The Dinner Files

Lovely baskets of fresh produce beautifully stacked would normally be enough to tempt me. I consider the promise of a fresh cup of 100% Kona coffee worth a drive. Amazingly flavorful “red veal” from local ranches (the ground meat made divine burgers) would, one would think, get my ass in the car. The possibility that the bacon made from pigs raised in a mac nut orchard that I tried last year might be back seems like a reasonable inducement. Yet I cannot tell a lie. The A-number-1 reason I headed back to the Waimea farmers market for a second visit on this last trip was for one of Aunt Aggie’s malasadas.

Fried dough is tricky. It can be the thing I can’t stop eating no matter how full I am or the thing that even sharp hunger won’t urge me to eat. It can be crispy and light and flavorful or heavy and greasy and beyond bland.

Aunt Aggie’s malasadas were, obviously, the former.

The malasada, or, rather, the practice of making malasadas, was brought to Hawaii by Portuguese immigrants, mainly from the islands of Madeira and the Azores when the grape-growing got rough in the 19th century. You can call it a doughnut. You can call it a fritter. You can call it a blob of fried dough rolled in sugar, for all I care. It is, after all, a most accurate description. Like its brethren, its deliciousness (or forgetableness) depends on a dough that was allowed some time to rise and develop flavor and texture, fresh oil that hasn’t gone rancid or taken up random ambient odors and smells, a steady oil temperature between 350 and 375 so the dough starts to cook before it has time to soak up oil, but doesn’t brown and burn on the outside before the inside is cooked and light and fluffy, and the prompt and speedy serving and eating of the result.

The people at the Aunt Aggie’s stand at the Waimea Homestead Farmers Market on Saturday mornings are doing all that. They are doing all that with smiles and good cheer.

When complimented they seem surprised. Why wouldn’t malasadas be delicious? And, I guess, when you know how to make them like that, you would think it was no big deal. But I’ve tried others and they can be, like all fried dough that is rushed or left too long, like faintly sweet industrial white bread that’s taken a oil bath.

So a humble gob of fried dough turned me into one of those people that, when gathered in enough quantity, can be the downfall of a farmers market; one of those people who head off to farmers markets to eat instead of to shop, who buy prepared food instead of ingredients. Yet how to think of salad when malasadas are there and you already have a cup of coffee in hand?

Sometimes you do not want another fish sandwich. Even if it is remarkably fresh and delicious. Luckily, if you find yourself driving through Kawaihae, Hawaii on a Friday, there is GJ’s Huli Chicken.

Also, as you can see, GJ’s also hulis up ribs.

Huli? What is huli? It’s Hawaiian barbecue. Meat is slathered with brown sugar and soy sauce and usually some ginger and maybe other seasonings depending on the cook and cooked directly or indirectly with a fire.

GJ’s offers a plate lunch, with a scoop of rice and macaroni salad (“mac salad,” which can be a bit confusing because in every other instance I’ve ever experienced “mac” in Hawaii is short for macadamia nut, although it is usually phrased as “mac nut” so I should have caught on just a bit sooner than I did) or you can just buy the meat.

If you just want the meat, GJ picks up a half rack of ribs or half a chicken and puts it right in a plastic grocery bag (well, really two plastic grocery bags to avoid the quite fragrant meat juice dripping all over you and your car) and hands it over.

The plate lunch, with its carb-heavy propensity, seems like something developed for workers, surfers, and kids at that stage when they’re growing like weeds. My son loved nothing more than a plate lunch, especially the one from GJ’s with its generous allotment of bird.

My dashing husband and I preferred to get our meat-in-a-bag and doctor it up a bit back at the house with a vegetable or two. Spicy pickles and piquant dressings were key to cutting the fatty deliciousness of GJ’s huli.

GJ’s Huli, in Kawaihae on Fridays, Waimea on Saturdays, and Konohaa on Sundays. You supply the pickles.

Sometime between the end of the school year and having “part of a dead person,” as my son calls my ACL donor graft, put in my right knee, we were lucky enough to spend a bit of time in Hawaii. The Big Island of Hawaii. We were in a part the locals call “Up North,” which, since that is what Minnesotans call anywhere their lakeside cabin finds itself, amused me to no end.

“Up North” on Hawaii and in Minnesota, I discovered, have three things in common.

First, they both offer excellent swimming. I believe I am clearly and firmly on the record as loving swimming, particularly in naturally occurring bodies of water. The warm salt water bath of the Hawaiian Pacific and the bracing effect of northern lakes are two sides of the same coin in my book.

Second, if you happen to go out for breakfast in either place you are likely to find yourself surrounded by old guys with incredibly strong accents spending the morning drinking black coffee and shooting what can only be called the shit.

Third, fresh fish. The soft spot on my palate for the delicate taste of fresh water lake fish like sunnies and walleye and bass seems to be fairly entrenched. But who am I to turn up my nose at a supremely fresh piece of ono? The very name of the fish means “delicious.”

The lunch wagon above was parked next to the fish market in the small town near where we stayed. You could watch the fishermen come in with their catch, off-load it into the giant refrigerated section next to the shack where it would later be sold, and, if you didn’t make too big of a deal about it, watch the fishmonger filet it up before it was walked over to the lunch wagon and cooked up for your sandwich. Dude had a way with the knife.

What’s not on the menu is the specials page taped to the window – the daily special plus a list of the fish you can choose to have cooked up for your plate or burger that day.

Besides being deliciously fresh food at a fair price, the lunch wagon offered the opportunity to interact with the lunch wagon lady. She was the kind of woman who happily gave Ernest all wings in his Korean chicken special. The kind of cook who noticed that I salted my sandwich one day and so asked if I’d like extra salt the next. Plus, I liked how the lawn furniture she had out front was the same kind I used to scrub clean when my parents brought it out from the storage space under the garage every spring.

If you’re on the Big Island anywhere near Kawaihae at lunchtime Monday through Saturday, I cannot recommend strongly enough eating lunch out of this ailing old vehicle.

Look at that beef. Pretty perfect looking, wouldn’t you say? How about if I told you I grilled it while wearing a knee immobilizer?

I have and will happily eat rare beef. Hell, I don’t mind a portion of steak tartare every now and again. But I really prefer a steak at a true à point, that state of medium-rareness where everything is a lovely rosy pink except for that blush of red at the center. For a larger cut, like this cross-rib roast, I’m an ideal eating companion or audience. If I think I can get away with it, I’ll nab the toasty burnt ends, but if all that’s left on the platter is a slice or two of bloody center cuts I’ll dig in with equal glee.

This roast was prepared as I was taught by my Minnesota predecessors. It was coated with a generous amount of salt, black pepper, and where they would use garlic powder I got all California on that roast and used fresh minced garlic. It was put on a hot grill and seared all over before the heat was brought down for it to cook a bit more gently. After it was off the grill and resting (the seriously most important step in cooking meat that way way way too many people pass over), we threw the asparagus on the grill until it was charred on the ends, at which point we took it out of its misery, drizzled it with olive oil and scattered a sort of crazy amount of lemon zest on it.

The extent to which, after surgery and a burial and long plane rides and leaving concourses full of pitying glances in my wake as I made my way through airports in a knee brace, my mouth watered while preparing and eating this dinner made me think of that old belief that beef “feeds the blood.” My blood, I’m afraid, needs a bit of feeding these days.

I am usually lakeside, at the family cabin, for this holiday weekend. Circumstances happy (a wedding) and, shall we say, inconvenient (knee surgery but 2 1/2 weeks ago) kept me in unseasonably sunny San Francisco this year. There have been many ice cream cones (the ridiculousness of debating where go to—Mr. and Mrs. Miscellaneous, Bi-Rite Creamery, Humphry Slocombe, or St. Francis Fountain, all of which are to greater and lesser degrees in what we consider our neighborhood living, as we do, betwixt and between the Mission and Potrero Hill—does not escape us and we are well aware of this bounty of riches) and a wee bit of grilling, but my relative immobility has kept me pretty much out of the kitchen.

So I was going to write about missing being at the cabin, and how much I itch to be diving into the cool northern waters this time of year. My connection to northern climes was highlighted even more, however, with the news that my grandfather died yesterday.

It is sad because death is always sad and we loved him dearly, but I count myself beyond lucky to be mourning a grandparent when I am in my forties.* He was a funny, independent, good-looking man who died with his mind and his head of thick hair remarkably in tact. He had a strong Norwegian-Minnesotan sensibility, as best evidenced by the fact that he always told me that he checked the weather in San Francisco everyday to see how I was doing, the two things being, to his mind, inextricably linked. I might miss most how his strong Minnesotan accent pronounced my name, with a nice long o in the middle. Accents that strong—remember the guy shoveling his driveway in Fargo? for a moment there in the theater I thought the Coen brothers had somehow recruited my grandpa for the role—aren’t too common anymore.

I’m very glad I once made him the kranskake, an almond Norwegian ring cake served at weddings and other festive occasions, pictured above. He teared up when I carried it into the room on Christmas Eve.

On the one hand, it would be fun to make a kransekake today and I have the ring molds; on the other hand I also have two filets of wild Alaskan salmon in the fridge just waiting to be turned into gravlax, an equally fitting tribute. I’m going to go ask my dashing husband to set me up with a stool at the counter, strap an ice pack on my knee, and get to work.

* There are a lot of long-lived people in my family. I had three great-grandparents into my teens; my grandparents all lived to see me to at least 27. My grandfather’s grandmother lived to be 95, her father to 94, his grandfather to 93.