Ever come across a really cool idea on vacation and you swear when you get
back home, you’re gonna make it or bake it? It took a recent trip to Charleston, South
Carolina, while roaming their charming gift shops to remind me of this sweet project and now I’m sharing it with y’all.

Big Sugar & I were first introduced to this scrumptious  but NOT edible treat on Saint Simon’s Island. Oh wait, is Simon possessive? Hold on a sec while I check that out… oops,
no apostrophe needed; their website should know, right? Saint Simons

So, we’re at our favorite restaurant, enjoying the beautiful sweet Georgia shrimp. It’s simple perfection. And it’s probably tied with Carolina barbecue as the food we miss the most. The most. I know, I know, no one wants to hear whining from any folks living in Hawaii but…Hawaii can mess up some fried shrimp, y’all. Unlike  Bubba (remember the best friend of Forest Gump, who has the running list of all the ways to prepare shrimp?)I mostly don’t want all the nonsense of shrimp dressed in coconut or pineappled, yada yada yada. There’s only two ways I really want my shrimp: big & steamed in Old Bay with lemon-butter for dunking or a delicate treatment of Southern batter done right with fresh made tartar or cocktail sauce.

Refrigeration be damned in a popular Southern Seafood Restaurant as these
sauces are always on the table in their squeeze bottles…because the diners are going
through it quickly. The lightest touch of batter, so sheer you can still see the pink creases of the shrimp.

Along with the plate of southern heaven, we were enjoying ice-cold draft
beer and Southern Sweet Tea. Big Sugar gets his tea straight and I get a half-n-half of
sweetened and unsweetened with a bucket of fresh lemons. After each of us had ordered our drinks, we visited the restroom and simultaneously came back to the table to share our discovery…and that brings us to the cool hand scrub in their restroom.

How perfect for a seafood restaurant; where folks really need a fragrant friction scrubbing
after peeling all that shrimp and tossing back oysters on the half-shell. After Big Sugar and I had both made our separate trips to the loo, we were so excited to share the scrub featured on the sink counters. Each of us thought it was so cleansing and genius . So much so that I forgot all about it for years, yep. We had a lot going on with many projects getting our St
Simons’ home ready for its new life as a rental.

Fast forward and we are in Charleston last month. We take a morning to do the tourist thang…carriage ride, strolling, window shopping and, after getting the same answer from all the locals when asking where to go for their favorite seafood lunch, Hyman’s. And there in their bathroom, which, Bonus! Has a picture of SJP (obsessed) on their celebrity-photo clad walls. They
also sell the scrub but c’mon- we got this.

It’s so easy and customizable; make it any fragrance you want to smell like-and if you happen to have an empty coconut half…I definitely think I makes it picture perfect. Perhaps I should put more things in coconut shells; like I’m marooned on Gilligan’s Island!

ISLAND COCONUT HAND SCRUB

1 cup sea salt ( I but it in stores like TJ Maxx or Ross- it’s so inexpensive as compared to the grocery store)

1 TB Coconut oil ( the above discount stores are a great source)

1 TB Coconut Body Wash ( Suave is an inexpensive one)

1 tsp coconut extract or a couple of drops of essential oil

We have ours on the vanity, next to the sink with a small wooden spoon for scooping onto your palms. Your hands will feel scrubbed (from the salt and body wash), moisturized from the oil and the scent will take you on a vacation!

BEGINNER’S POKE BOWL

In Hawaii, we love our poke bowls.  Put some rice in a bowl and top with fresh sliced fish, customize your toppings and top with a shoyu vinaigrette.  It’s the island version of grabbing a sandwich…grain, protein, veggies and sauce. Aloha, done.

Let’s break it down: fresh means raw and shoyu is soy sauce and poke is pronounced POH-keh.  Did I lose you at the raw fish?  Hang in with me because you’re gonna love this Beginner’s Poke Bowl.

Let’s start by the pickled toppings that really give a good crunch with your bowl but take at least an hour to marinate.  Make a light pickling solution with rice vinegar and sugar.  I use a ration of 3:1; vinegar to sugar.  Add a pinch of sea salt.  For the pickled veggie-crunch: stir together the vinegar, salt and sugar to dissolve.  Julienne a large  carrot and two radishes.  Thinly slice a Japanese cucumber and 6 slices jalapeno pepper. Save yourself a bowl and mix the vinaigrette in a sealed storage container, add in your prepped veggies; giving all a good toss.  Let it pickle at room temperature for one hour. Or if you’re really on the ball, do it the night before.

Cook brown rice according to the package directions.  For an authentic Hawaiian-style rice, make the sticky by rinsing, adding a little extra water and letting it cook low and slow.  Remember, you want the rice to not be fluffy as you need it kind clumpy to be able to use your chopsticks.   My friend Satomi taught me this easy technique when we lived in Japan. Put your  rice in a large pot, swish the rice five times (please don’t question Satomi). Pour off the extra rinse water each time because you’re rinsing off some of the starch to help it cook to the right texture.  You get the exact amount of water by resting the tip of your index finger on the damp rice and gently adding enough water to reach the first joint of that finger.  It works like magic for any amount of dried rice you add to the pot; no need to break out the measuring cups.  Stir in a pinch of sea salt, giving a good stir, and bring to a boil.  Once you see the first vigorous boil, turn down to low and cover pot with lid.  Simmer and keep covered for 45 minutes (don’t peak cuz you’ll let off steam).  Remove from heat and let rice come to room temperature before adding to your dish.

Once you have your rice cooked and your veggies pickled, assembling your Poke Bowl just takes minutes.  The star of the Poke Bowl is your Hawaiian Ahi (or shrimp, octopus, salmon). Oh no, too soon to introduce octopus in this beginner’s poke primer? You’ll get there and trust me it’s delicious.

Take your gorgeous red Ahi steak, cut into about one-inch cubes, season with kosher salt and cracked black pepper. Sear the tuna is a hot skillet coated with a swirl of olive oil.  In Hawaii, we eat it raw but for the beginner I suggest cooking it to your liking by kissing it with some heat.  Let the cubes  sit undisturbed in your skillet for a second to get a tiny bit browned, don’t feel you have to keep tossing it around the pan.  I like my tuna with the edges golden and the center red.  It will be easier to get that raw center-toasted outer by cutting the tuna into a larger cube.  If you order a poke bowl here in the islands you’re gonna get your raw fish cut into small cubes.  Actually, the word poke means to cut up into bits. Let’s get back to your pan and Ahi, err on the side of taking it out before you think as it will keep cooking a bit.

Assemble your bowl with a large scoop of brown rice in your bowl, then create a beautiful landscape of toppings.  Top with your seared Ahi, pickled veggies, fresh avocado slices and I like a mix of thinly sliced  green onions with pok choi(bok choy).  Mix a simple dressing of tamari, rice vinegar and sesame oil.  Finish it all with a spritz of fresh lime, especially important for keeping your avocado green and vibrant.  Make it truly authentic… sprinkle with toasted sesame seeds or furikake.

Hurricane Hamburgers…so cute, they’ll blow you away

 No Baking & No Cooking

First things first, hurricane preparedness  is serious business, y’all.  You need to plan for several days of no power  ( no lights, no electronics and gasp*** no cooking).  As desperate as the youngins’ are without their electronics, well, I feel the same way about the cooking and baking outage.  But here’s two family-friendly recipes I’ve prepared for our local morning show on KHON 2.  Both of these are no baking and no cooking but totally scrumptious and such an easy project for the beginner (or kids).

HURRICANE  HAMBURGERS

Use the photo above for a construction guide (so easy : no recipe, just a photo and ingredients)

Vanilla wafers (hamburger buns)

Shredded Coconut, tinted green w/food coloring (lettuce)

Mint Fudge Cookie (hamburger patty)

Corn syrup and sesame seeds (brush on a scant amount of corn syrup to the “top bun” wafer & sprinkle with sesame seeds)

If you want to make it a Deluxe Burger:

• Slice of American Cheese: select an orange starburst candy; roll it to flatten and cut into small squares
• Ketchup & Mustard: use tubes of yellow & red decorative frosting
• arrange your condiments and fixins’ so they are peeking out from the sides of the bun
• add a droop of yellow to your green coconut to give it that realistic lettuce color

No Baking & No Cooking

Stormy S’mores …No campfire needed

 STORMY  S’MORES

Graham Crackers (halved)

Milk Chocolate ready-made canned Frosting

Mini-Marshmallows (12 per sandwich cookie)

Set up a s’mores bar in the kitchen; try these add-ins:

• Nutella or nut butter
• thinly sliced bananas, apples or pears
•  blueberries or sliced strawberries
• chopped nuts or chocolate chips

Remember, you don’t have to wait for bad weather to enjoy these great treats!

LEMONADE

The Saturday started with a gentle reminder that the harvest needed to be completed that day. Our lemon tree was heavy with fruit. The bounty was ready to be brought into the kitchen. Each morning I enjoyed seeing the fruit, from my kitchen window, dipping the branch; checking on the ripening by gauging the optimal color and size.

Okay, I’m getting carried away, so before you start picturing a lush lemon orchard…something out of Under the Tuscan Sun. The photos on the page illustrate my entire harvest. Yep, that’s right. We got two lemons from our tree and we couldn’t be happier. You see, we have this very aggressive guava tree that is the bully of the side yard. And, according to a neighbor who took some guavas for jelly making, we have the bad kind of guava. It’s pulpy and hard to press the flesh out. The big bad guava tree is the bain of my Sweet Sugar’s landscaping plans. I am the Tree Gov’ner, giving the stay of execution. Only because the birds love to sing and flit around the branches and I have the show right in front of my window. But the reality is, the guava fruit is of no use to us. It falls along the stone path and the birds eat out little wedges then leave the fruit. The lemon tree struggles to grab some sunlight from the guava tree. But luckily, it persuaded some sun to feed it so that we were rewarded with these two glorious fruit.

As I had written about previously, homegrown fruit has to be treated like royalty. You have to give special thought to how, what, why and where you will cut into these glorious precious globes. It wouldn’t be meaningful to just slice into wedges to adorn steamed shrimp or squeeze into iced tea. And the Buttermilk Lemon Poundcake had been done (and devoured).

Sometimes simple is really the best. When life (ahem, your tree) gives you two lemons, make lemonade. Speaking of simple, you start with making a simple syrup.

RECIPE:
1 cup water and 1 Cup sugar heated until sugar is dissolved and thickens.
Squeeze 1 cup lemon juice. Stir together and adder to make 1 quart of water. Chill and serve with thin wheels of lemon.

Blueberry Morning…a Linda’s Dozen

These, bursting with blueberries, home baked muffins are calling out to be made for your weekend.  They patiently wait on the pedestal cake plate. Mister Sweet Sugar is bustling about.  As an early riser, he is already through with most of his weekend catch-up efforts.  As it gets too hot under the noon sun, here on the island; you gotta get your outdoor chores done. He’s trimming the jungle of our yard, fixing the door of his truck and lots of other guy things.  He’s not much of a breakfast guy so having these muffins ready on his schedule make me feel like a might have done a good wifey thing.   The muffins just sit under the dome and wait to be snatched on the run.

Here’s a Linda’s dozen of muffins. A Linda’s dozen?  Well, it’s the opposite of a baker’s dozen which gives you the bonus muffin; thirteen rather than twelve.  My dozen is eleven because how could you not  sample one while they are still warm from the oven?

The first time I made them, I had that uh-oh feeling… after I had preheated the oven, made sure I had plenty of blueberries and had whisked all the dry ingredients.  Then I realized I had no milk, no buttermilk or even cream.  Groan. And being a southern girl meant going to the store would entail hair brushing & probably a quick curl, running an iron over something and putting some color on my face. C’mon, it was a lazy Sunday…I just wanted to nestle in my kitchen.  So, I searched my fridge for something and there it was. Sour cream.  I watered it down a bit to make it pourable.  It worked beautifully and I’ve been using it in my muffin recipe ever since.  Don’t you love when that happens?

Here’s the crazy good recipe:

Sour Cream Blueberry Muffins

2 eggs

1 c. sugar

½ c. sour cream

1 tsp water

1 ½ tsp vanilla extract

½ c. oil

½ tsp salt

½ tsp baking soda

2 c. flour

1 c. blueberries, frozen

Directions: Preheat oven to 400 degrees In large bowl, whisk together dry ingredients.  In separate bowl, whip eggs and sugar; adding sour cream and one teaspoon water. Stir in vanilla extract and oil.  Add wet ingredients into the dry. Gently fold in blueberries.  Topping: In small bowl, mix together 2 teaspoons sugar and ½ tsp cinnamon.  Line muffin tins with paper baking cups. Fill cups two-thirds full. Top with cinnamon-sugar and nuts; evenly distributed. Bake 20 minutes. Reduce heat to 350 degrees and bake 15 more minutes. Let cool in pan 10 minutes on rack.  Move muffins to a cooling rack. Makes one dozen.

Mountain Mama Mandarin Rolls

Thanks to Facebook, I was notified it was Betty’s birthday. I consider her my “Mountain Mama”, to take a line from the old John Denver song. You see, I went to college up in the mountains of North Carolina, over six hours away from my coastal home. Luckily for me I met great girls on my dorm floor, freshman year. Teacher Tammy and I became great friends and sorority sisters. She lived down the mountain about an hour away. Like many of my fellow freshman, she went home frequently on the weekends. Our school became a suitcase- college come Friday through Sunday.

First rising

Teacher Tammy (her nickname: an education major) kindly took me home with her many week-ends. We headed down the mountains with Prince and the Go-Go’s blaring from her cassette player. I loved her family from the second I met them. So many great memories of driving slowly, cruising along the town center, tanning thickly coated in coconut oil, driving her grandmother to get her hair done, Betty’s delicious beefy cheesy –mac and every Saturday and Sunday morning, there were baked orange-cinnamon rolls. I had never had them before and boy, did they disappear fast.
Decades later, these rolls baking still remind me of waking up at Tammy’s home in the mountains. These rolls will make you feel toasty warm and your guests welcome.

I had been wanting to create my own orange rolls but sadly the oranges we get here in Hawaii are rather dull tasting.  And I surely didn’t want to waste the flour and butter on dud citrus if it had a starring role (roll, haha).  Well, for the holidays the stores are filled with mountains of juicy tangerines, clementines and mandarins.  Folks, go pick up a mesh bag of mandarins and get up early on January First to make your family very happy.

Mandarin Mountain

I’m planning to make these a winter tradition.  Which now makes me think of the original Read home tangerine tradition.  My sister Susie and I were allowed to dive into our stockings Christmas morning before anyone else was awake; no presents under the tree could be opened before all were up and seated in the living room.  We had the candy we loved and went crazy over the giant peppermint stick. I mean it was as big as a salami roll. We would lick it to a coned-point and then after a day it would go into the fridge, forgotten and turning pink… and get tossed about Valentine’s Day.  We always had great stocking stuffers but we would be puzzled by the lone tangerine rounding out the toe of the stocking. Susie and I would remove it from our stocking and put in back in the fruit bowl on the kitchen table. Later, we discovered that Sweetpea was keeping up a tradition from her Mama. A tangerine was a special treat in the winter of her childhood in the Virginia Valley.  Christmas citrus will always remind me of Christmas morning excitement.

RECIPE: MOUNTAIN MAMA MANDARIN ROLLS (makes 8 HUGE rolls)

Ingredients:
DOUGH:
3 1/2 Cups flour ( I used bread flour because I wanted to use it up from my pantry)
2 packages yeast (1/4 oz. packages)
1/4 Cup sugar
1/3 cup buttermilk
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup butter
1/2 tsp salt
3 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs
2 TB mandarin zest (can substitute clementines, tangerines or oranges-whatever’s juicy & fresh)
1 TB fresh squeezed mandarin zest

FILLING:
8 TB butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1 TB brown sugar
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
3 TB zest
1 tsp fresh manadarin juice
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
pinch of salt

ICING:
2 1/2 Cups confectioner’s sugar
1/4 cup fresh mandarin juice
1 TB mandarin zest
1 TB butter
1 tsp vanilla extract
pinch salt

DIRECTIONS:
Zest mandarins, I was able to get about one tablespoon of zest from each fruit. You’ll need 6 tablespoons for the entire skillet of rolls (separated into dough, filling & icing)

In bowl of upright mixer (before you add the attachment), whisk dry ingredients: yeast, sugar & flour. In microwave, place water, milk and butter. In 10 second increments, melt butter and warm the water and milk. Attach dough hook and with mixer running, slowly add warm butter and buttermilk mixture, add in vanilla, salt, juice and zest. Add eggs one at a time. Your dough will be very sticky. Knead 8 minutes.

Oil large bowl and use your oiled hands to remove dough from mixer bowl (remember, it’s super sticky). Cover bowl with plastic wrap and place lightweight kitchen towel over the bowl. Place in warm place and let rise until dough has doubled. About 45-60 minutes.

Punch down the dough. Place a small amount of flour on counter. Flour rolling pin (or roll out between parchment paper) and roll out to large rectangle. Combine softened butter with vanilla juice and zest; spread out onto rectangle leaving a one inch border on all edges. Cover butter layer with sugars, cinnamon and salt.

Roll up into log and cut in half. Then cut the halves in half so you end up with 8 spiral rolls. Butter a cast iron skillet liberally with butter. Place rolls in skillet, cut side down. Cover entire pan with plastic wrap and light towel; let rise in warm place for about an hour. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees after the first 20 minutes of this second rising. Mix together all icing ingredients.

Bake rolls at 350 degrees for 40-45 minutes, Let cool 10 minutes then pour icing over warm rolls. The icing will harden slightly as rolls cool.
I serve them straight from the skillet.

Spicy Sweet Sticky Chicken…Best EVER!

This is the best sweet spicy chicken you’ll ever eat; it’s incredibly easy and sassy too.  Just make sure you have  plenty of iced tea because the heat is gonna make you want to down a glass or two. It has a slow heat that will sneak up on ya.  It’s a different kind of heat than you’ll find in a big order of buffalo wings.  The heat from this is the sweet sticky sauce that is so popular in Southern and  Asian cooking. This is a great crowd and hostess pleaser; it’s inexpensive and easy to cook a bunch.

Start by marinating your chicken thighs overnight in the fridge. Pour all the marinade ingredients in a re-sealable bag placed in a large bowl (just in case there’s leakage and makes for easier handling); put all the chicken thighs in and give it a gentle massage to coat all the pieces.

SWEET SPICY CHICKEN

3 lbs Chicken Thighs (Bone-in, skin on)

MARINADE:

2 TB Sriracha Sauce (not Tabasco)

2 TB Oil

1 TB Rice Vinegar

1/2 Cup water 

(discard marinade after chicken placed on your grill)

SAUCE:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Preheat  grill to high. Combine all ingredients in food processor, pulse until garlic and ginger are chopped small. Transfer sauce to small pan, heat until reduced and thickened to barbecue sauce consistency. Grill chicken over high heat, skin side down until lightly charred but not cooked through.  Pour 2/3 of sauce in bottom of large casserole dish.  Place grilled chicken over sauce, turning each piece to coat.  Cover dish with foil, bake 30 minutes at 350 degrees. Serve over shredded cabbage with steamed rice along with reserved sauce on the side. The sauce is killer.  My boys love it over their rice and I pour it over my grilled vegetables.

1/4 Cup Soy Sauce (shoyu)

1/4 Cup Honey

juice of one orange

2 TB Rice Vinegar

2 TB Sambal (chucky chili garlic sauce)

2 TB Brown Sugar

1 TB Hoisin Sauce

1 TB Sriracha

3 tsp Fish Sauce

1 tsp fresh lime juice

6 cloves garlic

1 inch knuckle of ginger, peeled