a bird in the kitchen

hawai'i food tour

2010-03-08T02:09:46Z

Produce in Honolulu's Chinatown

Attempting to find decent cuisine in a strange town is intimidating. Navigating on your own can be a little scary, especially on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean well-known for its low tolerance of tourists outside Waikiki.

I knew that trying to explore even a small portion of the Oahu food scene by myself would be difficult, so I decided to book a food tour. The most well reviewed food tour on the island is run by Hawaii Food Tours. I was put off by the rather amateur-looking website, but after reading the almost fanatical rave reviews on Trip Advisor and an encouraging phone call placed to owner Matthew Gray, I decided to jump on the bandwagon.

So far, it's the best idea I've had since arriving on the island.

The tour is only about 4 hours long, but by the end I was feeling so fat and sassy I've actually considered scheduling another tour before we head back to the mainland in a couple weeks.

The tour van was immaculate and felt nothing like the stuffy, tourist-trap-y, monstrosities painted in bright primary colors that makes you look like doofus. That's a big plus with me. Add to that two of the most charismatic, gregarious tour guides, Rich and Sahara, and I was sold.

curried sweet potato soup

2010-02-27T16:23:26Z

I knew this soup was going to be good, but I was unprepared for how incredibly delicious it actually was. For being so simple to make it had a surprising depth of flavor.

It's thick and creamy, slightly sweet with just enough heat from the curry to add a lovely complexity. It's topped with a drizzle of cilantro oil (just cilantro and olive oil blended together with a pinch of kosher salt) for a little bit of additional freshness. The key is using fresh ingredients and a high quality curry paste - not a powder, a paste. I like Mae Ploy's pastes and I used the yellow curry paste in this soup. They're often available in Asian supermarkets. I order mine in bulk off Amazon.

I've been seeing how I can model my meals around main ingredients from Carolina Grown (see this post for more details). Mostly because I enjoy eating locally grown, fresh ingredients and I absolutely love the idea of being able to support local farmers as much as I possibly can - but also because planning a menu and sticking with it is a great way to save money.

I already allocate more money to food that most people I know, but I'm still interested in spending as little as possible for the highest quality ingredients I can get my hands on.

Because it's still winter the produce options at CG are limited, but they've got some lovely root vegetables available - including these Carolina Ruby sweet potatoes.

seared chicken with mushroom sauce over barley

2010-02-23T02:56:13Z

A fresh breeze to ruffle the feathers, sun to warm them, freedom to run about and peck at whatever they should choose. Delicious vegetarian feed and a life free of antibiotics and hormones. That's how chickens should be raised. Not in cages or factory farms where they never see the outdoors a moment of their lives. Not where they crawl with bugs and peck each other to death out of fear, anxiety, and a blind attempt at self preservation.

It's not a very appetizing thought, is it? Sadly, it's the reality of commercial farms, the predominant source of meat throughout the US.

It can be difficult to find an alternative to factory farmed meat, though, and the difficulty often outweighs one's conscious. It's so easy to just pop over to the neighborhood supermarket and pick up a pound or two of chicken for dinner and not think about where it came from.

It's an issue that's plagued me significantly since moving to North Carolina. In California it was so easy to find humanely raised meats at nearly any market, but in North Carolina it's been impossible - at least until last week.

Carolina Grown, a relatively new business in central NC, is offering an amazing new service. Produce, dairy, and meat from solely NC growers delivered directly to your door for a surprisingly reasonable flat fee.

red wine braised short ribs

2010-02-18T12:50:42Z

Once relegated to the scrap heap, trendy restaurants all over have revamped the short rib and transformed it into contemporary rustic cuisine. After marinating some in red wine for two days and braising them nice and slow for a few hours I can definitely see why.

Short ribs have long received the same bad wrap as the Boston butt roast (pork shoulder), but that's due in large part to people who have been cooking them improperly. These fat marbled, cartilage ridden cuts of meat require a nice, long, low-heat bath to slowly transform all that greasy fat and yuck into meltingly decadent, fork tender meat that quite literally falls of the bone with the merest of touches.

These are a great weekend meal because they do require attention every 45 minutes for turning - in total about 3 hours or so of braising. But, braising is great because even though it does take a significant amount of time to cook, most of that time is hands off.

five spice duck breast with honey soy glaze and sesame noodles

2010-02-14T23:39:03Z

This has definitely become one of my favorite preparations for duck breast. I first tried it in DC over the holidays at my MiL's house, but both of us had difficulties with the prescribed cooking time. I botched it twice, and with the price of boneless duck breasts I was about to give up on the recipe entirely.

I gave it a couple more shots and I've come away from it very pleased. Turns out if you use a duck breast twice the size of the one the recipe calls for it's going to take a little longer to cook.

The five spice combination of star anise, clove, cinnamon, anise seed, and Sichuan peppercorn is the perfect accompaniment to the richness of the duck breast. The sesame noodles are flavored just enough to please, but simply enough to complement the rich, aggressive flavor of the duck.

mushroom stuffed quail

2010-02-09T17:44:24Z

Something about eating quail always makes me feel like a giant. I like picking up one of the tiny little drumsticks and thinking, "Fee, fi, fo fum..." in my head.

Another great thing about quail? They're delicious. They may look like miniature chickens or a cornish game hen, but the flavor present in quail is unlike any other. It's equivalent to comparing the flavor of duck to chicken. Worlds apart.

Plus, they're incredibly impressive to serve at a dinner party and done right, just as easy to prepare.

The best way to buy quail is already deboned. This means that the only bones left in the little guy are the drumsticks and the wings. They're simple (and civilized) to eat and require no navigating around tiny little bones.

sour cream zeppole

2010-02-04T15:09:56Z

Zeppole are an Italian style ball doughnut with more variations than one could count. They can be both sweet and savory, light and fluffy or dense and cakelike.

It seems that there is little zeppole can't be - including delicious. The dinner at Tenh Penh has proved to be particularly inspirational for recipes, for it is there that I had the most delicious doughtnut I've ever had in my life.

I should add right now that I have never liked doughnuts. I'm not typically a fan of much anything that's sweet, instead favoring savory preparations or a dessert with a strong sourness or bitterness - like this Meyer lemon tart. However, at Tenh Penh I ordered a doughnut dessert just because I wanted to see how they made them.

When they arrived they were piping hot, fresh from the fryer and coated in a cinnamon sugar mixture. I have never enjoyed a doughnut quite so much as I enjoyed those little beauties.

After returning home I was still itching to have another so I set out to find just the right type of recipe. I chose, instead of a yeast recipe, a doughnut leavened with baking powder. The addition of sour cream adds not sourness, but a creamy, underlying richness and a complexity of flavor that strays far from the flat sweetness of your typical maple bar.

Almond Cakes

2010-01-30T22:04:31Z

When TA and I went to DC for New Years we had the chance to dine at Tenh Penh with the MiL and sFiL. While the service could have used a little polishing, the food was particularly delicious. At the end of the meal, in lieu of the traditional fortune cookie, four gorgeous little cakes were dropped off at the table.

They were about the size of a half dollar and smelled gloriously of almonds. They were chewy and dense and sweet and ridiculously delicious. TA and I are both fans of Asian cuisine, especially any sweets made with mochiko, a glutinous rice flour.

First attempt - not enough liquid, too puffy, and not enough sugar or almond extract.I decided right then and there that I absolutely had to try and make these at home and after two failed attempts I finally succeeded. Although these would be even better if I had a mini-muffin pan, they are nevertheless satisfying.

Swordfish Tacos

2010-01-27T02:59:16Z

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, fish tacos aren't really that different from any other kind of taco. Now that I've spent a good deal of time outside of that region, I've found that it isn't nearly as common as I thought.

Even TA thought the idea of eating fish in a taco was quite odd - and made several dirty jokes about the whole idea.

It really is totally refreshing. Whether it's grilled halibut or beer-battered mahi mahi, fish just seems a natural juxtaposition to the light flavors of fresh mex cuisine. The MiL was kind enough to bring me a cooler full of goodies from Whole Foods last time she visited and tucked a beautiful swordfish steak in with all of the other delicious treats.

Swordfish is very different from the traditional flaky texture of most fish - in fact, almost meat like. TA remarked that the texture wasn't hugely different from chicken. I think it's a great fish to try out in a taco for the first time, simply grilled and seasoned with just olive oil, kosher salt, and freshly ground black pepper.

Tropical Fruit Granita

2010-01-22T02:08:37Z

One of my favorite things about wintertime is the profusion of citrus fruits. I can stuff myself day after day with navel oranges, honey tangerines, ruby red grapefruits, clementines, blood oranges - you name it, I'll eat it.

I suppose, if nothing else, I'll never get scurvy.

That being said, I found myself with a few too many fruits the other day. I had forgotten about the five pound bag of oranges I'd bought one day and came home the next with an eight pound bag. That's a few too many for our house even.

After indulging in fresh squeezed orange juice for a couple days I decided to make a navel orange sorbet. However, even though my ice cream maker attachment was frozen solid and my sorbet base was chilled thoroughly, it refused to set up. I fell back on popsicles, but even then they weren't too my liking. The navel oranges just don't offer enough in complexity of flavor to make a satisfying frozen treat. Best eaten directly out of hand, or squeezed.