Facing agriculture’s future
Had lunch Friday with Dan Nakasone, a marketing expert who helps farmers and food producers find buyers for their products and who serves as Alan Wong's "sourcing" expert, linking him with new producers. Dan's always full of story ideas and juicy insider tidbits and...
Vegan food: You don’t have to be a monk to love it
What's "nirvana" food for vegan chef Mark Reinfeld of Kaua'i? A humble "monk's bowl": a grain, a green, a protein dressed with a blend of flax or hemp oil, nutritional yeast (flaked or powdered deactivted yeast — cheesy, nutty, high-protein) and wheat-free temari (a...
Putting myself to the Wong Way test
In a recent conversation with chef Alan Wong of Alan Wong's restaurant and The Pineapple Room, I learned that one of his teaching techniques is to have the kitchen staffs take a twice-yearly test on culinary matters. Throughout the year, Wong and senior staff expose...
Still rolling oats … with Alan Wong on the side
I'm still all about oat bars; sorry, I go through these phases . . . Yesterday, just before running out the door to go to Alan Wong's book signing at Barnes & Noble, I threw together some pineapple and macadamia nut oat bars, one of the variations I offered in the...
On an oat roll
I LOVE oats: Scotch or Irish oats with brown sugar and cream. Oatmeal cookies. Breakfast bars with oatmeal in them. Breads made with oat flour. Oatcakes. A reader asked if I had an oatcake of my own. And I do. (Sorry, I don't have a picture of it.) I don't much like...
Raising the bar
I love Kashi’s chewy grain bars; they’re not too sweet, have great texture and, at 140 calories, aren’t too great an indulgence. Half of one satisfies me as a between-meal snack. But they’re expensive. So I tried to recreate them, using the ingredients on the label. I...
Muffin love…
Other than the odd blueberry muffin, I rarely ate and never thought much of muffins until the oat bran craze of the 1970s and '80s, when it was widely publicized that oats could help reduce heart-threatening cholesterol buildup. Then came the Beyond Bluberry era, when...
O’Lei! A new Maui favorite
Made a quick trip to Maui to visit my mom and my ailing sister (prayers shamelessly solicited for healing there) day before yesterday. Mom and I went to dinner at Cafe O'Lei in Wailuku. Her choice. I'd always avoided O'Lei because it sounded like inauthentic Mexican...
What I got for Christmas: recipes
Meyer Lemon Marmalade Chops. Okay, so Grandma and Grandpa didn't miraculously rise from the dead to make my Christmas wishes come true. But I did get every material thing I asked for (it helps if you make very specific lists and give them to people well in advance)....
All I want for Christmas . . .
All I want for Christmas . . . is something I can never have. I want Grandma (Grandpa, too). Grandma as she was before Alzheimer's sent her careening backward in age, staring for hours in apparent surprise at her outstretched hands, as a baby will do. She would rouse...