Culinary Adventures

I've discovered that food in Hawaii is a bit different than it is in the midwest. Hawaiian food has a lot of asian influence, and shopping in the grocery store I sometimes don't have the faintest idea what I would do with some of the things that I find there. But I have started to get adventurous. I kept seeing the frozen whole squid in the seafood section, so finally one day I got one, unsure what I was going to do with it. I like calamari, so I figured it was worth a shot.

Turns out, there is a lot of cleaning that goes on with getting one of these things ready to cook, but after finding a handy YouTube video on how to prepare a squid (you gotta love the internet!), it wasn't too hard at all. But by the time I got done deheading, gutting, skinning and removing the little beak thingy from this squid, I wasn't even sure I wanted to eat him anymore. But I got over it and it was quite tasty. I made a shoga-yaki dish with him which is mostly soy sauce and ginger. Quite tasty!

Then of course there is Spam. In the tourism books, I had read about the love affair folks here have with Spam (the heavily salted luncheon meat cube, not junk e-mail) but I didn't really understand the scope of it until I got here. There have got to be at least 10 varieties of Spam that you can buy at the grocery store. Most of the fast food restaurants have their own local menu which includes spam (for example at McDonalds you can get a rice and spam platter for breakfast). So when in Rome... I have actually been buying and cooking spam on occasion. It is actually pretty good stuff if you get the lower sodium variety (I think there is two days worth of salt in the regular). Then one day at the zoo I discovered Spam musubi when we had lunch there. It was a little brick of rice with fried spam seasoned with soy sauce neatly tied up with a piece of nori. It was really tasty, so I decided I had to try to make these at home. They turned out pretty good and make a great picnic food - we took them to the beach the other day.

I find that we eat a lot more rice here, which is ok with me, I happen to like rice. I think we all like the 'sticky' shorter grain rice that you find in the stores here instead of the long grain rice that is common back home.

Next on my list - sushi. I love sushi rolls, now I just need to learn to make them....