Aloha and mahalo for all the mochi!

Yikes!!! I realized when I looked at the last post that it had been waaaay over a month since I last posted. Sort of hard to have a blog if you don't post, isn't it?

Stuff happens, as we all know, so I hope you forgive me when I tell you all about the much needed vacation that I took over Thanksgiving. As you may have figured out from the title and the photo accompanying this post, I had an exotic tropical vacation in Hawai'i...Honolulu to be specific. ( I just love saying "Honolulu"... it's such a fun word!)

During the summer, a friend invited me to spend the holiday with her and her extended family, who live on Oahu, and after emptying my frequent flier mile account, I was on my way to paradise.

I had a direct flight from Atlanta to Honolulu, and let me tell you, 9+ hours is too freaking long to spend on a plane and not be in first class...why, oh, why Delta, do you not let people who redeem their frequent flyer miles have a shot at the upgrade lottery? (That's all the whining I'll do, because it was so worth the ride!)

Hawai'i has always been a source of fascination for me...and not just for the whole Magnum, PI thing, either. It's always seemed so exotic and unattainable, and the closer it got to checkin time, the more I was bouncing off the walls in anticipation.

This trip was not the usual tourist trip--I saw and did some touristy things, but this was more of a "hang out with the locals" kind of trip...sort of doing a Bourdain and heading off the beaten (and expensive!) paths. For Hawai'i is nothing if not expensive...except for food. I found the food to be very reasonably priced, especially since we ate at a lot of local Honolulu spots.

I didn't do a luau--gotta save something for the next trip--but I did have a great Thanksgiving dinner with a decided Asian twist. And, since this blog is about food and the cooking and eating of it, let's get to it!

Day 1 in Paradise included a sojourn into Chinatown and a tour of the downtown area--gotta have your picture made with King Kamehameha, you know. Honolulu Chinatown is a wild market place, full of amazing little markets, exotic produce, and street food. My friend's dad, henceforth known as "Granpa," took us on a winding little tour through a market and down several streets. He would pop into a shop and come out with some little delicacy for us to sample. We had a giant rice noodle tube stuffed with pork and onions, drizzled with shoyu (soy sauce), and cut up into pieces that we ate with our hands. He passed around a bag of "dragon eyes," which turned out to be a fruit, longan to be exact When you took the outer shell off, it looks like the inside of a grape and has about the same texture. It was sort of sweet and tangy.

We traveled to the downtown area and saw the state capitol, which tells the story of Hawai'i by it's very structure. The building has a little reflecting pool around it, which represents the water surrounding the islands. There are two pillars visible underneath each side, which represent volcanoes and support each side of the legislature. Each of the legislative chambers is decorated in colors that reflect the island--one side is reds and oranges (sun and lava) and the other is greens and blues (for the sky and rainforests). Grammy walked us around the area and told us many interesting things about the downtown buildings, and having a local tour guide really made the day even more special.

We finished up with lunch in the food court of the Ala Moana Center, a very large, high-end shopping center/mall. Yeah, yeah, food court is not exactly what one has in mind when visiting a tropical paradise, but there was a lot of local places in the food court that were just screaming to be tried. Al Moana Poi Bowl was the place of choice for lunch, and I got the Local Boy special plate lunch, which was pretty much a tour of local Hawai'ian food--kalua pig, lau lau, lomi salmon, and poi.

Ah, poi...that's some mystical stuff...mystical icky stuff. Light purplish-gray, with a thick, pasty consistency, and it's got a wang to it. Evidently, it works better if you dip some food into it, sort of using it as rice. Let just say that I probably wouldn't order it again. I like taro for the most part--taro fries, taro chips are good, but poi is has no "joi" for me.

Laulau is interesting...the one I had was roast pork and a piece of butter fish wrapped in taro leaves and steamed. The taro leaves were like a bitter spinach, which I dunked in the poi to see if that made the poi edible (sort of). The pork was tender, and the fish was a little surprise, because I wasn't expecting it. The kaula pork was like salty barbecue--lightly smoked and very tender; I ate every scrap of that, of course.

There was also lomi-lomi salmon, diced salted raw salmon mixed with tomatoes and onions, along with rice and macaroni salad. It was finished off with haupia (a coconut pudding-style dessert), which was wonderful. This lunch was a version of the Hawaiian culinary staple, the plate lunch. Plate lunch, Hawaiian style, is usually 2 scoops of rice, a scoop of macaroni salad, and then a protein/entree; I subbed the poi for the rice, because I had to try it. Plate Lunch is a lot like the Southern "meat and 3" plate lunch.

I'm a big fan of plate lunches...a big fan, and we had another one at L&L Barbecue, a local chain that is slowly franchising on the Mainland. I can only hope that it comes this way soon. Plate lunch at L&L consisted of rice, mac salad, and some yummy Korean-style barbecue ribs. Forget the haute cuisine--I can eat Asian street food at every meal.

We went to L&L after a day of flying kites and hanging out at the beach, and then we followed up the meal with fresh hot malasadas from Leonard's next door. Malasadas are the Portuguese version of beignets, but better, because they're covered in regular granulated sugar rather than powdered sugar.

And, I did have a fine dining experience of sorts...we went back to the Ala Moana Center for shopping on Saturday after Thanksgiving, and we ate lunch at Alan Wong's Pineapple Room located on the top floor of Macy's.
Remember this post about the disasterous project in Regional Cooking? The Chiclet and I had Pacific Rim cookery, and I pulled together a great PowerPoint that included the 3 big names in Hawaiian cuisine--Roy Yamaguchi, Alan Wong, and Sam Choy. So when D's sister suggested this Alan Wong outpost for lunch, I was all over that!

Chef Wong is into local and sustainable products and features them on his menus. I had the Pineapple Room Burger, because I was just craving a burger for some reason, and I truly think it was one of the best burgers I have ever eaten. From the menu description: Kiawe-Grilled Kuahiwi Ranch Natural Beef Burger, Onion Rings, Bacon, Cheddar Cheese, and Avocado Salsa. There were two onion rings on the burger, one of which I had to remove to even pick the thing up. Those onion rings were made from Maui onions, and I have never had a more tasty onion ring than those. Those onion rings were just works of taste art.

The burger was served with Wasabi Potato Salad, which was good, but not bowl you over good. The wasabi imparted a nice little bite and cleared the ol' sinuses for a moment. D had the “Mac Garlic” Chicken Sandwich, which was chunks of a garlicky teriyaki type of chicken and topped with Furikake Macaroni Salad. Furikake is a salty Japanese condiment with seaweed, sesame seeds, and fish flakes, plus some other seasonings. If I ever made it back to the Pineapple Room, I'd have that next!

Hawaiians are big on snack food, and the one thing that I discovered that I really like is mochi. Japanese in origin, mochi is made from pounded steamed glutinous rice. It becomes a dough-like substance that is usually wrapped around a variety of fillings--peanut butter mochi was a particular favorite of mine. We also had mochi ice cream, which consists of balls of ice cream encased in the mochi--most tasty. Of course, I want more and am trying to figure out how to get it here. I may need to pay a visit to the Asian markets here in town and see if I can find some, or better yet, the Buford Highway Farmer's Market in Atlanta.

Monday after Thanksgiving was our military history day and my last day in paradise. We got up really early and went to get tickets for the USS Arizona Memorial tour. There's a lot of construction happening at the site, progress on a new visitor's center, and unfortunately, the Missouri was in drydock, so we didn't get to tour it.

When you go into the visitor's center, you file into a little theater to watch a film about the attack on Pearl Harbor. The park rangers are very clear that this is NOT a tourist attraction, that it is a grave site, and respect is the order of the day. After the film, a very solemn crowd filed out and onto an open-sided boat for the 20-minute ride out to the sunken ship. On our boat, we had a veteran...he wasn't a Pearl Harbor survivor, rather someone who w

as stationed there right after the attack. It was his first time back to Pearl Harbor since that time, and the staff gave him a special pin and allowed him to get off the boat first when we arrived at the memorial.

When you first see the marble wall at the opposite end of the memorial, listing the names of everyone who perished in the attack, it clutches at your heart to see how many are chiseled into the wall. War sucks, no matter what side you are on.

After the visit to the memorial, we had breakfast at McDonald's. And, yes, I really wanted to go to McDonald's, because I hadn't had that one staple of Hawaiian cuisine...drum roll, please!...SPAM!

At Hawaiian McDonald's, you have some choices that aren't available stateside. There's taro pies, haupia pies, both of which were not available, McTeri burgers with teriyaki sauce, and McSaimen, a noodle dish. And, for breakfast, there's the Local Deluxe Breakfast platter. The Local Deluxe consists of 2 scoops of rice, omelet-style scrambled eggs, 2 slices of grilled Spam, and 3 slices of Portuguese sausage. Best fast food breakfast ever, hands down.

(And, the coolest thing was that the trash cans said "mahalo," which is Hawaiian for "thank you")

After breakfast, we hiked around Punchbowl, the National Cemetery of the Pacific, where some of the Pearl Harbor casualties are buried. The view from the top of Punchbowl crater encompasses a large part of the Honolulu shoreline and is amazing. The 30-foot tall statue of Lady Columbia looking out over the grave sites is awe-inspiring as well. If you are of a certain age or watched Nick at Night, you may remember her from the opening credits of Hawaii 5-0.

For my last meal in Hawaii...and yes, I think all I did was eat and gawk at how amazing it is there...we went to Nico's at Pier 38 at the Honolulu Harbor, near where the daily fish auction happens. I had the Furikake Pan Seared Ahi w/ Ginger Garlic Cilantro Sauce and rice, and it was so very very good. I'm usually not a big tuna fan--hate the canned stuff with passion--but like it as sushi or sashimi. We had ahi poke one night at a family dinner, and I fell in love with it, so I ordered my Ahi rare to try and replicate that experience. It was a great meal to end my stay, and I really wanted it to never end. I'm going back one day, and hopefully sooner rather than later...heck, I'm just a winning lottery ticket away from retiring there, as one of my Facebook friends commented.

I mean, how can you not love a place where you see rainbows every single day?

(If you look closely, you'll see it's actually a double rainbow.)

"Be Our Guest!" (Or, Why I Want to Live at Disney World**)

A week or so ago was the first time since the "Great Unpleasantness," i.e., my layoff, that we well and truly got to take a vacation. We spent 6 days in Orlando at the Happiest Place on Earth...6 very long and tiring days and 5 dog-tired nights, but I wouldn't trade them for all the foot massages in the world...well, unless it was foot massages by Tom Selleck in his Magnum PI garb...then, we might have to bargain a little bit.

Say what you will about Disney and The Mouse, whether you love them or hate them for whatever reason, but realize that you can never say that they didn't try to give you a pleasant experience and help you have a good time. In fact, the only times I've ever experienced anything unpleasant in the House of Mouse was as a result of interaction with another guest...rude and entitlement-minded people are everywhere, and sometimes they just have to rain on everyone's parade in order to make their own mean-minded selves feel better.

Enough of that crap and on to the fun stuff! (On which I can and do wax on and on and on!…i.e., this is a loooong post.)

The Man and I have been to Walt Disney World 3 times together, and this was the first time we ever made it to MGM. We were just worn out the last times we were there, and just could not physically make it over there. We saw some cool things--Lightning McQueen and 'Mater were a couple of the highlights, as was the Lights!, Motors!, Action! stunt show display. We were told that it costs $50K each time that show is performed, and that's why it's only available twice a day. If you have small boy children who are crazy about things automotive, then by all means, take them to see this show.

And, be proud of me--I rode the Tower of Terror and did not cry and scream like a ninny...well, I screamed, but I think you are required to do that. For some reason, as I've gotten older, I've gotten rather apprehensive about (read “scared of”) things like amusement park rides. Which is weird and bothersome...like I'm becoming too cautious or one step nearer to my grandmother, who "worried" about everything. She was always predicting your imminent doom because you went off and had fun...her favorite line was "well, 'something' might happen..." What the "something " was never got fully defined, but the possibility of disaster was always there.

(And, let's not forget that the day before, I rode Space Mountain and hated every second of it, and was fully convinced that I really was going to hurtle off the tracks to my imminent doom. Let's face it, I hate roller coasters and roller coaster-like rides. The time I rode Big Thunder Mountain, I did it with my eyes closed and my head in The Man's armpit the whole time...which is a lovely picture, don't you think?) I found the Tower of Terror to be fun, so I can only extrapolate that I can plummet to my doom much better than I can hurtle towards it. Go figure.

But, who the heck cares about the rides and the fact that I waited at the Main Street Barbershop in Magic Kingdom for 20 minutes so I could get glitter and pixie dust shellacked into my hair (which, according to The Man, when I brushed it out of my hair that night, it made our hotel bathroom look like Tinker Bell had thrown up in it), and 20 minutes in a gift store trying to find cute little Minnie Mouse ear barrettes, when we could be talking about the dining?! Because food and the eating of food is where this blog is at!

The first time I went to WDW, I really was not expecting much in the way of good food...it was an amusement park, right? Probably full of rubbery pizza and crappy "parts is parts" chicken strips...big, fat, hairy deal. Yeah, I was so very wrong that it is almost humiliating to admit it, and if you have never been and have the same sort of misconceptions, then have you got a treat in store.

The food and service are amazing, and if you have a bad dining experience, I almost want to make the broad and sweeping generalization that you must have brought it on yourself. The whole world could learn a lot from the Disney concept of hospitality and how to treat guests...it makes you want to never leave, and it's one of the main reasons I think I will never tire of visiting.

I mentioned to The Man that my SS boss has friends who try to "drink around the world" in Epcot's World Showcase. He thought this was a fine idea and promptly stopped at the pub in England to get a pint. He then proceeded to have a beer in France and Morocco and Germany before he had to stop, "because I don't like Peroni (Italian beer)." (And not because he was feeling no pain...no, not that at all. At no time did I say that the friends drank around the world in 1 day, did I?)

We tried several restaurants in the World Showcase that we'd not been to before, and we bemoaned the fate of Akershus, the Norwegian restaurant, which has become princess dining central. Pre-princess, you could partake of a lovely cold smorgasbord buffet that included all the smoked salmon you could eat, along with a sampling of the finest hot dishes that Norway had to offer, which were all served by a bevy of good-looking young women and men--something for everyone. Now, the smorgasbord has been reduced to an appetizer plate, and the place is overrun by princess wannabes. Damn.

Here’s some highlights of what we stuffed our faces with:

Chefs de France is a fine and wonderful dining experience, and how could it not be with a menu developed by 3 of the most famous chefs in France: Paul Bocuse, Gaston Lenôtre, and Roger Vergé. We had a yummy lunch there, starting with the cheese plate and the paté/charcuterie plate, and I had the short ribs with polenta for my main course, and The Man had the Steack hache Angus, champignons et Bearnaise, frites, which turned out to be a 1/2 lb. Angus hamburger with confit onions, mushroom Duxelle, tomatoes and Bearnaise on artisan bread, with French fries…a very good hamburger, it was. We finished up with a cinnamon apple crepe and a fruit salad with Earl Grey syrup.

Our next fine dining experience was dinner in Morocco (Restaurant Marrakesh), and to me, it was the most disappointing, because it wasn’t all that I expected it to be. It was a tasty meal, but nothing that made me sit up, take notice, and start looking for tickets on the Marrakesh Express. We had the Taste of Morocco: Royal Feast, and I think it was kind of a “dumbed down” dining experience, because there were no really exotic flavors that I would have associated with Morrocan Cuisine…it seemed “safe for the masses,” if you know what I mean. Of course, if you ask The Man about the food, he would say “Food? Morocco served food?” because he was thoroughly enjoying the floor show. (Yes, they had a belly dancer, and yes, she was extremely attractive and limber.) The lamb shank was good, and you know I’m kinda wishy washy about lamb, but I ate quite a bit of it. If I opt to dine there again, I’m going for something else, or eat at the counter service café.

The most fun dining we had (not counting my O’Hana Breakfast with Stitch at the Polynesian) was in Germany at the Biergarten. Everyday is Oktoberfest in the Biergarten, which offers a tasty German buffet, with a ton of bratwurst and other sausages, and a mighty fine pork loin…plus all the spatzle one can eat. The dining style is sort of family style, which means you sit with other people if your party isn’t large enough to fill a table. We had a fine time with a family from Mississippi while we watched the floor show (oompah band!). We also chatted with the young man who was carving the pork on the buffet, and it turns out he was doing his culinary school internship and having the time of his life. (Which might be something to keep in mind if I ever decide to finish!)

Hands down, the best meal I think I had was in Italy at Tutto Italia. It’s the only meal I thought to take a picture of, or at least a picture of the antipasta appetizer plate. I would have just been happy with that and a couple of bread baskets. I had pasta with Bolognese sauce, and Th Man had a lovely strip steak and a humongous serving of Zabaglione gelato. (I opted for dessert in France, because I needed to walk off some of our Italian feast before we got in the car and drive 7+ hours home.)

While I ate my tasty cream-filled Napoleon from Boulangerie Patisserie, The Man had his picture taken with Sleeping Beauty, and got her to have a little fun with the pose. She told me that I had “a silly prince,” to which I replied that she didn’t know the half of it.

After The Man finished tormenting Aurora, we piled back in the car and headed for home, where I did laundry for a day before we headed off to WV for holiday visiting with The Man’s family. I hope everyone had a great holiday, and here’s to a fabulous new year!


(**I'm serious...the whole reason I play the lottery is so I can win enough money to spend a month at Disney World...after I which I spend a month at a "fat farm," trying to detox myself.)