"By Request: The Search For Hawai'i's Greatest Recipes," Betty Shimabukuro
This book is part of my collection of tourist memorabilia. Like I've mentioned here before, when I travel somewhere interesting I tend to buy myself cookbooks with local recipes as mementos. A few years ago
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umbran and I went to Hawaii, ostensibly for me to attend a Continuing Education conference. I fell in love with the area, the food, and everything else there, and brought this home as a reminder. It's an interesting book - the recipes are a collection from one of the local newspapers; the author runs a column where people write in looking for various recipes from different restaurants or cultures and she hunts them down and prints them. I picked it out because it had a few dishes that I really liked while I was in the area, and because it was as much fun to read as I figured it would be to cook from. Of course, though, I never actually used it.
Last week I decided to fix that, so dinner was Chicken Katsu - a dish I utterly adored when I ordered it from the plate lunch restaurant next door to the convention center, in spite of the fact that it's more or less glorified asian-style chicken fingers.
Alas, the recipe doesn't translate quite so well to the kitchen. Partly I blame the cookbook; telling me to fry the chicken in oil isn't very specific - is it pan-fried or deep-fried? No way to know. Partly I blame the setup; I doubt my oil was quite hot enough. Either way, the chicken was a little more bland and oily than I would have liked. The katsu sauce was delicious, though, and I'm not quite ready to write off this book. I figure I'll try at least one more recipe from it before it gets exiled to the shelf of 'too pretty and memorable to discard, but not useful enough to cook from....'
