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Seasonal Affairs: Hibachi Time 2, New Years 09
Happy New Year!
1/1/09 - Hope you've all had a killer new year's celebration last night! I know I always do, and usually right here at my own house, which is quite often party-central for the whole family and extended family, friends included. It's not as wild as it once was, with $100 festival balls, other illegal aerial's, and the 'ol bag-o-rama, our own term for stuffing packs and packs of firecrackers, jumping jacks, flowers, and anything that burned into a single bag or box, then stepping back - waaay back!
But we'll check out more fireworks later. For now, it's all about the grindz! As usual, there was waaay too much food, with everyone coming to enjoy both grilled specialties outside on the hibachi and mom's old-fashioned, traditional dishes that everyone can't get enough of. Bruddah Nelson, despite heaps of steak, crab, bbq meats, yakisoba noodles, sashimi, sushi, and much more, always makes sure his first plate comes with only one item - a giant mound of mom's home-made imitation crab/mac salad! Then there's also her nishime, namasu, mochiko chicken, baked ham, chow fun noodles, and mixed sushi rice, all on-hand this particular evening, along with her awesome, U-16-20 size shrimp tempura.
This woman, boy, cooking the entire day long, and preparing much the day before, as well! Hopefully, I'll be as strong as she is at her age! Although I know my tempura will never be quite as good...
Down at Marukai, they sell sashimi fillets of hamachi, which we often pick up on more special occasions. Despite coming frozen, it's still always a hit, with beautiful, creamy, very-fatty flesh, especially around the belly area. As you can see, it is much fattier than the rest of the body, making for quite the luxurious cut of sashimi down the right side, in a platter cut by yours truly.
Another platter I cut up was a madako tako, or Japan-imported octopus. Coming fully-cooked, they are meant to be eaten with either a sweet miso sauce mom always whips up or the regular wasabi/shoyu mix used for sushi. Personally, I'm not too high on the dish and would rather have it smoked or grilled on the hibachi, instead.
I'm also not the biggest fan of ham, either, but both wifey and mom love it, so it's always on the menu for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Eve dinners. It's actually really simple to make, though, and I often end up making it myself. All you do is poke in cloves all over, add a small can of pineapples, juice and all (and sometimes even a little jam or jelly of any kind), one box of brown sugar, and throw it in the oven. After slicing, we just throw it right back in to that sweet sauce, making sure it gets between each and every slice. Normally, I'd hit a few slices of Spam before ever thinking about ham, but this way, it does come out pretty darn good, good enough for even me to have a couple of pieces!
Though it always takes center stage on the menu, proteins are not the only story, with our hibachi seeming to bring in more and more veggies these days. I guess the older we get, the less our bodies can handle processing all that meat! On any given night, there are bell peppers of every color, zuchinni, kabocha pumpkin, sweet potato, eggplant, mushrooms of all kinds, and sweet onions, all splashed with a little extra virgin olive oil, fresh-ground Hawaiian Salt, and fresh-ground black pepper, then thrown right on the grill.
Recently, Big Al introduced another method of cooking veggies on the hibachi using a small aluminum tray. You still get that nice smoke flavor, along with some very beneficial side-effects - it's much easier to control the heat, black grease from the grill is no longer, the most delicate of vegetables can be used, and perhaps best of all, you can toss them every once in a while, so the oil and seasonings cover everything evenly. Here, we threw in some Roma tomatoes, shown here, right before coming off the second-tier level of our hibachi.
I've been cooking a lot of mushrooms with this technique - not the regular button mushrooms found in most grocery stores, but the much-softer, way-more delicate enoki's, shiitake's, maitake's, shimeji's, and the like. All are incredibly flavorful and easy to work with, so long as you don't over-cook or over-do them. On this New Year's eve night, I wanted to do something a little different, so wifey and I got a couple of containers each of enoki, shimeji, and shiitake mushrooms, and wrapped them up inside strips of thin-sliced Blackline pork. Very tempted, I was, to use bacon, but aaah, don't you find that almost cheating sometimes? I figured I'd challenge myself and create something with a bit more of a delicate touch. As a bit of an experiment, the first few of these were basted with unagi sauce (only because I didn't have any yakiniku tare, and didn't want to bother making one from scratch) and thrown directly on the grill, but quickly found that it tasted much better with a sprinkling of salt, black pepper, and a liberal splash of lemon.
As good as that may have sounded, however, I was greatly dissapointed at the outcome, so much so that I won't even show you the finished product! I dunno, maybe I just wasn't up to the no-bacon challenge - they were ok, but nothing I'd ever make again, and with all the other ono kine grindz, I didn't bother to polish off too many. Here's a shot at the beautiful creation, before I somehow managed to ruin it!
Actually, one day I just may give it another shot, but stick to my original intention of either dunking them in a really-light batter, then deep-frying 'em whole, or my other eureka moment, which hit me just the night before, of seasoning, dusting with a tiny bit of cornstarch, then pan-frying. When it came down to it, I was just too busy (or more accurately, didn't plan well enough!), and ended up throwing 'em on the fire as the easy way out!
On a much more successful note, here comes the fat ribeye steaks that are present eight out of ten times we ever hibachi here! A bunch thicker than the already jai-normous sizes Costco steaks typically come in, I guess they compensated by placing only three steaks on each tray instead of the usual four. Despite these big boys having been pulled out of the freezer from a couple weeks earlier, losing a whole lot in taste, color, and juiciness because of the fact, ey..... She still go, brah!
I also marinated a half-tray of boneless shortrib in my own home-made teriyaki sauce. I was going to slice them on our white cutting board and take a quick snap, as they were delicious, but just got too busy at the wrong time. Sorry!
On the other hand, my older brother (not the younger, vegan one!) had some picture-ready cuts laid out against another white cutting board just as the camera began searching for more shots. He smoked a little home-made pork char-siu earlier at his home, then brought it over to grill and re-heat on the fire. The dark-red, Chinese-style sauce was lighter than normal on these cuts, but no matter, as the smoke added its own nice balance of flavors to make it a great dish, yet, pupu-style.
I had a hunch Bruddah Nelson would bring what he's been gaining quite the reputation for - gigantic King Crab legs from Costco! They actually didn't have the premium giant-sized legs they normally carry, but were still plenty huge, with at least 8-10 of them that must have costed a small fortune. On top of that, I just bought 17 pounds of jumbo snow crab legs from Star Market, recently on sale for $7.99 per pound - not bad at all. It's a good thing wifey and I couldn't handle the thought of snow crab in our house for too long, raiding the freezer and steaming up a good five or six pounds worth only a few days earlier, as there was no way our party of just over 15 people, plus 8 kids, could have made a dent in all that crab. Even with our reduced supply of snow crab, there was still more than half of the crab left-over!
I know that there are fewer things more impressive than giant King Crab legs, even if just for sheer size, but personally, I prefer the sweeter, more delicate snow crab any day, as long as they are large enough. The ones you get on most buffets throughout the island are small and often dried-out, giving it negative marks scarred into many a mind and opinion, but bite into one that's big enough and not left to dry over a flaming sterno too long, and I gaurantee, you'll re-consider. They are also much easier to eat, as the shells are much thinner and you don't have to deal with the sharp spines King Crab has everywhere. Holding the large section of leg in both hands, carefully snap them about two-thirds down on the small side, and the meat should pull out easily. And then a small dip into a bowl of melted butter or ponzu, or a mix of the two (my favorite way!), and there's nothing better!
Here's the heaping tray, covering the entirety of my hibachi, which, mind you, is a four-burner grill that couldn't even fully close with this load! Notice the snow crab legs, which have no spines and are shaped in a somewhat flatter design than the larger, rounder, and spinier King Crab legs.
Knowing that most people don't want to bother cracking shells, wifey and I cracked over half of the snow and Bruddah Nels' and my older brother de-shelled all of the King, leaving a huge pile of pure crab-meat, alongside a giant brick of butter. One night we're gonna have to do this again, only without anything else at all, except for some good sake and my beer machine!
In case you're wondering, this is what the hang-out looks like. It's pretty quiet right now in the cooking/table area, as some are out on the street playing and watching fireworks, while most of the women are just off to the right and inside the house, separated by a large sliding-glass wall.
As I said before, things are not nearly as crazy as they were before, which is probably a good thing, actually, as smoke in the days before firecracker permits, no-rubbish firecrackers, Roman Candles, and a borderline pyro-pandamonium was, in all honesty, getting completely out-of-hand, if you ask me. Yeah, I was bummed out with the rest of 'em and cried shame when the City and State introduced permits for firecrackers and began cracking down hard on illegal's, but if they hadn't, I wonder how many would have dropped dead right here and now on New Year's from all that smoke, not to mention all the fire's! If even healthy people were hurting from the smoke, can you imagine what it would have been like for the elderly or sick?
Not that we didn't have our fair share of displays, mostly in the form of small-time fountains and such. Oh, and yeah, a few aerial's here and there, too, but don't tell HPD!
Brother Jerry and his dad set up a rig that, if it had gotten any higher, would have reached the lamppost!
Light 'em up, baby!!!
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There were also a fare shair of aerial's going off everywhere, which we could see from the vantage point of our roof-top, just a few minutes before midnight, and the start of the new year!
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And with that, I bid you all...
A Happy New Year!!!
Go out and truly make it a January thru Decembah to remembah!!!
Let's all be full of good thoughts, good deeds, and good cheer all year long!!!
I'll leave you with myself, wifey, my younger bro and his beautiful kids, from our roof-top in Hawaii Kai.
Take care and Aloha till next time!
Aku
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