Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophes, where I definitely had to stifle the urge to say “Aloha”, because today, we’re cooking Hawaiian food. Today’s recipes aren’t particularly quick, but they are quite easy, and they can FEEL super-fast with a bit of kitchen skill. AND the reason for today’s post is a fun little surprise. If you want to just get straight to the cooking, click this link. Everybody else, let’s dig in.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

So, personal business out of the way first: Today’s recipe was a surprising request from my brother, Stephen, to honor the fact that today is his Birthday!

Seen here, with his fiancée, in like, 2018. Not wearing a protective mask YEARS before it was “cool”.

I say “surprising” because the dish he requested was NOWHERE on the rest of the family’s radar, which is a fun reminder of how people change and grow over time: since Stephen and I only see each other a couple times a year, and when we do, it’s mainly in the context of family dinners or short get-togethers in our hometown, we tend to see each other eat the same things time and again. I had barely any idea that Stephen LIKED Hawaiian/Pacific Island cuisine, which is probably because, as he says, he first really got into it while working  at Pacific University, which was after I started living full-time in Pullman.

So, yeah. Happy Birthday, bro, sorry it’s during the pandemic, stay safe, we love you, and here’s the recipes I made following almost none of your suggested steps!

What a Thoughtful Gift

Well, that’s not entirely true: a lot of similar steps went into both recipes, as we’ll see, and I’ll include Stephen’s suggestions so you can try them yourself and see which you prefer. And the reason we didn’t do his methods is entirely my fault: I had intended to do them, and then forgot during the chaos of a very busy weekend: Like, my normal weekends during the last few weeks have had an average of 4 things to do, and two of them were “look up the specials so you can place your Sunday dinner order” and “get Nate to watch the latest episode of the new Disney+ Show”

Look, I’m just saying: first two episodes of Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s a pretty good time. Didn’t get to watch Episode 3 with the Easter chaos, but looking forward to it.

This weekend, on Sunday alone, we had 5 things going on, one of which (a multi-month delayed mead tasting) took roughly 3 hours, not counting an hour-long dinner break. Saturday had 2-3 things going on, and Thursday/Friday was when I got the ingredients. (Also, and I do not want this to be seen as an excuse, but I tragically/humorously had three DIFFERENT emotional/mental issues crop up on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. (nothing too severe or long-lasting, thankfully. Essentially just “panic/anxiety attacks based one three very different triggers”)

But enough of my excuses for why I betrayed Stephen. Let’s talk about what we’re making, what it means, and why what I teach you today is but the opening of a door of possibilities!

The Bento Box of Big Island

So, today we’re making Plate Lunch. What is that? Well it’s a FORMAT of food, rather than a strict recipe, in the same style as the ichiju sansei we talked about in the Washoku post, or the Southern Barbecue “Meat-and-three”. If you haven’t dealt with any of those, it’s very easy to explain: it’s a meal whose defining characteristic is not the components themselves, but rather the arrangement of them. If that sounded a little too abstract, think of like, “a combo meal” at a fast-food joint. If I said “I got a combo”, you know I have whatever the main meat thing I bought is, as well as fries and a drink. All these terms refer to a similar cultural touchstone: In Southern barbecue, it is common to get a dish that consists of one meat entrée, and three side dishes, AKA “the Meat-and-three”. In Japan, they have ichiju sansei which literally translates as “one broth, three sides” and a Plate lunch consists of Rice, Macaroni Salad, and an entrée.

An often strangely saucy or soupy entree.

You can also get mixed plates, where you get two or three entrees, but the basic set-up is the same: Rice, Macaroni salad, and meat(s).

The dish’s history has never been fully pinned down, but the general belief is that it’s probably the result of the heavy Asian population in the Hawaiian labor markets back in the 1800’s and 1900’s, and represents their version of the “workman’s sandwich”: while other regions have specialty sandwiches that sprung out of what their workers carried/made on the jobsite, the population of Hawaii more typically turned up to work with a tin or bento box of food containing white rice, and then some kind of protein, typically left-overs from their dinner the night before: Japanese workers might have katsu, or Teriyaki, while the Filipino workers had Chicken Adobo, the Chinese workers had Char Siu (aka “Barbecue Pork”), and the Koreans had galbi. And over time, some of them tried the dishes the others were making, and made riffs/additions. Kimchi starts showing up on more plates, Rice Flour fried Chicken with nori sheets, native Hawaiian foods like kalua pork or laulau get put in, etc.

Eventually, Macaroni salad became a required component of the dish. Again, the specifics aren’t clear, but the consensus seems to be that it was to serve a ‘need’ on the plate: in the same way that salty fries are what defines a combo meal, the mac salad was the glue that joined “meat with rice” into a consistent, recognizable pattern. The mac salad also served as a contrast/complement to the dish, in a way that unseasoned white rice can’t. It gave you a palate cleanser as you worked through your vinegar-y adobo, or your rich katsu sauce, by adding a creamy, typically slightly sweet counterpoint. And since it was just pasta tossed in mayo, it also could soak up/get coated in the sauce like the rice creating a new flavor, and B: was very cheap to prep and make. Like, (spoilers) my recipe uses onion, carrot, relish, mayo, and pasta. I think our recipe, in total, cost MAYBE $4, and it serves…12-16. That’s at worst 33 cents a serving, and I’m not buying in bulk, so as diners and restaurants started serving plate lunches, you can imagine they jumped on the chance for something that everyone liked that wouldn’t break the bank.

“If I could season sawdust so people would like it, I would serve it with every damn meal.”

So, how exactly did I pull this all together? Let’s talk about 30 minutes of work stretching 3 hours.

Prep and Go-Go Gadget MEAT SKEWERS

The slightly frustrating part of both of these recipes, which actually makes them IDEAL in a professional kitchen, is that they are “prep and go” recipes. Like, the Teriyaki beef takes like, 10 minutes to prep, and cooks for about 5 minutes…there’s just a 2-10 hour marination step between those two steps. Similarly, the mac salad can take up to a DAY between steps: Stephen’s recipe calls for you to cook the macaroni, let it cool off overnight, and then make the salad the next day. Our has a 1 hour marination, but the point is the same: both dishes ‘finish’ very quickly, but have to be started fairly far ahead of time.

The Beef teriyaki recipe we used was humorously vague/frustrating about it: in the introductory segment, it says “this is a good starting point […] there may be some trial and error to find your preferred marinating time. Start with 4 to 5 hours, and fry up a little test batch. This is an especially good weeknight dish, as you can prepare it the night before and quickly pan-fry it the next day.” And then the actual RECIPE calls for 2-3 hours of marination, and broiling in the oven. But really, that’s part of the fun of it: how you make it is going to be shaped by what you want and what you prefer.

The marinade recipe is very simple: you want some grated ginger and garlic.

Ginger’s bold personality caused it to force itself in front of the already-grated garlic here.

To that, you add a cup of sugar (Stephen prefers brown, I forgot and used white), and a cup of shoyu (soy sauce). Our recipe also has a couple tablespoons of mirin, the seasoned cooking wine of Japan,(Hey, that almost ties in with last week’s post!) which Stephen didn’t note in his recipe, but they might not have used it at the college since it would make the dish haram for Muslim students. Since we don’t have that problem, we can use it at home.

Now comes the meat, and, in the interest of being bougie, my family did NOT use the recommended “flank steak cut into thin strips”, but instead sprung for “flank cut boneless short-ribs.” (Though I will note the choice was not entirely predicated on decadent ideals: I was actually in a slight rush while shopping, and couldn’t FIND the flank steak, so I grabbed the short-ribs.) Toss them in your whisked-together sauce…

No, don’t WHISK the meat in. That’s not how that works.

And let that sit for, again, 2-10 hours. We popped it in the fridge at 1 PM, and cooked it at 8, so we went with 7 hours.

While it’s sitting, you’ve got time to tackle the mac salad, which is the more involved of the two…but not by a whole lot. At least, not for our version: some Mac salad recipes go ALL OUT. I saw one recommended that used deviled eggs, tuna, black olives, frozen peas, and more. Ours hews much closer to ‘the basics’: onion, carrot, mayo, and some sweet pickle relish/sweet pickle juice. You’ll see others with like, diced celery and vinegar/milk to thin the sauce, but the recipe I used, from Alana Kysar’s Aloha Kitchen (which is also where the teriyaki beef recipe came from) relies on the pickle brine for acidity, and believes the secret to Hawaiian mac salad is shredded/grated onion.(I assume she says “believes” because it’s the ingredient in her salad you don’t see in many mainland mac salads, and because, as just noted, different families and restaurants do it differently.) And let me tell you, grating an onion isn’t the world’s most fun experience.

But at least the results are visually impressive.

You get a puddle of goo and burning eyes. (Probably why Stephen’s recipe instead uses chopped Green onionBut luckily, ‘grated onion and carrot’ are the only two ingredients that take actual WORK: the rest is just “measure out ingredient and add”. We also completely flubbed the recipe right off the bat: Nate was cooking the macaroni as I seared my eyes with onion fumes, and pulled the macaroni out at a perfect al-dente. Which the recipe specifically notes is too soon: you want the macaroni softer, so it can absorb the flavors of the salad better. C’est la vie.

Now, as noted beforehand, Stephen lets his macaroni cool overnight before making the salad. Our recipe calls for a much shorter window. Specifically, you cool the macaroni on its own for 10 minutes, and  then whip up most of the dressing: mayonnaise, sweet pickle relish, sweet pickle juice, and the grated onion, all get tossed with the noodles.

SALAD PARTS! ASSEMBLE!

Season with salt and pepper to taste, and pop in the fridge for an hour. While that’s going, you can also soak some skewers for an hour, since you’ll need something to broil the beef on that doesn’t catch fire. (You could also use metal skewers, or decide you’re going to go hog-wild and fry these suckers

With that done, we wandered off for several hours and engaged in holiday activities. When the time finally came for dinner, we popped out the mac salad, adding some more mayo, as well as a grated carrot, and Nate popped the skewers into the stove and flipped them as he saw fit…

Were there clear favorites in his method? We may never know.

While I whipped up some fried rice for a guest who can’t eat soy, so I turned our Easter Brunch ham, asparagus, and roasted tomato into the meat and veggies of a Ham and Kimchi Spring Vegetable Fried Rice, of which I didn’t take a picture because I was busy cooking, and also because at that point I was about…2 servings of mead deep. But I DID get pictures of the finished plate lunches!

Reminder for self: when photographing dark meat and white pasta, do not use a cream-colored plate, you doofus. THIS IS WHY THE CHEFS HAVE FANCY PLATES.

The results were, for first attempts, very good. The Mac Salad suffered a little from our under-cooking of the pasta, but the flavors were very on-point for the kind you find the Hawaiian restaurants around us making. The Teriyaki Beef was also great: sweet and salty, but not too sticky or cloying. I’ll note that, as you might see from the picture, that they were a little ‘dry’ in the sense that you don’t baste them with additional sauce, or boil it down for a glaze, so if you’re really into saucy teriyaki beef/chicken, you’ll want to modify the recipe. (Stephen takes his sauce, and cooks it down/thickens it with a cornstarch slurry for something that’ll coat the meat as a finished product better.)

And that’s a real fun part of these simple recipes: they’re specifically meant as a starting point to be broadened and riffed on. You can figure out what you do and don’t like in your mac salad and teriyaki glaze on your own. We’re just here to open the door, and say “aloha”, before pushing you out the now-opened door. That’s right, suckers! I saved it for the ‘goodbye’! Eat it!

THURSDAY:  WHO KNOWS?

MONDAY: OH GOD, WE JUST KEEP MAKING THESE, DON’T WE? UMMM. OH YEAH, WE MIGHT MAKE GRILLED CHEESE. THAT’S OUR GROUND-BREAKING IDEA. STAY TUNED FOR THAT, I GUESS

RECIPES

Teri Beef

Serves 4 to 6

Ingredients

1.25-1.5 pounds of beef (preferably short-rib, flank steak, or another wide, flat cut), sliced thin (1/4” or less) preferably into 8 sections.

1 cup soy sauce

1 cup sugar (white or brown)

4 cloves garlic, grated or minced

1 piece (1.5 inches tall) fresh ginger, peeled and grated

3 tbsp mirin

8 skewers

3 cups cooked white rice (for service)

Preparation

1. Combine the soy sauce, sugar, garlic, ginger, and mirin in a large bowl. Whisk to combine, add beef, stir to coat in marinade, cover, and chill 2+ hours.

2. 1 hour before cooking, places skewers (if wooden) in water to soak. Line a baking sheet with tin foil (dull side up).

3. Preheat the broiler on your oven. Remove the meat from the marinade, and thread onto skewers. Place on the lined baking sheet. Place in the oven, broiling for 3-5 minutes, turning every 1-2 minutes.

4. Serve with Rice and Mac Salad for a Plate lunch.

Mac Salad

Makes 12-16 servings

Ingredients

1 pound dry elbow macaroni

4 tbsps kosher salt

¼ cup grated Maui or yellow onion (roughly ½ onion)

2-3 cups Best Foods/Hellmann’s Mayonnaise (Apparently the brand is important in Hawaii)

¼ cup sweet pickle juice

6 tbsps sweet pickle relish

Salt and pepper

½ cup grated carrot

Preparation

1. Cook the macaroni according to package instructions, seasoning the water with the salt. Cook to TENDER, not al dente. Drain and let cool for 10 minutes, then add to a large bowl. Add the onion, 1 cup Mayonnaise, pickle juice, pickle relish and stir to combine. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Chill for 1 hour.

2. Remove from the fridge; add another cup of mayonnaise, and the carrot. Taste and season again, and serve.