of the mushrooms in the upper left corner of the dish). The mushrooms were fresh, so we cooked them separately with no oil or liquid. The fresh mushrooms give off a lot of liquid in the pan. After the liquid is cooked off, the mushroom flavor is concentrated and the meat is not soggy and retains a bite. We added them on top of the dish before serving.

How do you like your hekka?

Best breakfast: kalo and ulu

Ulu and kalo with a little brown sugar and whipping cream.

Note the somewhat gelatinous upper layer and the more starchy looking inner section.

This makes a great dessert too. But, a scoop of Roselani haupia ice cream

on some warmed kalo is even better. 

Don't the most simple foods taste the best?

hello kitty!

my first strawberry hello kitty cake. next one will be easter themed. :)

suggestion.

thinks eden should make pumpkin ice cream pie. gooo meeeek um.