Home Cookin'

Once outfitted with their adorable training chopsticks, the kids requested a chopstick worthy meal. Months later, I still get a ton of visitors googling for the yatsumi zuke tsukemono (koko) recipe I posted. So, somebody out there is hungry for Hawaii food and I thought I'd share a little more.

First up, how to Hawaii-fy your leftover grilled (or in this case, roasted) chicken breast. I just slice it up, mince some ginger and sprinkle liberally, grind a little pepper and dab on a touch of soy sauce. That's a great way to Hawaii-fy anything, really. We like to cube extra firm tofu and give it the same treatment.



Another super easy dish is not-really-pickled cucumbers. We like to use rokusuke salt which is rock salt infused with mushroom flavor by a big kahuna chef in Japan who no longer allows it to be sold outside his restaurant and therefore I have a bone to pick with him. But, any coarse salt will do. Add some rice vinegar, and let sit for about a half hour. So yum and super simple.



On to a Hawaii staple, which you call soy sauce and we call shoyu. The Internet tells me shoyu is a specific kind of soy sauce. Huh. News to me. Anyhoo. I dearly miss my Aloha Brand Shoyu, which is so good that you can get it all over the place these days. Except apparently Stuttgart, Germany. So, to make the dreaded Kikkoman palatable, I've been resorting to an old Hawaii trick. Start with a little rice vinegar, add some minced garlic and ginger and then if you're lucky enough to be in Hawaii, slit the sides of a Hawaiian chili pepper and toss that in (thai peppers work pretty well, too). If you're out of reach of either, red pepper flakes work in a pinch.

You'll end up with something that looks like this, but you'll have to snag your own totally awesome Sailor Moon dish.



And now for something my mainland and European readers will likely find totally disgusting. But, if you grew up chowing down on satojoyu at drive in movie theaters, you would be all natsukashi over this recipe, too.

For satojoyu, toss a can of vienna sausage (no, not ew!), liquid and all, and some chopped spam and cabbage into a pot. Cover with water, then add about 2 teaspoons of sugar and 3 tablespoons of soy sauce. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for about 15 minutes. I didn't have any spam or cabbage on hand, so the picture I took just features bloated vienna sausage swimming in soy sauce and really it's not a pretty dish anyway but still leaving that one out.

In conclusion, well...not a dazzling spread. But, you can find recipes for things like chicken katsu and lomi lomi salmon all over. It's the little touches that round out a meal that are always a little tougher to hunt down. And here they are! Well, a few of them...