Aloha! I picked up Cooking with Aloha (Joyce Mondoy for Hawaii Foodbank, Inc., undated) mostly because I was enchanted with Brett K. Waipa's illustrations of Aloha.
From the big, dopey grin to the hole in the middle (Must be helpful on days with a lot of recipe testing! There's always room for more.) to the stumpy little legs, the dude is pretty endearing. So for this booklet, we will check out Aloha's appearance on the title page for a chapter and then go over one or two of the most Hawaiian-seeming recipes from the section.
The book, fittingly enough, starts out with a chapter on salads and pupus.
Aloha is taking "tossed salads" very literally! My favorite thing about this might just be that it's easy to forget he's supposed to be the letters A-L-O-H-A stacked on top of each other (since a big chunk of his body is covered by the jersey). This makes his legs especially puzzling. I can't imagine him running two steps without falling over. I am no sports expert, but I still can't help but think this would be a severe disadvantage in football...
The most interesting recipe in this chapter just might be the Papaya Seed Dressing.
Being a Midwesterner with very limited exposure to tropical fruits, I had no idea papaya seeds were even edible, but apparently they are! Easier to eat when they're ground down to "the size of ground pepper," though.
And if you wondered whether Hawaiians had the same fondness for Jell-O based salads as mainlanders, fear not! This chapter also features an Avocado and Gelatin Salad.
I'm pretty sure I'd prefer the Avocado and Lime Pie from the Pieathalon to this, though! Cream cheese sounds way better than mayonnaise in this mixture.
Next up is the breads chapter.
Aloha is so entertained by his "rolling in the dough" joke that he doesn't seem concerned that the rolling pin and oven seem to be wildly out of scale with each other, or that everything is just about to fall on his head.
What kind of bread might you make in Hawaii? While there are the old standbys like bran muffins and zucchini bread, I was most interested by Avocado Bread.
I thought it might be pretty similar to zucchini bread recipes, but this has no cinnamon, salt, or vanilla, so I wonder if it would be rather bland... (I'm sure it wouldn't matter to Aloha, though. He's enthusiastic about everything!)
Speaking of enthusiasm, he's fully in 8-year-old "sharing" mode for the chapter on cakes.
You can have a tiny slice. Aloha will polish off the rest! I'm sure people expect a fruity, tropical cake from this chapter, so here's Hawaiian Pineapple Carrot Cake for you.
I'm not really sure what sets this apart from the carrot cakes we bake in the Midwest. (My recipe has pineapple too!) So I'm going to include a second recipe-- one that seems much more regional to me: Cocoa Mochi.
I'm guessing that mochi would have seemed pretty exotic for a lot of mainstream Midwesterners until fairly recently (and I'd still have to go to a specialty store or order online to get mochiko!), so this seems much more unique to the island than the recipe with Hawaii in the name.
Aloha is a real fan of sweets! The cakes aren't enough, so we'll look at pies and desserts next.
One thing that the mainland and Hawaii had in common: weight jokes. (Sigh.) The scales are not too excited that Aloha is into the sugar again. I'm representing this chapter with something typically Midwestern (chiffon pie) crossed with something Hawaiian (lilikoi).
I was really curious about what "lilikoi" might be, but it turns out it's something I have heard of! It's the Hawaiian word for passionfruit. At least that means that mainlanders can make it if we want to.
We'll top off all these (mostly) desserts with a main dish.
I'm trying to decide whether Aloha is a sloppy eater or growing a weird mustache. (Maybe both?) In any case, he just might eat his napkin too if he doesn't pay attention...
And what might he be chowing down on? Well, it's fishy, as you might expect, given that he lives on an island.
But it's salmon loaf (from canned salmon)! The thing that sets this apart from the typical Midwestern version is that this incorporates tofu and shoyu with the more common ingredients like veggies, eggs, and bread crumbs. (Plus, honestly, I couldn't resist including a recipe that starts out with the crossed-out sentence "Beat eggs; add vanilla, mushroom soup, shoyu, oil, salt." Where did the vanilla come from? And why is this recipe ALL CAPS?)
I'm sure Aloha doesn't care about the inconsistency. He's just glad to be here and to wish you aloha.
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