A Warm Summer Night's Dinner

Time for more foodventures! This time, I teamed up with Titowpuente to create a feast of sorts for my family. We went Hawaiian-Japanese for the themed dinner.

That day was particular scorching as the tail end of the Indian summer wound up for it’s final pitch. We nearly canceled our cooking session because turning on the stove and oven would only increase the temperature, right? We resorted to a cooler meal: instead of slaving over the stove massaging arborio rice into risotto, we decided to go with a cold somen salad, with yakitori for a side. 

It took quite a while, the whole endeavour, as we had to hit the supermarkets (this meal required a special trip to the Asian market to get kamaboko, or fishcake), but it was very much worth it and there was plenty of food for all! 

Want to duplicate the dinner? Here you go:

• Somen Salad
• Yakitori
• Green Tea Cheesecake

Just a tip: For the teriyaki sauce that the yakitori recipe asks you to make, I would half the measurements so you won’t have so much leftover. :) Also, in addition to chicken, we added tasty chicken liver onto the skewers. Delicious!

Puff City!

Image from Big Island Grinds

My last trip to Hawaii brought me to a little hole-in-the-wall pastry shop called Puff City. The hype on Yelp as well as hype from an uncle of mine got me to the humble establishment at a honking 6am! First of all, I am not, by any means, a morning person, so you can imagine how important this foodie trip was for me. Or you can imagine the fear of getting there at 8am and only being able to grab what's left! Anyways, now you reap the rich rewards of my puffy reviews as well as that of my puffy ego. Here you go!:

Lilikoi (passion fruit) Mousse- exquisite! Definitely my favourite puff of them all; with rave reviews of it on Yelp and and awarded most-popular-puff from Michael at Puff City, that seemed to be the flagship puff that simply doesn't mess around. Coated in a lilikoi ganache, it really does earn its esteem: light and fragrant, it captures the essence of the fruit without compromising in sweetness (far too many lilikoi products are overloaded with sugar).

Lychee- delightful! The mousse is literally like a flower, being very aromatic. Much of the lychee fruit's sweetness and character is in it's juicy and somewhat meaty pulp. While a pastry can't really capture that, the lychee puff does maintain the floral fragrance of the tropics-loving fruit. It makes me hungry for more possibilities of flower-scented morsels; reminds me of rose and lavender gelato I had in Nice, France. :)

Coffee Mousse with Chocolate Ganache & Heath Bar Bits- the highlight of this puff is the coffee mousse! Accompanied by the chocolate ganache, this puff has a good marriage of flavour... and then you get to the toffee, which really sells this puff. I would almost like to see what Puff City could do with a sea salt caramel puff. :)

Coconut Mousse with Chocolate Ganache- the coconut flavour in this isn't as strong as it would be in haupia (a Hawaiian coconut milk pudding), but I respect it as an artistic choice. Nonetheless, the coconut scent still shines through in this puff. The shredded coconut marries the puff together amidst the chocolate ganache (which is a tad bit overpowering)--the trick is to take a whiff of the shredded coconut with your bite (like the strawberry daiquiri at the Noble Experiment in San Diego).

Mocha Rum- the rum flavour is evident in the mousse and the mocha is subtle behind the rum. I do find that this puff relies heavily on the ganache for its taste.