Happy Lunar New Year!

Ever since I saw Eat Drink Man Woman when I was fourteen, I've been captivated by the idea of inflating a duck to produce a crispy skin Peking duck, which made Chinese banquets with noisy relatives that stretched too far into the night, long after all the food had been eaten, a little more bearable. With food, it's hard to separate the memories from the taste, and sometimes I wonder if the reason I love duck so much is because it reminds me of time spent with my Dad: always ordering duck if it was on the menu in a French restaurant, eating duck noodles at our neighborhood Chinese restaurant, picking out roast duck at the Chinese butcher shop on Broadway St. in San Francisco. My dad would choose the duck with the fewest creases, reasoning that it was the least fatty. I'm not sure of the reasoning, but any duck he chose would have juicy breast meat with a hardly a trace of fat between it and the skin, which I discovered later, on my own, is not always the case.

The theory behind inflating the duck is to separate the skin from the duck so that when it roasts, the fat is rendered completely, leaving behind only a crisp skin. For our Chinese New Year feast this year, I was determined to make my own Peking duck. It doesn't really make sense to, cost wise, especially when Nam Fong in Chinatown sells a delicious roast duck for $16, but sometimes, curiosity consumes us. I bought my duck, cleaned it, and then inserted one end of our bike pump under the flap of skin by the neck, and started pumping, waiting for all my childhood fantasies of cooking duck come true. It didn't work...I guess you could say I was deflated... How does one get a tight seal with duck skin?! So much for childhood dreams. So instead, I just separated the skin from the duck with my hands, getting all up in that duck's business, wearing the duck like a glove. After boiling the duck for a few minutes to tighten the skin and marinating it in a solution of shoyu, five spice, honey, shaoxing wine, and Chinese black vinegar, I hung it up next to a fan to dry for 8 hours, all in the hopes of achieving that perfect, crisp skin. I'm not sure if it's the humidity and heat, but the duck never really dried out.

And in the end? It wasn't that great...not enough flavor, and definitely no crisp skin. A disappointment, yes, but still an adventure that I'll remember as I head into Nam Fong.

The other dishes, thankfully, were less of a failure: Chinese style steamed whole opakapaka, caught by a friend, char siu chow mein, Hunan braised tofu, garlic eggplant, stir-fried Kauai shrimp with XO sauce, and lettuce wraps with turkey (instead of squab because it was ridiculously cheap...what better way to celebrate my Chinese-ness with my cheapness?) and fresh water chestnuts. I first tasted fresh water chestnuts working in the restaurant, and even though they're a pain to peel, they're worth it. They're sweet and crisp, like an asian pear.

For dessert, homemade nian gao. The nian gao I'm used to is stiffer than what is sold in Chinatown here, and full of goodies like red bean and Chinese dates. It holds up to pan-frying, resulting in a crisp outside and gooey middle. And not so traditional, a Vietnamese affogato: a shot of espresso with tapioca and a scoop of condensed milk ice cream. Not used to drinking coffee anymore, it literally kept me awake the *entire* night.

Pie Day: quite possibly the best holiday ever

Our friend Justin organized the First Annual Pie Day by the Hawaiian Chapter of the Pie Council on Friday. More than 30 people turned up, each bringing a pie: shepherd's pie, pot pie, taco pie, elk pies, mini pies stuffed with feta and spinach, Frito pie (my favorite...the only thing that could've made it better was if it were actually served in the Frito bag) and some twenty more savory pies that I couldn't even try because I had to move onto dessert pies: two Bubbies ice cream pies, a chocolate haupia pie, my own banana cream pie, and more. 

I didn't get any pictures of the spread. Anyways, it would have been impossible to capture its magnitude. To keep pie day spirit alive, above is a chicken and kale pot pie I made to try to use up all the kale (superfood's newest darling, it appears) that's coming in my CSA box. 

Happy Inauguration Day!

The inaugural luncheon, along with recipes, has been posted here, modeled after foods Lincoln enjoyed. If I weren't busy watching the inauguration and planning a Chinese New Year feast later in the week, I'd be tempted to reproduce the menu. Instead, we're having khao soi tonight, a northern Thai noodle curry dish. I keep trying trying to find some kind of symbolism that makes khao soi appropriate for the inauguration (like eating noodles to promote long life for Obama) but the simple reason is just we like it, and what better reason when celebrating an incoming president that we're excited about.

Other inauguration foods being enjoyed today...bacon, eggs, and grits; hamburgers; donuts; red, white, and blue smoothies. And for SYT producer Melanie, on her table today are North Shore Cattle Co. grass fed beef burgers, "in keeping with Barack's themes of community and a grass roots campaign." She says's there's no pun intended, but I don't believe her.

mochi pounding

I attended Tenrikyo Church's mochi-tsuki, or mochi making, a few weeks ago. Never having made mochi (but eating plenty of it!), I never realized that traditional mochi is made by pounding glutinous sweet rice (or mochi rice). The end result is so texturally smooth and homogenous that it's hard to imagine it used to be a thousand individual grains of rice. In the Shinto tradition, each grain of rice symbolizes a tamashii, or human soul, so rice cakes represent millions of souls. I'm told that pounding and handling the rice is a purifying and reflective act, but I can't help wondering, if each grain of rice is a soul, why are we pounding it instead of leaving it whole and undisturbed?


The rice is soaked overnight and then steamed in wooden steamers for an hour. A batch is put in the usu, what looks like a large stone mortar, and then pounded with big wooden hammers, or kine. Three of the biggest guys from Tenrikyo Church circle around the usu, using their kine as pestles, grinding the mochi rice as they walk around the usu. After about five minutes, they stop circling, and taking turns, they lift their kine and bring it down like a hammer onto the mochi, literally pounding the mochi. They work quickly, before the mochi cools and becomes less malleable.


When the dough is smooth, it's transferred to a table dusted with rice flour where other members of the church tackle it, pinching off small balls of dough and filling them with azuki and rolling them in kinako (roasted soy flour). When I get my mochi, it's still warm, and I devour all those souls in two quick bites.

Farmers markets as cultural activities

When I plan trips, I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I rarely figure museums and other such cultural activities into the itinerary. Instead, it's farmers markets and food musts like Le Pigeon and Waffle Window in Portland, and Pink's and Sprinkles in Los Angeles, with a hike here and there to crank up the appetite again. But in defense of my gluttonous, culture devoid life, I discover more about the culture of a place via its food than I would at any museum or art venue, even in the ridiculously long line at Pink's Hot Dogs. Because to me, that's what food and LA is about. In a trend and fad obsessed city, waiting hours for a hot dog or a cupcake or frozen yogurt is all part of the food experience, and as long as what's at the end of the line is a little more than decent, the wait makes it all the better. (Though in breaking with our tradition of only going to places with long lines in LA, we did have a meal at JiRaffe on account of Chef Raphael Lunetta's superlative foie gras preparation at Roy's 20th Anniversary.)


There's no art gallery that could be more beautiful to me than the stalls of farmers markets, especially that of San Francisco's Ferry Building. From produce as "ordinary" as grapes to the surreal Buddha's Hand citron to fragrant bunches of lavender, it engages all my senses in no way paintings or sculptures could.


Maybe it's also all the experiences and memories that I've had with food that I don't have with canvas and paint. The sight of romanesco (below) reminds me of my stage at Coi, one of the most exhilarating experiences in my culinary career, when I plucked tiny morsels from the stems to be blanched and served with a shred of preserved lemon. (Oh, where we get our kicks from...) And I can't resist getting three dozen oysters from the Hog Island booth, to recapture memories of friends and I in Point Reyes, shucking literally hundreds of oysters, straight from the ocean, slurping them while perfectly cold and briny.


When I'm at the Ferry Building farmers market, I always pick up a pastry from Frog Hollow, producers of the flakiest pastries filled with luscious fruit, and thick slabs of smoky bacon from Fatted Calf. It's all very expensive (which I think is partially due to the fact that half of the clientele at this market are tourists), but while my frugal mind screams a little everytime I buy things here, I know it's worth it, and the producers deserve it.

We cap our trip with a visit to Yountville, Thomas Keller's city with three of his restaurants and bakery. Brunch at ad hoc consists of a Smoked trout, soft-boiled egg, pumpkin seed, and frisee salad with a Meyer lemon vinaigrette; Chicken, duck, and spinach crepes topped with fried sage; and a puckeringly tart lime and pomegranate granita with a creme fraiche whipped cream and sprinkled with crushed almond cookies.