The Trans-Pacific o-miyage exchange never fails to bemuse me. 

O-miyage (pronounced "oh-me-ah-gay) is a Japanese word describing little gifts one brings back from travels, or sometimes just a little something you take to someone's house. Whenever we visit in Hawaii, we never go empty-handed and never leave empty-handed. 

Here is how this dynamic plays out across blue Pacific.

I have relatives visiting from Hawaii. This is a good thing because besides in addition to being allowed to turn the heat up to slightly-above-tundra, we are on the receiving end of various gifts and snacks, including a brand-new Hawaii Regional Cuisine cookbook, Big Island snack mix, private reserve Kona coffee, various forms of macadamia nuts, and all things li-hing mui.

Now for the quid-pro-quo, or what my husband sometimes calls the accounting of affection. 

My Hawaii-based ohana asks for Trader Joe's and Archer Farms food. Yep, you read that correctly. Target food. And yes, there are 4 Target stores in Hawaii, but they don't have the same stuff as our neighborhood Target. Like Lemon Raspberry Granola Bites or Paul Frank Kids clothes. Go figure.

But Trader Joe's is my Hawaii-based ohana's version of the Holy Grail. What I not-so-fondly call squirrel food and what serves as my post-Hawaii plate-lunch detox, is what my relatives lust for. 10 bags of trail mix, 6 boxes of Trader Joe's Mac and Cheese and assorted bags of pistachios, almonds, cashews and dried apricots.

The best part is that we all think we got the better end of the deal.

Eat Well. Be Well.

Last week, I showed you my amazingly talented friend's Angry Birds cake pops.  Let this post serve as a cautionary tale of when cake pops go rogue.

Lesson 1: Prep is very easy. Make the box cake. Cool it and then crumble it to smithereens. Add about 3/4 of the tub of pre-made frosting to the crumbs, and then mold into small self-contained shapes. Toss them in the fridge to set. Before you start dunking pops in candy, make sure you have a place to stick them. Otherwise you'll have 2 in your hands and then be stuck wondering what to do.

Lesson 2: Melt the candy well and definitely in 30-second increments. Use something narrow and deep, like a tall coffee cup. The wrist action will give a smooth all around coating.

Lesson 3: Do not make the shapes too big or let the melt get too thick. The cake pop gets naturally bigger once it is dunked in candy melt. Thus, if they start  too big, they will split and splat. If the candy melt is too thick, it looks like an acne pop. The picture at left shows the morgue for dismembered cake pops.

Lesson 4: Use icing and food coloring like paint. We tried Wilton's Edible Ink Pens. Do not waste your money. They don't work on candy melts, and worse yet, scratch the candy surface.

Use a very, very fine paint brush and add food coloring to the leftover frosting. I was feeling nearly homicidal after the frustration of the ink pens. Notice the scratchy, weak Jason mask at the left, below. But it was easy to give him a makeover using a brush and food-colored icing.

Lesson 5: It's fun. 
Despite the non-functioning ink pens, my daughter and I spent a great afternoon making these. Until we figured out the icing trick, we made the best of the icky-ink pens with "emoti-pops" --> :P, XD and T_T and the riddle pop: What does the equation the square root of -1 is greater than 3u mean?

Eat Well. Be Well.

Let's hear it for Moms.  

My Grandma, Mom, Sisters, Aunties, Cousins, friends' Moms,  Nieces, Mother-in-Law, gal-pals--Be grateful to them all. For they have nourished/nurtured/advised/supported/encouraged and just-plain-loved you, physically and emotionally.

In honor of the amazing women in my life--heart-and-soul food

Grandma's Meat and Macaroni--my dear Japanese-speaking grandma, who never drove a car, and loved sumo and Las Vegas, made this thoroughly down-home American one-dish pasta meal.

Sanny's Hamburgers and Gravy--my sister is the master of "throw-stuff-in-and-I-think-it-will-work" cooking. Slightly crunchy on the outside but moist and full of complex flavor on inside. Add a sunny-side up egg and voila-ici, perfect loco-moco.

Mayonnaise Chicken--my mom's alternative to fried chicken. My Sister must have have learned a 'mayonnaise' secret from my Mom because the mayo in both my mom's chicken and my sister's hamburgers is what keeps each from drying out, but yet not greasy.

Grandma Nancy's Brownies--my mother-in-law's light, chocolate-y, just-sweet-enough brownies. It was her 'secret' recipe...but it's too good not to share :)

Anna's Broccoli Salad--from our very much beloved Anna, who was my daughter's day care provider. Everyone who has the good fortune of meeting Anna and her family became her family. Anna is the embodiment of ohana.

Karen's Mom's 7-Layer Bars & Jane's Napoleons--from the moms of two of my best friends in college. Thanks to them, I was never an 'orphan' during the Easter, Thanksgiving or the Jewish holidays.


Eat Well. Be Well. | Celebrate All Those Who Have Mothered You!

We've all had them. What sounded like such a good idea all-too-quickly torpedoes into Complete and Utter Cooking Disaster. Doesn't taste good. Doesn't look good. One substitution too many and bam! Unlike Emeril,  it's an into-the garbage and go-get-the-takeout fast day. 

I've had a bunch of them. While my family is very tolerant and will eat pretty much anything once, my children are merciless, and have made a sport of thinking up entertaining names for kitchen failures. A chicken curry with eggplant, green beans and coconut milk was dubbed  Prison Curry and they asked if it was served in orphanages. Another recipe whose official name is "Savory Lamb Burgers" was endowed with the title Poop Burgers because of aesthetic and aroma shortcomings. 

Finally, there is the outrageous disbelief that two lovely foodstuffs can be combined to ruin each other as in, "How in the world can can you take perfectly good furikake and and perfectly good salmon and have it taste like something weird called furikake salmon?" However, the all-time worst is simply called by its given name, 
Salmon Couscous. This is the meal against which all epic fail meals are judged. 

The most recent fail was Macadamia Nut Eggplant. It was edible, but barely. It sounded like a good idea, scoop out the eggplant meat, dice it upy and stir fry in some olive oil, garlic, Worcestershire, shoyu. Cook in a little ground turkey and chopped onion and top with bread crumbs and macadamia nuts and bake in the eggplant shell. Easy one-dish meal. 

Not. First of all, do you know how hard it is to scoop out raw eggplant meat? Strike one. Second, all I taste is salty. Strike 2. Finally, you get this hash-like brown food that you stuff back into the eggplant that you cored and bake it. Let me just say that long brown, cooked stuffed eggplants just do not look good and really don't look much like food. Strike 3. Out. The children said, "Well, it wasn't as bad as Salmon Couscous, but..."

And it was time for dinner by phone.