Small Celebration

Are you married? How long?

The DH and I have been for THIRTY-TWO years! And we'd been together for some years before that!

One of my excuses for not going to school reunions is that I know many of my classmates have sadly divorced and remarried. Or not.

It's not easy staying together for that many years. People change. Compromise is important. Tolerance is key.

sigh. The DH tolerates a lot of things. We agree on many. Still, we are very different people.

We produced male offspring we are very proud of!

So, how to celebrate? No big steak with lots of wine and ceremony and obsequious (I had to look up the spelling!) waiters. Though we do sometimes enjoy that. The DH jokingly named his favorite ramen place, and I gave him the STINK EYE!

Instead, on Saturday after my work day was done, we headed off to Hiroshi for happy hour. Martinis are 1/2 price and so is the food, as is the food from Vino, the brother restaurant next door. We've been to Vino for dinner, and prefer the food and vibe at Hiroshi. The bartenders, too!

Zoe was swamped last night, even though they opened 5 minutes early - at 5:25 pm. Six of us stormed in, quickly followed by 2 more, and more, until the bar was full. We knew we wanted the hamachi carpaccio and asparagus Milanese with egg, parmesan and white truffle oil. And the steak with two large shrimp on top. We also had the gnocchi with crab. DH had the Echigo beer, and I had a lychee martini. Or two. We were FULL by the time 6:30 came around, the sun was still up, and we took half the steak plate home. It made a wonderful brunch the next day!

If you like all the above, you MUST go to Hiroshi. I THINK you can also order Vino food for dinner as you sit in Hiroshi. You will want some of each!

We headed to the mall after, as I'd forgotten an errand! Then to sad Borders bookstore, a shell of its former self. Needless to say, we didn't stay long. Instead, we headed for Tango Market, for great coffee, an extremely small guava danish, and too-yummy toffee-chocolate macadamia nuts.

Next weekend is the DH's birthday, and we'll continue the celebration with several lunches!

How do YOU celebrate? And what are you celebrating?

I Had a Heart Attack...on a Plate

The DH and I went to the big Blaisdell Farmer's Market yesterday. Ostensibly, we were there to buy locally grown bananas, papayas, carrots, tomatoes, green onions and eggplant.

But we also go there to eat dinner. I'd been wanting to try a dish from Soul Restaurant, but they didn't have it until this past Wednesday. I'd already tried the fried chicken with cornbread, black-eyed pea chili and buttermilk cilantro coleslaw - those last two are too, too yummy! - and the gumbo.

I needed to try the Shrimp and Cheesy Grits - and it was FINALLY on the menu!

I ordered, then I saw the cook heat up a skillet and slip in some butter. Then LOTS of garlic. Plump shrimp - looked to be 26/30 size. Flour, a few chiffonade greens and sun-dried tomato, water. A scoop of grits - the white cornmeal kind. This wasn't fast food - it took a good 10 to 12 minutes. I made my way to where the DH was sitting. He'd already started on his spare ribs.

I sat down and opened the ecologically correct clamshell takeout box. What an aroma! I took the first bite - yikes! Can you say RICH? Cheese-y, buttery. I ate bacon fat before I realized that's what it was, 'cause I sure hadn't seen him slip that in! I made sure to eat around the fat and only ate the bacon meat after that!

Also, there looked to be cream cheese - I thought they were cheddar grits! - under the grits. It was all very, very good, but so rich I could only eat four bites - 2 of grits, 2 of shrimp - as I'd eaten a late lunch at 2 pm. More about the lunch later! Many hours after that, I was hungry enough to eat about half the shrimp and grits. Tonight I ate the rest of the leftovers for dinner. Along with half a big sliced tomato and some leftover mixed vegetables. I am STILL burping garlic!

About the lunch: it was California organic brown rice maki sushi from Nijiya. Very fresh and delicious - what a way to get your fiber! Since I hadn't eaten breakfast, it was TWO meals!

OK, I can eat that sushi lunch any day, but the shrimp and cheesy grits were a one-time experience!

Have you ever had shrimp with cheesy grits? Did you live to tell the tale?

The Most Delicious Beans - the Tooting Comes with the Territory

These are the most delicious beans you will ever taste.

I eat less meat all the time. I still eat it, but the portions may be just a few bites compared to what's on the rest of my plate. Tonight, it was a strange array of leftovers, fruit and rice. The leftovers were a few bites of pork and fish-stuffed calamari that the DH brought home from a potluck. (This is what happens when you're last to leave the party - the remains are thrust upon you! It was a gathering of cigar smokers. Yes, it was outdoors, but I can't take more than 2 or 3 hours of this, and he was there for SEVEN HOURS.)

ANYWAY! The fruit was slices of insanely honey-sweet melon. The rice was also leftover, combined with beans I'd cooked. The ratio of beans to rice was one cup of beans - with some of the cooking liquid - to 1.5 to 2 cups of rice. I served it with the remains of a jar of Newman's salsa to which I added a handful of chopped cilantro, a small chopped tomato and the juice of 1/2 a lime.

When I was packaging the beans - some to eat later, others to freeze - the last Ziploc bag slipped from my fingers, and I lost a third of the pot of beans I'd cooked! I spent a moment mourning them, as they truly are the MOST delicious beans you will ever taste! Here is the recipe:

Basic Cooked Pinto Beans
Based on a recipe from cdkitchen.com

• 1 lb. pinto beans
• 1 small onion, minced
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 bay leaf
• 2 tsp oregano
• 7 to 8 cups stock
• 2 tsp cumin
• 2 tsp coarse salt

Quick-soak beans by covering with water, bringing to a boil, then cook at a rolling boil for 10 minutes. Remove from heat, cover and leave for one hour. Pour off water, rinse, then place beans in pot with liquid (water is fine), onion, garlic, bay leaf and oregano. Bring to a boil, then simmer until tender, adding liquid as necessary. This may take up to 1-½ hours. Remove from heat, add cumin and salt and stir well. Let sit for 15 minutes. The recipe calls for draining the beans well - I don't, I keep the liquid. Makes about 6 cups of beans.

If you're adventurous, and want to make a healthy and delicious dip, try the following recipe:


Pinto Bean Hummus

• 2-1/2 cups basic cooked pinto beans
• ¼ cup green onions, sliced
• 2 tsp sesame oil
• 2 Tbsp lemon juice
• ¼ cup sun dried tomato strips, soaked in water to cover
• 2 cloves garlic, zapped one minute in microwave in tomato soaking water

Place drained tomato and drained garlic in food processor bowl and run until chopped. Add basic cooked beans, lemon juice, green onions and sesame oil and process until smooth enough to your liking. Add tomato or bean liquid if it’s too solid. Turn into a serving dish, top with a little extra virgin olive oil and edible herbs of your choice. Serve with multi-grain pita cut into wedges, carrot sticks, cucumber slices and celery sticks. Use remainder of beans in soup or with rice, or freeze.

Epilogue: A Short Meditation on Beans

I'm very picky about the ones I'll eat. Growing up, the only beans we saw were kidney, lima and green. Often the kidney beans and/or the limas were cooked with a lot of sugar and served as a very sweet side dish. I'm not sure if this is a phenomenon peculiar to Hawaii or local Japanese. The green beans came from a can, the freezer or were string beans served with pork or a pork product (Spam or Treet luncheon meat) and shoyu. 

As I started to taste different foods, and began to cook for myself and my family, I found that garbanzos (aka chickpeas or ceci), black-eyed peas, soybeans, black, azuki and pinto beans were the ones I liked best. I find that all of these have better texture and flavor than the other beans, IMO.

To this day, I still can't bear to eat a kidney or lima bean!

BTW, the tooting comes with the territory...

Dragon and other Exotic Tropical Fruit

I just got off the phone with my son. In far-off Minneapolis, the most constant and consistant-found tropical fruit available are mangoes. From Mexico. He assured me that they're pretty good. He also enjoyed some golden raspberries, which I've never seen here in Honolulu. I did have some of those in Portland, OR that were yummy.

Still, we had some awesome locally-grown fruit last week. The DH came home with a large dragon fruit. A colleague said a neighbor found the plant growing in his yard. It looks like it was designed - an ovoid fuchsia fruit with green barbs and "scales". Here's a photo and more information from a website, http://dragon-fruit.biz/ :

I put the gaudy solo fruit in a paper bag for several days, then quartered it and easily pulled off the fuchsia skin. I sliced the fruit into bite-sized chunks, chilled it and served it with lime and mint as a side dish at dinner. The flesh was white, and freckled with seeds. I felt the taste was relatively bland - like a cross between a kiwi and melon or banana. There is also a variety with fuchsia colored fruit interior, and black seeds. I added a drizzle of agave syrup over mine. This turned out to be a good instinct, as with further research I found that the pitaya or pitahaya, the Hylocereus, is a cactus, and agave of course is a desert plant. Dragon fruit flowers look very similar to our lovely and fragrant night-blooming cereus. 

Before that, the DH came home with a rumpled paper bag that he held close. He said, "You won't guess what I have here!" An expensive wine? Truffle oil? Live Maine lobsters?

None of the above! His paper bag held five small Pirie mangoes. I wrote about the difference between the more commonly-found bold-tasting Hadens and the lovely shy sweetness of Piries here. 

The DH gets the job of peeling and slicing these babies, and I just eat 'em! Of course the peeling, etc. also involves sucking the remaining fruit off the peels and seeds. Out of five mangoes, four were solid specimens. The fifth must have fallen from the tree; it was too soft and bruised to eat. The mango chunks were eaten on top of vanilla ice cream, with morning oatmeal, and with a salad of baby mixed greens and shrimp. 

Too yummy! 

Even veggies taste better with wine

There are lots of lovely vegetables in the fridge and kitchen baskets. These will go into a vegetable melange for dinner:

• Several baby pattypan squash - also known as cibleme or scallopini - sliced
• One medium zucchini so fresh it glows, emerald green - halved and sliced
• Onion, sliced
• Garlic - 2 or 3 cloves, minced
• Half a carrot, sliced thin
• One or two small bell peppers, cut into strips
• Baby Yukon Gold potatoes, sliced thin
• Hamakua Alii musrooms, sliced thin
• One tomato, in chunks
• Leftover wine
• Herbs of your choice
• Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Start by cooking the onion in olive oil until soft, then add the carrots, potatoes and mushrooms and saute until somewhat soft. Stir in the bell peppers, squash and zucchini, cooking until soft. Add as much wine as necessary to make things hiss and bubble, but not drown, stir and heat for several minutes. Add the tomatoes, herbs, salt and pepper. Heat through and adjust seasoning. Drink the rest of the leftover wine if you like.

I'm going to cook some quinoa - 2 parts water to one part quinoa - and add some butter or olive oil, vegetable or chicken base or salt for flavor. The tastier quinoa is much more fun to eat as a leftover, in salads. And make it easy on yourself by buying the prewashed version, and cooking it in the rice cooker!

I'm serving the veggies with a bit of leftover salmon, but if you top it with some grated Parmesan, feta or goat cheese, with the protein-rich quinoa, it's a complete meal!

Notes: fresh spinach would be a nice addition to the rest of the veggies, but I have none. Basil would be the first herb of choice - again, none. But there is fresh thyme and oregano! Make too much of this, as it's perfect to add to an omelet, or use the leftovers as a fast dinner, topped with a sunnyside-up egg or two.

Happy cooking! What are you cooking for dinner tonight?

BTW, reader: yes, by all means use every part of the Hamakua Alii mushrooms. If the bottoms look unsightly to you, just trim that bit!

About my leftovers plus WOW Farms tomatoes

Do you eat them? I've heard of some folks who won't. Never met them!

We were told that children were starving in China, so we'd better eat what was on our plates!

Food is expensive, so wasting anything is painful, and a shame. Since I don't know how to cook for just the two of us, there are always leftovers. That's also true when we go out to eat. Sometimes it's hard to find something you want to eat that you can finish in one sitting.

We went to the Blaisdell Farmers' Market on Wednesday, and I got the delicious black-eyed pea chili with cornbread and a piece of chicken from Pacific Soul. I ate half the chicken and cornbread, and a third of the chili, and was full. The DH got surf and turf: fried fish and beef curry - and ate half of it. No, we can't share - we never want to eat the same thing!

So dinner last night was the leftovers plus salad mix from the big box store, topped with the last of the Pirie mangos from Ewa Beach and luscious WOW Farms tomatoes that are almost the same color as the mango flesh - orange-skinned and fleshed, and low-acid.

Yum, yum, yum!

When the tomatoes are this lovely and ripe, I have not even bothered to chop them for bruschetta. Instead, I toast the bread* - which you can rub with a garlic clove - and drizzle with a combination of extra-virgin olive oil  and balsamic vinegar. Top with fat, juicy tomato slices and sprinkle with sea salt. And cracked black pepper, if you want. Sooo good!

*Please, please use GOOD bread! My two favorites are the olive bread from Ba-le, and La Brea rosemary/olive oil loaf. As Berry says, "Life is too short for bad bread!" So true!

Ono Poke Salad for a Hot Summer Evening

Poke is a Hawaiian dish which usually consists of one-inch chunks of raw ahi or aku tuna fish marinated with a variety of ingredients and flavorings. We buy these ready-made at our supermarket fish counter. The types we  most often choose usually include shoyu (soy sauce), wasabi (Japanese horseradish), green onion tops, and Chinese oyster-flavor sauce.

Here's what we do when we have too much left over - yes, we are re-purposing food! Heat a small frying pan with a slick of sesame oil and fry poke chunks until lightly brown. Add ponzu sauce - a mixture of shoyu and yuzu citrus juice - until moistened. Then add enough agave syrup (or honey) just until slightly sweetened. Add a pinch of chili flakes or a shake of furikake (prepared nori seaweed flakes) if desired.

Serve on a bed of mixed baby lettuce, chunks of WOW Farms heirloom tomatoes. slivers of red onion or chopped green onion and chunks of Japanese cucumber. Don't forget to pour the pan juices over the poke! Newman light raspberry walnut vinaigrette is perfect with this. Add a slice of crusty bread or sesame lavosh, and it's a light supper.