Food in Kauai: Barbecue Inn

Posted on 16 April 2011 by christao408

After our jaunt around the north coast of the island, we stopped for dinner in Lihue at a small hole-in-the-wall place that my parents stumbled upon their first night on the island when they stayed in a hotel nearby. The restaurant is called Barbecue Inn, an institution opened by Masaichi and Hanayo Sasaki in 1940.

The storefront is located on Kress Street, a small alley named after what used to be a popular department store in town.

Specializing in affordable family cuisine, Barbecue Inn serves American and Japanese food and everything – everything, they emphasize – is made from scratch. The interior is clean but definitely a bit of a time warp. Service is very friendly, though.

Tasty homemade bread

Miso soup

Teriyaki beef kabob with tempura. My mother had this and it was tasty, although the sauce was a bit heavy.

Panko crusted mahimahi served with tartar sauce. My father had this and while it was tasty, the breading obscured the fish inside.

My dinner, kalua pork and cabbage. Kalua pork is traditionally cooked in an underground pit but these days refers generally to slow-cooked pork. Really tasty with a smoky smell. The only drawback was that there was a lot of the same (albeit tasty) flavor on the dish. It would have benefitted from a smaller portion and something (maybe Japanese style pickles?) to contrast with the flavor.

The stand-out of the menu was Tawn’s order, mahimahi encrusted in a combination of macadamia nuts, panko crumbs, and sesame seeds, topped with coconut cream and spinach sauce. This was amazing.

The real treat, though, was the macadamia nut cream pie. I’ve made two attempts at making this pie and have encountered some problems. So you can imagine how excited I was to find it here, perfectly fluffy and flavorful. While they wouldn’t release the recipe, they did answer my question about what thickener they use: a combination of cornstarch and gelatine, which helps explain the chiffon-like texture.

I have to admit, though, that now that I’ve finally encountered that long-lost taste memory again, I feel less need to try and recreate it. In short, the pie was very good but I realize that in my memory, I had built up how wonderful macadamia nut cream pie is, to a level that can never be achieved in real life. Maybe.

After dinner we drove around the corner to see this small local motel my parents had stayed at their first night on the island. It is well-maintained but is definitely straight out of the 50s or 60s!

The Main Event – Kari and Nathan’s Wedding

Posted on 12 April 2011 by christao408

The main reason we were in Kaua’i was to attend the wedding of my cousin Kari to her fiancee Nathan. They exchanged vows on Sunday in the late afternoon along a beautiful stretch of Shipwreck Beach near Poipu, which is on the south shore of the island. There were about two dozen family members who had made it for the ceremony, probably a few more than Kari and Nathan had originally anticipated. Needless to say, it was a beautiful ceremony.

Tawn comes prepared for the occasion with a nice hat.

My cousin Brad and his wife Silvia. Brad is Kari’s younger brother. The cliff in the background served as a focal point for the ceremony.

Tawn and I pose for a self-portrait.

My uncle Dick and aunt Sandy and their first grandchild Tommy. Dick is the older brother of Kari’s mother.

Orchids are strewn along the beach, marking the path along which the bride walked.

As is probably increasingly the case these days, it seemed everyone (myself included) was trying to get pictures of the ceremony rather than just witnessing it!

We needn’t have worried, though, as the official photographer did a marvelous job and made these photos available on his website. I will say that if you are ever looking for a great wedding photographer, for the Hawaiian islands or elsewhere, I would recommend Gelston Dwight.

The lighting of these photos was really spectacular. They have a “Hollywood-esque” quality to them and capture the couple’s glamor as it looks in everyday life!

This is about half the group – just Kari’s side of the family. From left to right, cousin Bill, his son Tommy, his wife Alex (also my cousin), Tawn, Me, my mother, my cousin Kelly (Kari’s sister), my father, Nathan, Kari, Kari’s mother Pat, father Carl, brother Brad, his wife Silvia, and my uncle Dick and aunt Sandy. Probably more than you needed to know, right?

My cousin Alex designed the invitations, menus, and all the other printed materials. She’s quite a talented designer and you can see more of her work at her website. Fresh local pineapples made the perfect centerpieces. The reception was held at the nearby Plantation Gardens Restaurant.

My contingent – father, mother, husband, and me. That shirt my father is making? My mother made that in 1980 for a trip to Hawai’i the family took. In fact, she used matching fabric to make shirts for both my father and me and mumus for her and my sister. Of the four of us, only my father still fits in his outfit!

Some concoction my cousin Silvia was drinking.

Appetizers – called “pupus”

Kailani farms arugula salad with local mango, papaya, cherry tomatoes, onion, avocado, and a lilikoi cider vinaigrette

Lobster bisque with garlic croutons

Grilled beef tenderloin with gorgonzola mashed potatoes, local green beans, sauteed mushrooms, and merlot reduction sauce.

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Fresh local fish with mango and avocado salsa, pan fried green beans and black bean sauce. Can’t remember what type of fish it was.

There was also a seafood lau lau – fish, shrimp, scallops, and vegetables steamed in taro and ti leaves. The picture didn’t turn out, though.

When it came to the cutting of the cake, there was such an explosion of flashes that I ended up with several of these “ultra-exposed” shots.

A picture of the beautifully garnished cake. This was a lilikoi wedding cake (lilikoi = passionfruit), a white vanilla cake brushed with passion fruit syrup and filled with passion fruit butter cream. One of the tastiest wedding cakes I’ve had.

Food in Kauai: Koloa Fish Market

Posted on 11 April 2011 by christao408

Looking back, I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point in my life my “what to see” list when traveling started to tip in favor of places to eat rather than sights and attractions to see. While Kaua’i is a beautiful island with stunning beaches, mountains, canyons, and jungles, as I made my list of what I wanted to do, it pretty much read like a list of local types of food I wanted to try. Along the way, I discovered Lonely Planet’s Kaua’i guide, a book that uses 296 pages to detail the island and does a lot of work to present it through a environmental/sustainable/locavore lens. Excellent resource.

Our first afternoon in Poipu Beach we decided to start with the nearby town of Koloa, a five-minute drive from Poipu. With its little town feel that would be right at home in an “old west” movie, our first stop was the highly recommended Koloa Fish Market. Known for good local “grinds”, I was anticipating a chance to sit down and enjoy some great food. We got the great food alright, but since there was no place to sit down we had to take the food back to the condo.

Everything’s on the chalk board inside this tiny market. The friendly staff readily explained things that we later realized were written right in front of our face. (Hey, it happens to the best of us!) With four of us, two of whom are not large eaters, we decided the following would be enough:

This mixed seafood plate has seared ahi tuna encrusted in sesame, boiled shrimp served with dipping sauce, seaweed salad, and poke. Poke (pronounced “poe-kay”, which means “to cut or slice” in Hawaiian) is a common side dish in the islands made from raw fish marinated in soy sauce and other ingredients. We ate a lot of poke and every bit of it was fantastic. Most often, it is made from ahi tuna, the quality of which is amazing. We also had it made with octopus, crab meat, and salmon.

Now, I will say this about seafood in Hawai’i. It is really wonderful and all, but I get really fresh, really inexpensive seafood in Thailand so there was a point where I was thinking that it was all fine and dandy, but not really that exciting. This echoes a problem that Michael shared with us. When he has guests from the mainland, there are a lot of very interesting types of food for them to experience because Hawai’i has a hodgepodge of Asian cultures that make up its heritage and a lot of the Asian food here is better than what the visitors may experience back at home. When he has guests from Asia, though, they are more likely to think something like, “yeah, we’ve got this back at home.”

Of course, that didn’t stop us from trying as many different things as we could!

Another thing we tried is the plate lunch. Well, the styrofoam box lunch. Today’s offering was a mix of laulau (pork steamed in taro leaves and ti leaves), kalua pork (slow roasted, traditionally cooked in a fire pit), rice, lomilomi salmon (minced salted salmon with chopped tomatoes and green onions), and a little serving of poke. Both types of pork were wonderfully tasty. The lomilomi salmon was fine but it was hard to identify that there was any salmon in there. We tried some a bit later in the week that had more noticeable amounts of salmon.

For dessert we shared a piece of the fish market’s homemade sweet potato and haupia pie, a market specialty. Haupia is a coconut milk dessert thickened with arrowroot or corn starch. It is very similar to a Thai dessert and is lightly sweet and salty with a thick, gelatine-like consistency. This version is served with a sweet potato base made from purple sweet potatoes, again something familiar to people in Thailand. It is served on a cracker-crumb crust. It was very nice, not overly sweet but pretty filling.

All in all, our first meal in Kaua’i was a thumbs up. Relatively inexpensive, good food, simply prepared.

Unrelated to the lunch at the Koloa Fish Market was our search for malasadas, the fried dough that came here with Portuguese contract workers, thousands of whom came to Hawai’i in the late 1800s. We were looking for for the one-woman stand known as Kaua’i Malasadas, located in from of the K-Mart at Kukui Grove Shopping Center in Lihue. Unfortunately, she was nowhere to be seen, so we stopped at Kaua’i Bakery & Cinnamons in the same shopping center to try some of the different malasadas.

The options included plain, chocolate cream filled, vanilla cream filled, and filled with both chocolate and vanilla cream. Lightly sprinkled with sugar and not too oily, I was nonetheless underwhelmed with these fried treats. They are donuts without holes, something that I can’t get incredibly worked up about.

Food in Singapore

Posted on 26 March 2011 by christao408

The evening I was in Singapore a few weeks back, I met up with a group of friends to go to a Zhap Chai Peng place. “Zhap Chai Peng” means “mixed dishes with rice”, referring to pre-made dishes. It is colloquially known as “economy rice” because of its affordability. The one we went to is in the Tiong Bahru neighborhood.

The clean, well-lighted shop is open-air, with the attention focused on the row of more than two dozen prepared dishes.

The selection runs the gamut from curries to stir-fries, to stews. Meat dishes sit shoulder to shoulder with vegetarian ones. And the influences of Singapore’s many different cultures can be seen.

Bonus points if you can guess what this is. Answer at the end of the post.

Boiled peanuts with Chinese five spice

Goose braised with soy sauce

Stir-friend squash – very beautiful color

Otak – a steamed fish mousse with spices. The Thai counterpart to this is called hor mok and the mousse is steamed in little cups made of banana leaf and it is topped with some coconut cream.

Bitter gourd with garlic

Salted cabbage with pork belly

Scrambled eggs with tomatoes

As for the mystery dish? That’s fried SPAM. All in all, a tasty and inexpensive meal. Very similar to khao gaeng shops in Bangkok, about which I’ll be writing soon.

A Little Pre-Hawai’i Cooking

Posted on 23 March 2011 by christao408

The day I filmed the Almost No-Knead Bread video, I got some extra cooking done. It made sense to have just a little more home cooking before we head off to Kauai for my cousin’s wedding. The meal: Indian spice rub pork chops with raita (a yogurt sauce with cukes and tomatos) and Indian spice roasted potatoes. Dessert was Swedish brownies. And while I was at it, I whipped up a batch of meusli.

While the recipe was originally for chicken, I used pork chops in this Indian spice rub and raita combination from Joanne Choi’s Week of Menus blog. Being a mother with young children and still a foodie, she manages to balance creative, complex flavors with ease of preparation and wholesome ingredients. The only change I would make to the recipe is to add a little bit of brown sugar and a bit of salt. The rub could have used a touch of sweetness.

Tawn and I enjoy meusli for breakfast – although in truth I eat oatmeal most days – and I find it isn’t too difficult to roast a batch of meusli when I already have the oven heated for some other baking. Each batch is just a little different. Based on Alton Brown’s granola recipe from the Food Network, I cut back on the sugar and substitute a little orange juice instead. I sometimes substitute different types of nuts or seeds (flax, pumpkin, or sunflower) for the cashews and almonds in his recipe. And I add a bit of cinnamon or sometimes freshly-ground nutmeg while the meusli is still warm. After it has cooled, I add dried fruits. This one is a combination of cherries, dates, apricots, and raisins. Tasty and pretty healthy, too.

Now, you see why I had to bake some healthy meusli: to offset the caloric karma that came from these wonderfully sticky and chewy brownies. The recipe came my from friend Per’s mother. Since he’s from Sweden, I think I’m going to call these my Swedish brownies. Some brownies are too cake-like. These have an almost mochi-like chewiness (causing me to wonder what would happen if I added just a bit of rice flour to the recipe).

The big challenge was that the recipe was in metrics – and I don’t have any dry ingredient measuring cups marked in deciliters. Thankfully, the internet helped provide conversions and then I made note of the weight of the ingredients so I can measure by weight in the future.

Okay, enough food porn for one entry!

Food in Bangkok – Khao Mok Gai on Convent

Posted on 22 March 2011 by christao408

Flipping through Khun Chawadee’s book Bangkok’s Top 50 Street Food Stalls, I got an itching to try the Khao Mok Gai vendor on Soi Convent. Khao Mok Gai, which alludes to a mountain of rice burying chicken, is the Thai take on chicken biryani. Doubtlessly Indian in origin, the dish traces its more recent roots to the predominately Muslim south of Thailand. It is a dish that is simultaneously simple and complex, one that rarely fails to satisfy.

The vendor in question has long been a fixture on the sidewalk along Soi Convent, just off Silom Road. Just down from the Starbucks and in front of an Irish Pub, the khao mok gai vendor’s cart perches on the edge of the curb with a half-dozen folding tables and plastic stools set out beneath umbrellas.

The menu is rudimentary. The khao mok gai comes in three ways: regular for 30 baht (US$1), rice special (extra rice) for 35 baht, chicken special (extra chicken) for 45 baht, or double-double for 50 baht.

The dish is not fancy – a piece of chicken with a heaping pile of turmeric-stained rice. Fried shallots and cucumber slices garnish and a dish of sweet chili sauce is on the side. The rice is tasty and the chicken flavorful, though.

Don’t skip the soup, which comes on the side. Made with bits of chicken, herbs, and fried shallots, they serve this plain or spicy and its rich flavor hits the spot.

Like all street vendor places worth their salt, this cart gets very busy at lunchtime and they make their day’s wages or so. Don’t dilly-dally. Eat your food, pay your tab, and get moving!

For an alternate (and Xangan) version of biryani, check out this video I made about a visit to the kitchen of Dr. Zakiah back in 2009!

Food in Bangkok: BKK Bagel Bakery

Posted on 20 March 2011 by christao408

First it was the cheesecake; now the bagels have arrived. There seems to be a growing affinity for things New York (or, at least, things perceived to be in the New York style) here in Bangkok. This trend first caught my attention a few months ago with the opening of NYCC – the New York Cheesecake shop at the Crystal Design Center. In the last few weeks we’ve added another source of New York style carbs to the local dining scene: bagels.

While I’m no bagel expert, I do recognize that a really good bagel must be boiled before it is baked. Simply steaming them (as is done in a lot of faux bagel shops) just produces doughy round bread. In fact, last October I made two attempts at making bagels, just to understand the processes better. Thankfully, I don’t need to rely on my own bagels anymore as I can now stop at BKK Bagel Bakery to purchase some freshly boiled and baked bagels.

Tawn and I made our first visit to BKK Bagel Bakery during their soft opening in late February. At this point they had at least a half-dozen types of bagels, several types of cream cheese spreads, and also several sandwich offerings. Sadly, the pastrami recipe has not yet been unveiled. We tried a simple toasted bagel with a cream cheese and olive oil spread, which had a nice, nutty taste.

I tried a roast beef sandwich that was alright but nothing to write home about. Besides using iceberg lettuce, the roast beef was a little dry. All of the flavor came from the generous helping of whole grain mustard. For the price – about 250 baht (roughly US$8) – it was a little pricey.

A week ago, I stopped by a second time to bring home some bagels for breakfast. The bagels themselves are quite nice with a good chewy texture and dense crumb. Again, I don’t claim to be a bagel expert but these certainly remind me of the bagels I’ve bought from bodegas in New York City. I’m eagerly awaiting their attempt at pastrami, though.

Located in the ground floor of Maneeya Center, adjacent to the Chidlom BTS station, BKK Bagel Bakery should have a ready supply of customers: not only is Chidlom in the heart of the high-end expatriate community but the Foreign Correspondents’ Club is located in the Maneeya building, too. I wonder what will be the next New York food to be introduced here?

My Almost No-Knead Bread Recipe

Posted on 20 March 2011 by christao408

My cousin Jane recently asked me to share my recipe for almost no-knead bread, which I’ve adapted from a recipe in Nancy Baggett’s “Kneadlessly Simple” cookbook and techniques from Cooks Illustrated. This weekend I completed a video showing the recipe. For your enjoyment:

Baking Natural Red Velvet Cupcakes

Posted on 7 March 2011 by christao408

The red velvet cake’s entry into popular culture can probably be traced to the 1989 film Steel Magnolias, in which the groom’s cake was a red velvet cake in the shape of an armadillo. There’s something seductive about the color of a red velvet cake, especially a cupcake, at least at first. But at some point, the red seems just a little too red, and it starts to seem a bit unnatural. That’s no surprise considering that a recipe will use up to several tablespoons of red food coloring.

Doing some research, I gathered that red velvet cake was originally not so red and the color came about naturally. Cocao powder, a key ingredient, didn’t used to be “Dutch process” and was less alkaline in years gone by. When combined with the buttermilk and vinegar in the recipe, the chemical reaction caused the batter to take on a muddy red hue. Unable to find cocao powder that isn’t Dutch process here in Thailand, I stumbled upon a recipe for Natural Red Velvet Cake that, supposedly based on a traditional southern recipe, uses cooked beets for the color.

Intrigued, I had to try.

The ingredients: brown and granulated sugars, eggs, flour, cocoa powder, chocolate, buttermilk, butter, vanilla, salt, baking soda, cider vinegar, and roasted beets.

The mystery ingredient. Instead of using canned beets, which the recipe called for, I roasted my own beets and then pureed them with a little bit of olive oil and water.

First step: Melt the chocolate over a pan of simmering water. Chocolate doesn’t figure in most red velvet cake recipes, only cocoa powder, so I was surprised by this addition.

Sift together the flour, cocoa powder, salt, and baking soda. One of these days I’ll have to seek out natural cocoa powder (i.e. not Dutch process) and see how that affects the outcome of the recipe.

Cream together the eggs, butter, and two types of sugars. Most cake recipes are specific about the process – for example, whip the butter and sugars before adding the eggs. No specificity here so I just dumped them all into the bowl and turned the mixer on.

The end result (after combining the dry ingredients and adding the melted chocolate and beets) had a vaguely reddish tinge to it, although that could just be a color correction issue from the light.

Cupcake liners filled and ready to bake. Lesson I’ve learned: don’t fill your cupcake liners so high because cake batter expands as it bakes.

See? I told you that cake batter expands. Now I have these muffin top cupcakes that would have been interesting if the crumb had held together better, but the structure was kind of weak.

The cupcakes pretty much crumbled when unwrapped. I’m very curious why this is. Maybe cake flour didn’t have enough protein and regular flour would have been better? Maybe just a little too much liquid in the beets? Baking is a science and something didn’t work out right here.

To frost the cupcakes, I prepared a butter-cream cheese frosting but perhaps didn’t whip it enough. That, or the opening in the frosting tip was too small. The frosting bag actually burst on me so I had to instead spread the frosting instead of piping it.

The end results looked a bit rag-tag. I really need to take a class to learn how to frost a cupcake properly. As for the taste, the cupcakes were very moist and the beet flavor wasn’t noticeable at all. As for the color, though, there really was nothing red about the red velvet cupcakes. Not in the least bit.

I guess if I want a really red, red velvet cupcake, I may need to reach for the food coloring after all.

Food in Bangkok: Goose at Chua Kim Haeng

Posted on 3 March 2011 by christao408

The final day we were showing our Singaporean guests around, we decided to pile into taxis and travel halfway across the city for some famous Chinese five-spice goose from Chua Kim Haeng restaurant.

This restaurant has been around for decades with two adjacent dining rooms on Pattanakan Road, which is what Petchaburi Road turns into as it heads east of Ramkhamhaeng. They have recently opened another branch.

Jasmine rice.

Gaeng joot gradook muu – Slow-cooked clear soup with pork ribs and daikon radish.

Gapow plaa pad haeng – fried fish maw stir fried dry with green onions served with a sweet chili dipping sauce on the side.

The main course: braised goose, known as han paloh. “Paloh” refers to the cooking a dish with Chinese five spice, but this is a general term in Thai. Each restaurant has its own specific recipe for what those spices are and in what combination.

Chua Kim Haeng is famous especially for its dipping sauce, a combination of vinegar, garlic, and yellow chili instead of the usual green or red chilies. The sauce has a flavor almost of pickling spice and contrasts well with the rich flesh of the goose.

Goose innards. Can you name the parts? Liver, heart, gizzard… yummy!

The Singaporeans loved it. Of course, this is a Chinese style restaurant so they must of felt right at home. In fact, one of our friends ran into someone he knows, another Singaporean who was traveling with his family, sitting at the table next to ours. Small culinary world, isn’t it?

christao408

The adventures of an expat American who moved to Bangkok for his husband.

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