Kung Hee Fat Choy!

happy chinese new year and valentines day! i don't usually post about things that i haven't actually made myself, but my aunty wanda made these cookies the other day that were too hard to resist. she was inspired by this article in the honolulu advertiser about the tradition of almond cookies for chinese new year. it turns out it's an americanized cookie - traditional chinese nut cookies were made out of walnuts - but i'm grateful for the switch, since walnuts make my tongue swell. inspired by the morning newspaper, and taking advantage of her newly-retired lifestyle, she called my aunty billie - popsie's sister, for her masterful almond cookie-making tips. included in the expert tips is:

• you HAVE to use crisco. yep. you can't make crispy almond cookies without crisco. so take a deep breath and get over it.
• you should HANDLE them. i always assumed handling the cookie dough too much would make the cookies tough, like pie crust, but it turns out you should roll these cookies between your palms at least ten times each, till you can feel them change texture. 
• to make them all uniformly flat, you ball them onto the cookie sheet and then drape a dish towel over them all and use a rolling pin or drinking glass to flatten them all at once. this also gives them a nice waffle texture. 

these cookies are awesome. here's the recipe aunty wanda used, courtesy of the honolulu advertiser:

Brenda Leong's Almond Cookies

• 1 cup butter-flavored solid shortening (she uses Crisco)
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 large egg at room temperature
• 1 tablespoon almond extract
• 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• Red food coloring blanched almonds.

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Using an electric mixer (preferably a hands-free stand mixer), cream shortening and sugar very well. Add egg and almond extract and cream again until built up and smooth. Mix together flour, baking soda and salt and gradually add to batter while mixing. Form and decorate cookies with food coloring or almonds on ungreased cookie sheet. These cookies spread. Be sure to place them 3 inches apart. Bake at 325 degrees for 15-20 minutes.

Makes about 30 cookies.
 

the brilliant innovation that aunty wanda put on these cookies is the heart stamp. chinese almond cookies traditionally have a red dot in the middle, and since it's also valentine's day today she made the red stamp into a heart by carving the end of a carrot and dipping it in food coloring. genius!
happy year of the tiger, everyone!

imu cooking

next in the series of hawai'i reportback is the imu.
imu is the traditional hawaiian pit oven, dug into the ground and filled with hot lava rocks. traditional foods cooked in the imu include pua'a - pig, 'ulu - breadfruit, and 'uala - sweet potato, which are wrapped in ti leaves and placed in the pit with the hot rocks, on top of juicy mai'a - banana stumps, leaves, and burlap and then the pit is filled in with dirt to seal the baking process. one of my favorite dishes is laulau, where your pork or fish is wrapped first in lu'au leaves - kalo (taro) leaves, and then wrapped in a ti leaf package.
we dug a pit into some friends' yard this year around the holidays to do an imu. we prepared breadfruit, sweet potato, kalua pork, and pork laulau, as well as a bunch of turkeys that were bought in a sale frenzy, some rice pudding, and coconut stuffing.


since it had rained every day for weeks, the wood was a bit wet and we had some difficulty getting the fire started to heat the lava rocks. however, using new technologies such as the leaf blower and some hardwood pallets snagged from a local business, we were able to get up and running.

word to the wise: don't get too involved in your firestarting to notice if your hair has started burning off.
as the rocks were heating, we were chopping and crushing the banana stumps, which are very high in moisture and provide the steaming effect for the imu. this is a great material to use because bananas reproduce asexually from suckers that shoot off the side of the plant, so when a banana tree bears fruit it must be cut down (or it dies on its own) to provide room for the next shoot to emerge.

once the fire burned down and the rocks were sufficiently hot we covered them with the banana stumps and then laid our food on top of them. as you can see the steam is working its magic already.


from there the food gets covered first with banana leaves.


then with palm fronds.

usually the next layer is burlap, but we used a couple of tarps.

from here the edges first get sealed shut with dirt.


and then the whole thing is buried.


and then you leave it cooking for several hours while you go fly kites.


and when you get back you do the process in reverse.
you dig out the dirt.


and peel back the tarps.


and it looks like a crazy sea organism.


and then you check the turkey to make sure it's done.


and shred the meats.


and the feast is on.


thanks to my stepmom, kat, for the photos.

new year's traditions

the past three weeks marty and i spent in hawai'i with my family for the holidays. and while we were enjoying ourselves and even doing radical domestic stuff, i couldn't bring myself to sit in front of the computer to blog about it. but now we're home and so it's time to catch up on the vacay postings.

we'll start with mochi pounding.


mochitsuki, the pounding and making of mochi, is a japanese new year's tradition, and my family joins our closest friends on kaua'i each year before the new year to pound it out and roll it up.


the process starts the day before, soaking the mochi rice overnight. after soaking, the mochi rice is put into the seiro, a series wooden steaming frames, and steamed.

the hot cooked rice is then put into the usu, a big carved stone bowl, where it is pounded with a kine or wooden mallet. typically three mochi pounders go to work first smashing and then pounding the mochi in rhythm.


the job is then finished up by one pounder while one adept person with quick hands scrapes the sticky mochi from the sides of the bowl between pounds with the mallet.


when the mochi has reached optimum consistency it's delivered to a wax paper and katakuriko , potato starch - covered table where the mochi gets made. one person pinches off little balls of mochi and the others form, pinching and patting them in their hands into the proper mochi shape.

some mochi are made with an, adzuki bean paste, in the center. we've also branched out to non-traditional but oh-so-tasty varieties like chocolate-peanut buter filled mochi.

most of the mochi are made into standard palm-sized confections, with a few batches made into special sizes for new year's traditions, such the tiny mochi balls used for ozoni, a soup made with mochi. also, special mochi are made for the kagami mochi, a traditional new year's decoration and offering made with one smaller mochi atop a larger mochi, which is then topped with a mandarin orange with the leaf attached.


the kagami takes its place near the entrance to the home at new year's time along with the kadomatsu, an arrangement of bamboo, pine and flowers that sybolize good luck for the coming year.
my family spends new year's eve with our friends, eating traditional good luck foods, such as toshikoshi soba (yeah, buckwheat!) and lighting off fireworks. our established tradition in the past few years is to build what we call a "morning glory circle" around our fire pit in the front yard. this tradition started one year when we had a few boxes of those fireworks called morning glories, which resemble sparklers but have the added effect of popping off sparks and being a little more firey. bored with the typical use of holding and drawing shapes in the air with these sticks, we planted them in a circle and lit the whole thing on fire. this was great fun, and each year the amount of boxes of morning glories showing up at our house multiplied exponentially, such that the circle of planted morning glories is now feet deep and the fire produced at midnight when we light the circle resembles something nuclear. here are some images of this year's circle, which we built in the back since the front yard was too saturated from weeks of rain.

happy new year.