Good morning. Elyse Inamine has a cool story in our pages this week about “local food” in Hawaii, food that reflects the blurred culture of all those who’ve settled on the islands over the centuries, from Polynesian settlers, British and American plantation owners and laborers from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Portugal and Spain. Local food is the food of the future, some in Hawaii say, an amalgamation of all that is delicious: the food local people eat, and revere.
I’ll be traveling there in my mind and in my kitchen this weekend, perhaps for saimin, a sort of mash-up of Japanese ramen, Filipino pancit and Chinese American chow mein, or for Big Island pinakbet, the Filipino stew with long-simmered pork, fish sauce and plenty of vegetables. Definitely for mochiko chicken (above), crisp and salty.
Featured Recipe
Mochiko Chicken
This isn’t Hawaiian food, precisely, but the food Hawaiians eat. It’s American food, in other words, like BBQ chicken pizza, yakamein or steak teriyaki, food that tells stories about who we were, who we are, who we are becoming. And it’s a reminder that when it comes to cooking, authenticity is for the birds.
Celebrate that this weekend, somehow, by cooking at the intersection of America and the rest of the world. Make a New Mexican hot dish for the family, or San Francisco-style Vietnamese American garlic noodles. Consider Priya Krishna’s recipe for tomato rice with crispy Cheddar, somehow both South Indian and Spanish, with an American accent. Kimchi grilled cheese? Michelada chicken? Bake a shoofly pie for dessert, absolutely.
There are thousands and thousands more recipes to cook this weekend waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. As I believe I have mentioned in the past, you need a subscription to read them. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. I hope, if you haven’t done so already, that you will subscribe today. Thanks extremely.
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Now, it’s nothing to do with blueberries or Arctic char, but I enjoyed Rosemary Hill’s review, in the London Review of Books, of a new Noël Coward biography by Oliver Soden, “Masquerade.”
Are you watching the new season of Padma Lakshmi’s “Taste the Nation,” on Hulu? Y’oughta. It is interesting work she’s doing there, and important.
Speaking of seasons, the fifth run of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” maybe didn’t measure up to, say, the first. But if Kate Abbruzzese’s appearance as Princess Margaret in the penultimate episode breaks her into the bigs, that’d be a terrific outcome. She killed.
Finally, here’s a new track from Youth Lagoon, “Little Devil From the Country.” Listen to that while you’re cooking your local food, and I’ll see you on Sunday.
