Dear Hawaii, how can I ever thank you enough? You’ve given so much to the mainland; you gave us Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Magnum P.I., surfing, sea turtles, hula girls, plate lunches, and spam musubis, with extra emphasis on the last two items. In fact, I want to emphasize Hawaiian food in general. It’s the greatest cuisine to ever grace the West Coast, and hopefully it makes its way east. How do you qualify a cuisine that’s richly influenced by Japanese, Chinese, and Korean cuisine, emphasizes meat in all its glorious forms–fried, barbecued, roasted–and considers a complete meal (called the plate lunch) to be comprised of a large portion of meat, a scoop of rice, and a salad that’s really macaroni salad (no fibrous, leafy vegetable matter at all!)? Words can’t describe it, but if I were to compare it to something we know here, it would be to Southern cuisine, where complete meals are also composed of meat, potatoes, and biscuits. No need for any vegetable. Maybe there will be a fruit pie for dessert, but that won’t yield very many nutrients.
I miss plate lunches, and all the choices of meat I can get. However, I can make spam musubis in my own apartment, and conjure up my own little taste of Hawaii. Spam musubis are ridiculously easy to make if you’ve ever cooked Asian food before. Actually, if you’ve even made rice before, then you’ve already made half the dish! TOTALLY RADICAL! All you need is Spam, rice, nori (seaweed) sheets, furikake (optional rice seasoning), sugar, and soy sauce.
Slice up some spam and fry it in a pan. After a minute or two, add the sugar and soy sauce mix and let the meat soak up the juices. After the meat’s done cooking, take it off the stove, and in the meantime, take some rice and mold it into a rectangular bed for the spam slice. Add some rice seasoning to the top, and then place a slice of spam on top of it all. Wrap the entire thing in seaweed, and SHABAM! You have a handful of meaty and ricey goodness, that’s found all over Hawaii. Eat it on the go, or at home, or eat it like I do: while reading food blogs. Yes, I like to maximize my grastronomic exposure.
