Poi pounding

I know it's really the season for mochi pounding, but having not yet found a Japanese family who will take me into their wings for their yearly tradition, I attend a poi pounding demonstration hosted by Slow Food KCC instead. Like many poi pounders I've come across, Daniel Anthony is a storyteller and comedian. I suppose one has keep himself and others entertained during the lengthy and tedious process of pounding poi. What a workout...I'm thinking of advising Ben on ditching the Perfect Pushup and getting our own wooden board and stone pounder. Not to mention the delicious result: pa'i 'ai, or mashed taro. At first, it confuses me that cubes of steamed poi can be pounded to resemble a slightly sticky play doh that can be kneaded and folded like bread dough, until I remember my early cooking days when vigorous overbeating of mashed potatoes resulted in a gluey, gray mass. Somewhere in the process of pounding the taro and releasing the starches, the taro also becomes sweeter.

Still, there's really only so much I can eat before I tire of it as is. Daniel has numerous ideas on how to jazz it up, from different flavors to smoothies to calzones (hm.....). First, though, we have to get more farmers growing it.

Christmas

I don't know which is better...the smell of gingerbread (all the scents of Christmas...ginger, clove, nutmeg) or actually eating it (spicy, warm, and soft). I guess it's like Christmas itself...all the sensations and experiences with family, friends, and food all together that make it what it is: magical.

This gingerbread was adapted from Gramercy Tavern's recipe to include fresh Hawaiian ginger...its juices making this cake especially fragrant and spicy.

A Mexican-Korean-Japanese holiday feast

Chef Kevin pulls out the achiote turkey from the oven
(All photos courtesy of Adriana Torres Chong)

Only in Hawaii do so many different countries' cuisines so easily find their way to our tables, particularly around the holidays. Growing up on the mainland in a Chinese household that didn't cook, we always ate Chinese food at Chinese restaurants for all holidays (reliably open 365 days a year). So when I left for college, I resisted going home for Thanksgiving, opting instead to follow my Caucasian friends to their all-American Thanksgiving turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and gravy feast, crazy relatives included. From then on, I've wanted every Thanksgiving dinner that I prepare to be nothing but "traditional." But then I married a Mexican-Filipino, and tortillas, rice, and adobo somehow sneak themselves onto the dinner table. And these days, nostalgia finds its way into a lup cheong fried rice stuffing for the turkey.

Of course, it's not only on my holiday table that myriad cultures come together...our managing editor's Thanksgiving spread included turkey with all the trimmings, lomi salmon, sushi, challah bread, tofu-salmon-watercress salad, chow mein, and tako namasu.

Foods from all cultures come together on this holiday table

And I'm especially impressed by Kevin and Adriana Torres Chong's Mexican-Korean-Japanese holiday banquet which included Achiote turkey, mandoo, sashimi, and a coconut flan. Kevin is the chef de cuisine of Chef Mavro and Adriana is the instructor for Mexican Cuisine at KCC (one can only imagine how amazing this feast prepared by two chefs must have been!). Kevin and Adriana drew on their respective Korean and Mexican cultures to assemble this holiday dinner, which took place on Thanksgiving, but is also Christmas and New Year's rolled into one giant feast, as Thanksgiving is the only holiday of the season that Kevin has off.

Fish and zucchini jun

The turkey was coated with Achiote, a traditional adobo sauce inherited by the Mayan culture. Side dishes to the turkey included pickled red onions and habaneros, a chorizo-mushroom stuffing, and a traditional gravy (sometimes we just can't escape tradition!). Kevin's mother provided the Korean side of the feast, including kimchee (of course), fish jun, zucchini jun, Korean-spiced shrimp, and mandoo. To help round out the celebration, a sister brought a local favorite, Chinese vegetable stew, and an uncle who's also the owner of Sushi Masa in Honolulu brought a sashimi platter, a nod to Hawaii's way of celebrating the new year.

Coconut flan

For dessert, a coconut flan to cap off the fete that spanned two continents and more cultures than we had the stomach space for!

A week in Oregon: farmers markets, Le Pigeon, a yurt, miles of coastline, Thanksgiving in a trunk, and movie theater pubs

We spent a week in Oregon...it wasn't planned that way; we were supposed to go to Vancouver, Canada for four days, then fly down to Portland for the rest of the week, but the night before our flight to Vancouver, I dug out my passport and discovered it had expired. All my best laid plans were undone one by one as I called hotels and airlines to cancel and reroute. We booked a flight straight to Portland just three hours before it left, and I rather morosely boarded as Ben schemed ways I could cross the border. As it always does, though, it all worked out. Probably the best part of the huge snafu was spending more time with a high school friend, her new baby, and not-so-new husband while indulging in her blueberry coffeecake that still managed to be delicious and beautiful even though half of it ended up on the bottom of her oven. (We can't all be perfect all the time :) Because of her pregnancy, she was on a preservative-free, organic diet which appeared remarkably easy as Ben and I perused farmers' markets and New Seasons Market, filled with fresh, local, organic produce, meat, grains and dairy.

Reading labels in the grocery aisles, walking around Portland's myriad too-cute neighborhoods and looking at restaurant menus, Portland appears to be a DIY food utopia where everyone mills locally-grown wheat, brews their own beer from hops just a few miles away, butchers their own free-range pigs, poultry, cows, hunts elk and buffalo, picks mushrooms in the forest (but being careful to wear bright colors so that they don't get shot by the hunters), knows exactly what to do with each of the twenty different varieties of apples grown in the state, all while blithely riding their bikes in the cold rain. Even Oregon fast-food chains like Burgerville and Hot Lips pizza promote fresh, local, sustainable. It's ridiculous. I love it.


Do Portlanders even read all the farm descriptors on the menu anymore? Are "local" and "sustainable" just buzzwords that everyone throws around now or do they actually mean something to everyone and every restaurant that uses it? One of our best meals was at Le Pigeon, where the menu was spare, as if to distance themselves from menus that read like farm rosters and focus on the food (which if you do inquire, is of course locally and sustainably raised).

What we ordered: Beef Cheek Bourguignon (like Edward the vampire of Twilight, a rather menacing-looking piece of meat, but dark, complex, soft and yielding, like every high school girl's dream); Pork Belly, sweet & sour, slaw; Poussin, brussel sprouts, truffle; Cornbread, maple ice cream, bacon; Foie gras profiteroles with caramel and sea salt. I was too nervous about the idea of foie gras ice cream for a full order of the profiteroles, so I asked for just one. And I'm glad I did...new experiences are always fun, but instead of eating liver for dessert, I'd rather be battling Ben for the cornbread.


Despite finding ice on the car in the morning and still being cold no matter how many layers we put on, I was ready to move to Portland. Anyways, the cold allowed us to pack an entire Thanksgiving feast in the trunk of the car, from Rome apples with a pink flesh to brussel sprouts to celeriac to a Bronze turkey "that was just walking around yesterday", while we meandered for two days, refrigerator-less, through the Kennedy School (former school/hotel/brewery/movie theater), miles of spectacular Oregon coastline, a yurt, down to North Bend, to have Thanksgiving with Ben's parents. Rather inadvertently, this Thanksgiving dinner turned out to be an entirely local feast, though more traditional, as Oregon's bounty includes dairy, wheat, potatoes, and of course, turkey...almost all of it we picked up at the farmer's market.

One of my favorite things about Portland food is its heartiness; it appears to take its cue (and 'cue) from "soul food." Maybe it's just the time of year that we visited, but it seems that any brunch place worth its salt serves chicken and waffles, and meat (local, of course) is the star of most menus. While I could see it being easy to be vegetarian in Portland, it's even easier to be a carnivore...and an alcoholic...with Oregon's famous microbrews. Ben, a frat boy in college, says our week in Portland rivaled his alcoholic consumption in college. All the movie theaters we went to--the Living Room, Cinetopia, McMenamin's Kennedy School--served alcohol and food ranging from decent to the best chili fries I've ever had. Beer, movies, food, sustainability...there's a lot we could learn.