I like going to Hawaii is because of the food. That Pacific Island cuisine can’t be beat sometimes. There’s a place up on Captain Cook Drive in Kona that sells a particularly Hawaiian dish called Lau Lau. It’s fish, pork or chicken or all three, wrapped in lu’au (taro) leaves and ti leaves. It’s steamed and eaten with rice and poi. It’s cooked for hours so that everything just melts in your mouth. It’s hard, if not impossible to get lu’au and ti leaves on the mainland, but I recently discovered you can use collard greens and instead of wrapping it in ti leaves, you wrap it in foil. You don’t eat the ti leaves in any case, so you really don’t need them. This week I tried making it. Instead of taro leaves you can use spinach as well to place inside the bundle which you then wrap in collards. Some people use banana leaves to wrap it all up as well, but foil is fine. The thing is, you eat the collards and the spinach and throw the foil away.
I know it’s not on a proper plate, but that’s how it’s always arrived for me.
After steaming this for a good 3 and half hours, the end result isn’t traditional lau lau, but it’s close enough to blunt my desire to fly to Hawaii because I’m craving some. Poi is bitter tasting stuff, so I don’t need that at all. It’s made from the taro root anyway, so I couldn’t make it if I wanted to. I liked my version of lau lau so much that I made it again yesterday. Last time I forgot the spinach and the liquid smoke, so this one was even better.
That’s all for cooking school today. I’m no good at describing recipes, so look it up. You can probably make it yourself easily. Hawaii is great. If I ever go to Australia again I will be stopping along the way. That non-stop in transit thing from NY to LA and then 13 -15 hrs to Sydney isn’t something I’m planning on doing again. It’s 32 hours door to door all up. I’ve timed it. Fuck that. It wasn’t too bad from San Francisco to Sydney, but add another 6 hours (plus three to the airport) to get to the West coast from New York and it’s too much. Next time I shall stop in Hawaii for a day or so, like I did last time.
I’m not breaking my neck to race down there anyway. The way they butchered up the crazy plandemic was very disturbing. I knew Victoria was a police state before I left, but I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The fact that Daniel Andrews got re-elected further cemented my disbelief in what people are smoking in that place. I sent many years wandering around Melbourne though, and it was a great place to be a musician. I guess oppressive regimes serve as an incubator for creativity, I don’t know. I don’t need any more of it, that’s for sure.
I know I’ll get into arguments with people if the subject of politics comes up, so maybe I’ll just talk about cooking from now on.
Happy Friday.