Sunday, August 25, 2013

Dan's blackened-chicken pasta salad.

Blackened-chicken pasta salad with honey mustard dressing. © Ryan Schierling
When you move away from things you love, you will find there are some very necessary instances where you'll attempt to recreate them as best you can. Sometimes it's trying to find a feeling, a recollection, or a solid sense of place. The intangibles are always the most onerous to rediscover. Thankfully, when it comes to reviving a food-related impression, it's not terribly difficult to do. Olfactory and taste perceptions bring back memories in powerful ways that other senses seem to clumsily mishandle with feeling and emotion. My most-cherished meals are wrapped with importance and warm remembrance – a single bite will bring forth a flood of memory and stories to retell. 

This simple blackened-chicken pasta salad with rotini, black olives, tomatoes and honey mustard dressing is not my food memory – it is the fond reminiscence of a lifelong friend who has carried it with him and shared it with his friends and family. I am thankful to be a part of that group, and it has been a part of our wee suburban cabin family collection for a while now.

Dan shared this dish with me when we were living at Ghetto Melrose in Seattle. He's been making it since he moved from North Carolina to Kansas, to Washington state and then back to Kansas. Originally a favored menu item at the now-defunct Harrison's Bar & Grill in Cary, North Carolina, not much has changed in his (and our) preparation. 

Sunday, August 18, 2013

Avgolemono and fried artichoke hearts.

Avgolemono soup with artichoke and lemon fritto misto. © Ryan Schierling
I'm not naming names, but some of us are occasionally bent on pretending that, in those short hours after work, we're actually on a Mediterranean vacation. The perfect food vehicle for such fantasy is avgolemono. It is a cheery egg-lemon soup with all the satisfaction of a wintertime comfort food, but perfectly suited in its lively essence to the heat of summer.

It seems that really good Greek restaurants are few and far between, and I have yet to adopt a Greek grandmother, so alas, my history with the real deal avgolemono is somewhat limited. Yet, a singular experience has remained ingrained in my memory as a stalwart standard. It was at a small Greek diner, that I've long forgotten the name of, where I stopped alone for lunch one day as I was passing through town. For some insane reason it has stayed filed there in my memory, waiting patiently for this year when it finally found its way to the surface and I was inspired to work out how to make it at home.

Wanting a warm soup in Summer felt as if I was making some kind of advanced mental preparation for Fall. Or, perhaps I just had a hankering for lemon. Who knows. But on a recent morning walk, it was all I could think about. It's a shame I didn't turn my attention to this dish sooner, as a traditional avgolemono soup is surprisingly straightforward to make. Simply a homemade chicken stock, white rice, and a rather miraculous lemon and egg finish. You might think of avgolemono as the Greek counterpart to our traditional chicken noodle soup. It's a warm and silky soup with a soft yellow color, tender white rice and an unmistakable lemon brightness.

Friday, August 9, 2013

Tex-Mex Loco Moco.

Tex-Mex meets broke da mout'. © Ryan Schierling

It's been just long enough that I'm starting to yearn for a little island time again.

There were only a few places on our must-eat list when Julie and I first visited Oahu. We had to get malasadas at Leonard's on Kapahulu, try shaved ice at Matsumoto's Shave Ice in Hale'iwa. There would be poke at Tamashiro Market, shrimp trucks on the North Shore, and a stop for plate lunch at Rainbow Drive-In. A bit touristy, as all first visits are, but a good introduction to some solid Hawaiian culinary building blocks. 

At Rainbow Drive-In, the plate lunch of mahi mahi, steamed white rice and that wonderfully-simple, mayonaisse-drenched macaroni salad, was nicely satisfying, but I couldn't leave without trying the loco moco. The crazy wha….? Isn't "moco" Spanish for "snot?"

One scoop rice, one hamburger patty, one over-easy egg, smothered in brown gravy and served in a bowl for three bucks. It was brilliant. 

Now, like any other fabled regional dish with a long history steeped in island culture, stories vary about the origins of the loco moco. Some say it was a guy on the Lincoln Wreckers barefoot football team nicknamed "Crazy" that asked for the combination at Hilo's Lincoln Grill in 1949.  

Others say Lincoln Grill owners Nancy and Richard Inouye put the dish together for the hungry (and usually broke) Wreckers players and only charged them 25 cents.They say when Nancy wrote it up on the butcher paper menu, she asked husband Richard what it should be named.

"The kids are crazy. Call it a loco moco." 

There are variations – Spam, teriaki beef or chicken, mahi-mahi, wieners, chili, ham steak, bacon – but for me, none compares to the original with a hamburger patty.


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