Taste
Hawai'i communities are a gold mine for comfort-food recipes

• Favorite recipes from local cookbooks and chefs

By Kaui Philpotts

A new crop of Hawai'i cookbooks, some for charity, others from local publishers, includes, clockwise from right: "Hot Hot Hot Dragon Cookbook" "Island Cooks," "Flavors of Aloha — Hawai'i's Ethnic Foods," "Hawai'i's Best Local Desserts," "Hawai'i's 2nd Spam Cookbook" and center, "Na Keiki O Manana Cookbook No. 2." The cookbooks include recipes for many local favorites such as banana bread, salmon furikake and Spam katsu.

In the past couple of months, a half-dozen or so new community cookbooks have been released here. Some are self-published fund-raisers for schools or organizations; a couple are from local publishers and familiar authors. What they all share is a cozy quality and recipes with easy-to-acquire ingredients and simple procedures.

"Hot, Hot, Hot Dragon Cookbook," Mililani High School, Class of 2002 Project Graduation; to order, call 623-6553 or e-mail projgrad2002cookbook@hawaii.rr.com; cost $12 plus $4 for postage and handling

This is one of the best of the new batch of cookbooks created to raise money, in this case for the Mililani class of 2002's postgraduation alcohol- and drug-free event. The book has a crisp appearance, simple-to-use spiral and laminated binding, and is well organized. One of the sections, "On Your Own," focuses on really easy hot dishes for students who'll soon be living in college dorm rooms or their own apartments. They're the sorts of dishes that involve canned soup and that are meant to be served over hot rice — simple, quick, inexpensive.

The VIP section is fun, too. There are complex offerings from professional chefs and more down-home ones such as U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie's mother's recipe for potato-chip cookies.

Cooks who have been frustrated in the past with cookbooks that do not clearly indicate can sizes and procedures will be delighted with the clarity of this one. Also sprinkled throughout the recipes are pithy quotes from everyone from Carol Burnett to Harriet Beecher Stowe.

"Island Cooks," Island Heritage Publishing; $9.99

This is a repackaging of a classic 1980s community cookbook called "Maui Cooks," a project in which I had a small part, writing some short essays that helped bind the original collection in the days when I was living on Maui.

That book, which is now out of print, was a collection of the favorite recipes of a dozen or so Maui women who loved to entertain in their homes. The women got together periodically over the course of a year, tested all the recipes, paid to have the book produced and donated the proceeds to Kokua Services on Maui.

Later, they sold the rights to Island Heritage, which has eliminated the paintings of country markets by Darrell Orwig and the essays that accompanied them. But what is left is an excellent selection of easy-to-prepare recipes for family and friends. I know from experience that these dishes are fool-proof and were tested over time.

The recipes themselves are a bit more upscale than many fund-raising cookbooks and include some kama'aina island favorites like Willows Restaurant curry sauce, Kona Inn banana bread and Horatio's (now Kincaid's) burnt creme. The computerized food photographs between each section are blurry and strange looking, but don't let that detract from the integrity of the recipes.

Another nice bonus: The original book cost considerably more than this. It's good to know that this excellent book will continue to be available to another generation of cooks.

"Flavors of Aloha — Hawai'i's Ethnic Foods," Japanese Women's Society of Honolulu, P.O. Box 3233, Honolulu, HI 96801, jwsonline.org; $16.95

The cookbook committee, chaired by food professional Muriel Miura Kaminaka, chose to organize this book by ethnicity rather than type of dish.

Even more interesting is that the ethnic groups they have selected are mostly ignored in other local community cookbooks, including Italian, Samoan, Puerto Rican, Portuguese, Mexican, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese.

This spiral-bound book offers recipes for some of the best-loved and most common dishes from these groups: bulkogi in the Korean and pad Thai noodles in the Southeast Asia sections. There are some amusing inclusions such as banana oatmeal cookies in the Hawaiian section and Caesar salad in the Italian.

The Pacific Rim chapter includes recipes that are several notches up in difficulty and number of ingredients.

Sponsors advertise on the back pages and proceeds will go toward scholarships and grants to graduate students in gerontology and geriatrics. Distribution will be wide at most local bookstores and gift shops.

"Hawai'i's Best Local Desserts," by Jean Watanabe Hee, Mutual Publishing; $9.95

Local people really do have a different taste in desserts, and Jean Watanabe Hee, author of "Hawai'i's Best Mochi Recipes." Hee walks you though them in her new book. These are the recipes for the desserts that make it to the potluck buffet table, the tailgate party and the coffee machine at work. The cakes are often dense and moist, the pies full of air and tropical flavor and the dessert bars are chewy with mochi (rice flour).

Hee has organized her book into sections on Cakes and Breads, Pies, Cookies and Bars, and Assorted Treats. Each section begins with helpful hints ("a pie crust is easier to make if all the ingredients are cool") and the homey, color photographs look natural and unstyled by professionals.

Expect everything from banana mochi bread made with Bisquick to coffee Jell-O mold and chocolate haupia pie. The directions are good and the ingredients listed in order of use are well-detailed.

"Na Keiki O Manana Cookbook No. 2," Manana Elementary School, 1147 Kumano St., Pearl City, HI 96782, 453-6430; $10 and $2 postage and handling; available though the school office

Since 1977, the faculty, parents and children of Manana Elementary have been supporting their chorus with the proceeds from a cookbook. This is the second volume.

The 55 members of the chorus, from the third through sixth grades, take their chorus seriously, performing during the holidays in Waikiki and even going to the Mainland every four years.

The cookbook is a collection of favorite family recipes from them all. Easy to use in a spiral-bound format, the recipes range in difficulty from crostini to fourth-grader Kalani Higa's honey-and-cheese sandwich.

Perhaps because of the youth of both the children and the parents, the offerings in this book reflect local tastes changing with the times (mini sushi, pizzeria macaroni casserole, salmon furikake and Tibetan curry).

The whole volume is cheerfully assembled with illustrations of musical notes, school activities and food. They've done a good job.

"Hawai'i's 2nd SPAM Cookbook," written and illustrated by Ann Kondo Corum; Bess Press, $9.95

Just when you thought there was nothing new to say about Spam, Ann Kondo Corum surprises you. Her original book was printed in 1987 and was the first time we saw our favorite comfort food elevated to cookbook status.

Since then, Corum, who now lives on the Mainland but still has a Hawai'i heart, has collected even more recipes, many from Spam-cooking contests around the Islands, others from friends, and they are offered here.

The Quick and Easy section, which includes recipes for Kakimochi-furikake Spam katsu and scrambled tofu and Spam, will appeal to anyone without a lot of time or money. She may have gone too far with her dessert, Spicy Spam Apple Pie, however.

Corum's cartoons are a lot of fun — especially the one showing a corpulent Mainland tourist sitting on the beach reading a book of Island food facts and remarking, "Yikes, that's a lot of fat!"

And then there is triathlete Bob Brubaker proudly professing his devotion to the luncheon meat (you don't want to deplete those electrolytes!).

If you love local okazu-ya mac salad, Corum tells you how it's done — overcook the elbow macaroni until it's "fat" but not falling apart and don't put too many ingredients into it, just grated carrot, a little sugar and Best Foods brand mayonnaise (and of course, cubed Spam!).

"Creating a Culinary Legacy," Farrington High School Food Service Program, $10, benefits Farrington Alumni and Community Foundation Scholarship; available through the program during school hours

This book seems to be dogged by luck, both good and bad: It had been a long-discussed idea among faculty in the food service program, but didn't seem practical until another teacher talked to them about a grant that could help pay for the book (which was used to teach writing, math and marketing). That was good luck.

But then last year's teachers' strike fell during the production period. Rushing to meet the publisher's May deadline, Food Service Program teacher Linda Uyehara typed recipes at home out of the program archives (recipes contributed by Farrington alumni were in the classroom and she didn't have access to them).

Good luck, because many faculty at Farrington, having dined in the program dining room, were eager to buy the book to get the recipes for dishes they liked.

Despite Uyehara's efforts, the project lost its window at the press, which pushed the publication date back from last June to just this month. More bad luck.

Still, said Uyehara, the students learned a great deal in testing and researching the recipes. Her teaching partner, Laura Sato, is already dreaming of Volume Two.

The book arrived just as we were putting this story to bed, so we were able to slip it in. More good luck.

This spiral-bound book is organized by type of dish and includes some short student essays about the foods they encountered and their cooking experiences. The index is rudimentary, but the book offers a wide variety of well-tested recipes that range from chef's specials (quite a few local chefs graduated from Farrington) to homey favorites.