Monday, June 17, 2013

Father's Day Luau

I meant to take pictures.  Really, I did.

I should admit now that I'm a HORRIBLE food stylist.  My food may taste good, but if I do manage to take pics (more often than not, we're washing the dishes after dinner when I realize I meant to take a picture), they look bad.  Paper plates, bad lighting, no garnish, dirty pots and pans in the background.  Oh, how I'd love to be able to pull off those gorgeous food pics you see in the magazines.  But alas, this is not a talent I have.

But I did mean to take pictures of yesterday's meal.  My dear friend Melissa and I planned a big meal for our husbands, Hawaiian style.  In truth, it was somewhat self-serving...  she and I are celebrating milestone birthdays together next month (40 for me, 30 for her) and are doing an Elvis-Hawaiian-themed party.  So we used the day to test run a few things.

We spent the day down at McFaddin Beach, which is about 30 minutes from us.  It is a little redneck, but if you drive down a mile or so, it is pretty clean and sparsely populated.  And the kids love it.  Well, the two younger ones.  Our oldest HATES the beach.  Fortunately he's off at SpaceCamp this week.  So off to the beach we went with our Hawaiian food for a day of splashing in the waves, fishing, collecting hermit crabs, and studying Six Sigma.







Yeah, that last part sucked.  I had a Six Sigma test last night for an online class I'm taking.  Blah.










Back to the food.  Melissa and I made quite the spread.  It was so much fun cooking together too.  The original game plan included a green salad, but I overestimated the shelf-life of the lettuce I had in the fridge.  Oh well, we'll eat veggies another day...

Here was our menu:

Ahi Poke
Huli Huli Chicken
Spam Musubis
Macaroni Salad
Potato Salad
Hawaiian Rolls
Pecan Pie

OK, so the potato salad and pecan pie weren't Hawaiian.  Call Hawaii 5-0 on me.  My husband wanted them and it was his day, after all.

We kinda followed this recipe for Huli Huli Chicken.  It was so good.  We did skinless in the oven;  I think skin-on and smoked would be outrageous!
scroll down to dragonchowmein's recipe here...  http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/788498

And this one I followed pretty religiously for Macaroni Salad.  I was not hopeful, especially with all the milk and mayonnaise.  But it turned out to be pretty good.  I may tinker with the seasoning a bit next time, but it is a good starting point.
http://creolecontessa.blogspot.com/2013/02/hawaiian-macaroni-salad.html

There are plenty of recipes out there for Ahi Poke.  I don't have one in particular to suggest.  I just use a little sriracha, sliced onions, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, sesame oil, and salt.  And believe it or not, we've found the frozen ahi steaks from Sam's club work just great.  Thaw, dice up, and toss into the rest of the ingredients.  Admittedly, I overdid the sesame oil just a bit yesterday.  But everybody else loved it.

I'll do a separate post some time about musubis and pecan pie.

And then there's the cupcake testing.  That's for a later post too.

1 comment:

  1. Sounds good...can't wait to EAT at this party...I am jealous that I am not invited to cupcake cooking...I might have an amazing secret cupcake receipt...I do not but I will look forward to trying all of this

    ReplyDelete