Every Thanksgiving, Aunty makes this mochi rice stuffing for friends and family.  The very first year, we used it to stuff the turkey that Uncle and Cousin Mike were in charge of – using a large hibachi grill with dome cover.  Because the turkey was stuffed, it took way longer to cook and the 2 “boys” came in sunburned, quite drunk with too many beers, and the stuffing oozing out and charred.

It was really really delicious, though, but the following years, we stopped stuffing it into turkeys in order to save on cooking and drinking time.

We use Mow Lee & Co.  lup cheong from a hole in the wall place at 774 Commercial Street in San Francisco .  Any brand will do, but Aunty really likes the freshness and taste of this one.

Here is the link to Hawaiian Electric’s recipe, or follow along with Aunty below.

Ingredients:

Just as I start to write about Korean Natural Farming recipes and formulas, I get sidetracked. My son-in-law’s mother (Yoko) is here and she brought sheets of prepared and cut mochi from Seattle because son-in-law loves mochi and she used to put it in everything that had a sauce or soup. Beef stew, curry, natto, sukiyaki, udon, etc.

I also love mochi. But not in natto – bleh! Recently I added it to some Thai green curry that I made because it was too watery. That was pretty good, if I do say so myself!

This mochi is not the pretty colored one that are super soft with delicious fillings of bean paste, strawberries and cream, peanut butter, etc. It is the plain white mochi used in ozoni made with a mochi maker machine. In the old days, it was made by pounding with mallets in a mortar. It is soft, chewy and yummy on the first day, and then it gets tough and hard.

Freshly made plain mochi is usually rolled out in sheets and cut into rectangles or rolled into balls and flattened. Yoko brought over “bricks” of mochi wrapped in several layers of plastic wrap. Each brick was a stack of many flat rectangles which were easy to use. I was in heaven and made New Year’s ozoni and feasted on Yoko’s mochi dishes such as baked mochi that was used like bread to pick up salmon crumbles, mochi in grated radish, mochi in kinako and maple syrup, mochi in miso soup, and mochi fried up like popcorn. I think I gained about 5 pounds.

After the New Year mochi meals were over, I still had some very hard mochi that I kept in the refrigerator. I could have put them in the freezer but every mid morning and mid afternoon, they (the mochi) called to me, “Eat me, eat me!” And so I did.

I put a thin coating of butter on the front and back of each mochi and fried it in a nonstick pan until a slight crust formed on each side and the mochi became soft and slightly puffy. I then put in on a dish and pour just a little soy sauce on it. OMG. So delicious. Chewy, sticky, sweet and buttery with the saltiness of soy sauce. It goes so well with a cup of hot tea.

Each day I eat these I think I gain another pound. But it is worth it. And I will soon run out of mochi. Or maybe not because Yoko now has a mochi maker machine here. Sweeet!

Pal Jalna makes my mouth water and my tastebuds go pitter patter. Her husband, son, nephew, and sister are such good cooks, and so is Jalna. This was one of her latest – Beef Barley soup – which I never had. Neither have my kids. It looked easy and I had everything but the barley (Times and Foodland didn’t have it). I found it at Whole Foods and got my beef shank cut at Foodland – 2 thick slabs with bone.

It seemed strange to cook meat and then add vegetables but NOT potato, but I did it because Jalna did it. Here is her recipe and the video that she watched:

So how was it? Winnahs!!! Really ono! Thanks Jalna!!

For Thanksgiving this year, we had the usual feast with a very small group of family – which meant there were a LOT of leftovers. Except for pumpkin pie. Lanakila Kitchen’s annual turkey fundraiser included a perfectly cooked 22 lb turkey with homemade stuffing, gravy, corn on the cob, sweetbread rolls, and seasoned roast potatoes, and one little 8″ pumpkin pie. Hardly enough pie to feed the family and nothing left to give away.

This made pie become an almost obsession for Aunty. I really wanted to have a big piece of pumpkin pie – and pal Kay’s picture of Art’s pumpkin pie started a quest to bake one of my own.

I started with my mother’s pie crust recipe. She used to make the BEST lemon chiffon pie from scratch, mixing the chiffon part into the lemon pudding for a wonderful light texture.  Her crust was divine.  MmmmMmmmMmmm.

She would refrigerate the knives and bowl – to ensure the crust is flakey.

Grannie’s Pie Crust (makes 2 very small or 1 large pie crust)
2 cups sifted flour
3/4 tsp salt
2/3 cup shortening
4-6 TBS cold water

Put sifted flour and salt in a large mixing bowl.  Cut in the shortening with 2 cold steel butter knives until sort of mixed.  Add cold water, a tablespoon at a time and mix with spatula until dough forms. Roll into 2 balls. Flatten out with rolling pin. Drape over pie crust, trim, and form ridges along edge. Bake in a 450° oven for 15 minutes.  Cool.  I used just one dough ball and refrigerated the other for another pie another day.

The pumpkin puree can called for cans of evaporated milk – which I did not have.  But, because daughter #2 loves to put sweet condensed milk in her drinks, I did have cans of that, so found an easy recipe from Baking Bites.  I made some changes with the spices and also in how I cooked it at a consistent lower temperature for a longer time (because it was easier).

Sweetened Condensed Milk Pumpkin Pie
(or Four Ingredient Pumpkin Pie)

1 15-oz can pumpkin puree (approx 1 3/4 cups)
1 14-oz can sweetened condensed milk
2 large eggs, room temperature
2 tsp pumpkin spice ( I used 1/2 tsp each of ground cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger)
2 tsp vanilla extract (optional)

1 tsp worchestershire sauce (update on 2nd pie)

Preheat oven to 325F.
In a large bowl, whisk together pumpkin puree, sweetened condensed milk, eggs and pumpkin pie spice. Add in vanilla, if using. Pour into cooled crust.
Bake for 60-70 minutes, or until the pie filling is set and jiggles only slightly when the pan is jiggled.

My first pumpkin pie

How was it?  Not sure.  The crust was really flakey, which I like a lot.  The pumpkin filling was “meh” because I baked it for 60 minutes and by the time I checked on it, it didn’t jiggle at all.  Overcooked it.  This recipe was double enough for an 8″ aluminum pie pan so I will bake another one soon and keep the cooking time down.

Still, I would consider it a success because it is edible and tastes like a pumpkin pie.  And maybe it was easy, for a person who doesn’t really cook.

Update three days later

I backed another pie with the other half of the crust dough (me thinks I need to find a marble slab for rolling ease) and I added worchestershire sauce to the pie filling, just to try a zapper.  I also didn’t bake it for an hour – just 45 minutes in the oven – and it still was past jiggling.

However, I think it was a success!!!  Aunty can bake pies!

Aunty likes the Korean kim chee from Costco – it used to be Choonga and now it is called Joonga.  The big squarish bottle with the green plastic cover.  SO ono but TOO much.   I eat it with rice or saimin, or sometimes I would make it with spam – Ann Corum’s recipe.  But I can’t finish most of the bottle so it starts to get old and more potent and sits in the refrigerator until I guiltily throw it away after a few weeks.  So wasteful.

Jalna did a post about putting it in hamburger.  It looked really good and I still have to try it.

Recently I was watching a new Korean drama on Netflix called Mystic Pop Up Bar.  It is a cute show about a punished shaman’s daughter who has to save 100,000 people because of what she did 300 years ago.  Anywho, one of the characters shared a recipe with her using old kim chee.  It goes like this:

Rinse ripened kim chee.  (I also squeezed it out so it was like a big golf ball).  Chop it up finely and add shoyu and sesame oil.  Plop it on noodles and pour anchovy sauce over the bowl.

Sounds good and easy, doesn’t it?  So I made it tonight, but I didn’t have anchovy sauce.  (What is that anyway?)

It was karai, sour, and sweetish.  Strange but very delicious!  Perfect for a hot bowl of noodles.  And good for my digestion because kim chee is full of probiotics.  So glad to find another good kim chee recipe, especially for old kim chee.  No more waste, woo hoo!

Aunty doesn’t cook BUT Hawaiian Airlines has some neat local articles and one of them was chef Wade Ueoka sharing a recipe.  I used to get take out orders from him at the Farmer’s Market way before he and his wife opened the popular MW Restaurant.  That restaurant has unreal fancy food and desserts to die for.  However, truth to tell, I liked the homestyle cooking from his humble tent better because I like simple and cheap.

The Hawaiian Airline’s site has other local recipes and even videos.  I liked this recipe because the ingredients are what I have in the refrigerator.  Chicken, carrots, daikon, onions, ginger.  But it is not what I expected when the title said “shoyu chicken”.  I figured shoyu chicken is easy – chicken, ginger, shoyu and sugar – so I checked it out, watched the video, thought to myself, that looks like easy Nishime, and tried it tonight.

And you know what?  It was good – tasted healthy, light – and was easy!  I like how he cut the carrots.  I like how he shows us how he puts the chicken in and the other stuff and then takes the chicken out to chop.  I added shiitake mushrooms because I like shiitake mushrooms.  I also added tsukoshi (little bit) hondashi.

A really good cooking lesson.  I know he doesn’t know me, but I want to shout out, “Tanks, eh!” to chef Wade and Hawaiian Airlines.  He made a cook out of me!

Pal Jalna has a great blog with travel journals, recipes, and photos that have so much joy that Aunty is a Jalna fan.

Recently, she posted about her 9 year old nephew Colin’s Vietnamese Garlic Pork Chop.  It was so cute – his handwritten recipe, and looked so ono, Aunty had to try it because it looked easy.

It was harder than it looked and Aunty was missing several ingredients such as chicken powder, shallots, and fresh garlic, so Aunty made do with mushroom powder (Umami from Trader Joes), stalks of green onion, and some old chopped garlic in a bottle in the back of the refrigerator.

Harvesting and using lemon grass was treacherous.  That plant is killer because of super fine, super sharp little needle hairs that plunge into the skin, even through surgical gloves.  Ouch ouch ouch!  To remove those dang prickles after the laborious process of peeling off the hairy leaves from the stalk and chopping into bits, Aunty slathered Elmer’s white glue on arms, hands, wrists, and wherever else came in contact with the plant from hell.  After the glue dried, Aunty peeled it off in sheets and pieces.  Note to Aunty – freeze the dang lemon grass next time or use something else.

Times Super Market had pork chops on sale for $2.59/lb so for $5.30, Aunty had 4 nice pieces to work with.  It was super wonderful to clean the pork chops first with water, vinegar and salt in a large bowl, and then rinse and pat dry.  That winner first step made the pork seem almost kosher and less stinky.  Great tip, thanks to Colin!

Putting all the other ingredients together after the battle with lemon grass was easy except the Umami powder  (as replacement for chicken powder) was so fine and dusty, Aunty had a coughing fit after shaking out a teaspoon of it.  Actually, what IS chicken powder?

Aunty kind of coated each chop with the sauce, laid them flat in a single layer, covered them with plastic wrap and put it in the refrigerator for several hours.  It was easy to fry them with a bit of oil on medium heat (not too hot or it gets black) and, after plating it, put whatever sauce left in the pan over the pork chops.

It was SO soft, moist, and delicious!  Not sure what did it, but it was!  Thank you Jalna, thank you Colin!  It was a great and successful learning experience.

Here is Colin’s recipe and his broiled version:

Aunty’s version before the olive oil, salt, and pepper.

If you one local like Aunty, you say “Capreez”.  However, the proper way to say it is like one Italian, “Ca prez eh”, with the emphasis on the 2nd syllable and a rolling “r”.

On Saturday’s class at the Hawaii Potters Guild, pal Becca (from the East Coast) corrected Aunty’s pronunciation and Aunty told her that we say “capreez”.  She couldn’t believe that, so Aunty asked a group that was gathered nearby if they knew what a “ca prez eh salad” was.  One girl nodded gleefully and said she loved it.  Others looked at me like, “huh?”  until I said “capreez salad” and smiles broke out because now they understood.  That was pretty funny.

Anywho, Aunty now makes ca prez eh salads because of how darn easy it is, and how delicious it is!  It also helps that Aunty has basil growing like crazy in the garden.

How easy?  Like 1, 2, 3 after cutting slices of tomato, slices of mozzarella logs or balls and trimming basil leaves.

After the ingredients are cut in their respective piles:

1.  lay down a slice of tomato
2. put a slice of mozzarella cheese on it
3.  put a basil leaf on the cheese.
4. Repeat 1-3 until done.

Then, sprinkle a little bit of Hawaiian salt and pepper (optional) and drizzle good quality olive oil on the salad.  Many people also like balsamic vinaigrette drizzled.  That’s it!

It looks pretty, is probably healthy, and when you pronounce it properly, you can kiss your fingertips and sound like an Italian chef.

Buon Appetito!