First off, I know you want lots of photos. Here you go.

Ingredients

• Slice of pig-head roll
• Sliced carrot
• bean sprouts
• Datu Puti vinegar
• Egg roll wrappers

Directions

• Thinly slice a bit of carrot.
• Get you a nice slice of pig-head roll. Trim off the fattiest outer section and cut this fairly thin.
• Place the sliced fatty bits into a wok and heat up so as to render the fat out. This is what you'll be frying in. If it looks like you need more, get more pig head roll.
• Dice up the remaining pig head roll and fry up in the oil. Splash (carefully, that is) in some Datu Puti cane vinegar to taste. Let that stuff fry up for a bit, but don't overdo it. Use a wire strainer to remove the cooked pig bits from the wok, and for now, remove the wok from heat.
• Assemble egg rolls using the fried pig, along with carrot and bean sprouts.
• Return the wok to the heat, and using the fat remaining in the wok, fry up some nice egg rolls. Should there not be sufficient fat in there for frying, supplement with sesame oil if necessary.
• Serve over rice, and provide a large bottle of that egg roll sauce, the "honey and hot chili pepper" stuff you get at restaurants.

The above is what I ate for dinner tonight. The texture of that pig head meat? Well, it's a mix of globby collagen fat, cracklin' fried fat, nice meaty pork, and more fat. Fat! If you've heard of a Chinese dish called Kau Yuk, you'll know what I'm talking about. It sounds disgusting, but eating a bunch of pig fat in various states of fattiness is an occasional treat, trust me. There is plenty of good pork meat in there, mind you, but yeah, it's fatty. Sort of a bacon egg roll.

I cooked up six of those egg rolls, and they were a feast. I'm trying to cut back after all the Christmas overindulgence, but this sure wasn't in the plan. This meal, basically consisting of fatty pig fried in pig fat, probably has enough calories to, well, you cram in an analogy. I'm tired at the moment. But oh it was good. So good. My wife picked up a bottle of that great "egg roll" dipping sauce at Red Apple, and the stuff is like this huge bottle for only $2.50. Well, I tanked probably a fourth of that bottle with the egg rolls. Had those egg rolls over hot jasmine rice, and man oh man, I pigged out. Pigged on pig head egg rolls. Afterwards, I was so carbo-overloaded, I crashed out on the couch for I think an hour. So good.

Ingredients

• One sous-vide pig snout
• One onion chopped
• Hoisin sauce

Directions

• Chop up that sous-vide pig snout into bite-sized pieces.
• Do the same with the onion.
• Get a wok nice and hot. Drop in the pig snout pieces. As they cook, they will release sufficient fat for frying.
• Add onions and continue cooking until onions are the way you like them.
• Hose the whole mess down with a generous amount of hoisin sauce and continue cooking until things look they way you like.
• Serve over rice.

Disclaimer: Do not try this on your own. If you want to cook sous-vide, you should get proper sous-vide equipment. Information here is purely for entertainment purposes only.

Here is porky, after spending 16 long hours in the oven. I used the sous-vide technique, but lacking the fancy French water circulator bath, I had to use the low-tech solution. Foodsaver bag. "Sous-vide" roughly translates to "Boil in the bag", just like the old Banquet TV Dinner Chicken-Ala-King (my favorite back in the day, by the way). I googled around looking for time and temp recommendations and decided 12 hours at at least 160° f. would do the trick.

I decided the best way to maintain this temp would be to fill my stainless steel stock pot full of hot water, and place the whole thing into the oven. I dropped an electric temperature probe into the water so I could get a precise reading. With our new oven, setting the temp was easy. The lowest the oven would go was 175° f., so at midnight I started it out there. Unfortunately, by 2:00 a.m., the water temp in the pot was a measly 122° f. I cranked the stove up to 350° f. until the water temp rose up to 170° f. At that point, I backed off the temp on the oven down to 175° f. and went to bed. The next morning all was well, with the water temp in the pot reading 179° f.

Since it took a while to get up to temp, I decided to let Porky have it all day, finally stopping the cooking at 4:00 p.m. the next day. Porky had undergone a 16-hour sous-vide. He's really taking it like a man, er, pig.

When I got the pot of the water, I drained it out and removed my tightly bundled roll o' pig. I undid the butcher's twine, and cut the bag open.

I guess I was expecting fanfare or something. Instead I got a whiff of some frankly unpleasant odor. I washed ol' Porky off really good, but a pig is a pig is a pig. Sous-vide pig doesn't translate into a wonderful aroma. You must admit, it looks a bit odd, too. The sous-vide process is sort of like poaching. No fried or baked look at all. You remember the first Star Trek movie? The scene where they show the guy who had the transporter accident? He looks a bit like that. Really strange. Had some of that nasty grey congealed blood & crud on parts, too, which I removed. The hot mass was placed into a glass bread pan and sealed up for some fridge time. First, though, I sliced off a section, which will take me to the next story. In a bit. I'm tired, so I'll talk more later.

And of course, you want pictures. Here are plenty of pictures.

For the last couple days, I've had a horrid itch on my right arm. Tried lotions, no luck. Finally went to the doc and went through the expected questions. No new laundry soap, pets, and do on. I did mention I did prepare a pig head last Wednesday night. "A pig head?" "Oh yeah." "Hm. That's a first" So after more talk the conclusion is dermatitis, likely from the cleaner I was using afterwards to clean the kitchen sink. Or was it Porky's revenge? Did he exude some toxin from one of his piggy glands? Some anti-predator poison? I'll never know.

Meet Porky. He's glad to see you. Anyhow, I was reading offalgood.com and was inspired. Being something of a foodie, I decided to finally take a try at preparing pig head. Rather than do a boiled head as in souse meat, I'm going to give a shot at doing a sous-vide here, like the offalgood.com guy did.

But I know what you want, you want pictures! Here are the pictures of the pig head prep.

Oh, and if you are wondering, no the kids will not be forced to give Porky a taste. Purely voluntary.

There is simply no better place to shop in Anchorage. Red Apple has everything! I started out looking for some chicken, but these treats caught my eye instead.

At the end, I saw Barbara the manager lady. I asked her if they had any pig heads in. She said they had some on the truck and if I waited, I could have one. I decided not to wait, much to Justin's happiness. Next time, maybe.

If you are reading this, you have already read my tale of L & L Hawaiian Barbecue. As any local (to Hawaii) knows, one of the keys to a proper plate lunch is a scoop of proper macaroni salad.

To me, the proper mac salad does not contain potato, cheese, tuna, peas, or any sort of extra food other than some occasional grated carrot purely for color. This is not to say those variants are bad; they just have no place in a plate lunch.

I decided to take a stab at recreating the classic Hawaiian mac salad. I hit up my favorite food site, recipezaar.com, but all the recipes there contained adulterations such as pineapple and potato chunks. I expanded my search to Google, but still found it difficult to find a pure local style mac salad.

I did notice of all the mac salad recipes, one thing was consistent. They all used mayo or Miracle Whip as the base. Most cut down the mayo with milk, going with a ratio of 1 cup mayo to 1/4 cup milk. While I had heard that the true mac salad uses sour cream, none of the recipes I saw mentioned it.

What you see here is a semi-scientific crack at reproducing the mac salad. I went with a simple recipe as follows:

Experimental Local Style Mac Salad

• 2 cups dry elbow macaroni
• 1 cup mayonnaise ("M") or Miracle Whip ("MW")>
• optional glob of sour cream ("S")
• 1/4 cup milk (Next time I'll do 1/3 cup or more!)
• Salt (a reasonable amount)
• Pepper (enough to give it the right look)
• finely grated carrot for color

Directions

• Mix up everything but the macaroni. Or maybe you want to wait on the salt and pepper and add them in afterwards. Whatever.
• Boil up some elbow macaroni for 15 minutes. (My mistake was to boil the macaroni for 10 minutes, as one does for mac-n-cheese. Big mistake. Next time I'll boil it for 15 minutes.)
• Drain the mac into a colander. Rinse the macaroni with cold water to stop it from cooking further.
• Pour the drained macaroni into a pot and stir in the base. Toss in the grated carrot and mix it up. If you wimped out and waited til' now to add in the salt and pepper, do so now. Cover the salad up and stick it in the fridge overnight.

I created four variants of the salad base; Mayo ("M"), Mayo with sour cream ("MS"), Miracle Whip ("MW"), and Miracle whip with sour cream ("MWS"). They all had to go in the fridge overnight, and that was key. The overnight sit gives the mac time to set up and not look like a blob of hot mayo, which is rather unappealing.

Ah, the taste test! Here are the results. First off, I really undercooked the mac, so the noodles were way too chewy. This alone made it difficult to accurately gauge the taste. Next, the mayo or Miracle Whip taste was very overpowering. I will certainly crank up the amount of milk in the mixture to cut down on the overwhelming mayo taste. Okay, that being said, between my wife and I, the "MS" variant is the closest to the real thing, followed by "MWS", then "M", then "MW". It is a fine line between not enough sour cream and too much. The sour cream works mostly as a counter to the mayo, and is not intended to impart it's own distinct flavor. Getting the amount of milk and sour cream right is something I'll have to wrestle with in an future round of taste testing.

I meant to post this like over a year ago, but finally got 'round to it. This lady Clara, I love her videos! Clara is this lady in her 90's who cooks food from the Great Depression era, while describing life at that time.

I figure, hey, the way things are going these days, we might find ourselves with no choice but to survive on hot dogs and water. I tossed her cookbook into my amazon.com cart, so once I rack up $25 of orders, I'll do the free shipping thing and get the cookbook, too. But yeah, do check out her YouTube videos. Classic stuff.

Here it is, at long last. Our inaugural dining experience at the recently opened L&L Hawaiian Barbecue was so worth it. I had curry katsu, as shown here. My loving family chose to partake of the chicken katsu instead. The food was perfect. Perfect. I told the owner as much, too.

The katsu was done just right, with a crispy outside and moist chicken within. The curry? Well, my family will claim it stunk, but then, doesn't good curry smell that way? It was just as one would expect, a classic Hawaiian-style curry plate lunch.

The rice was just as one would wish it to be, two scoop rice. And the mac salad - oh the mac salad - they nailed it. This for me has been the litmus test of so many plate lunch places. Potato salad is not mac salad. Mac-potato salad is not mac salad. Costco mac salad is not mac salad. These folks took the time to prepare a classic Island mac salad.

My only disappointment is that they do not have manapua or malasadas on the menu. The owner told me they only have the "core" menu. I hope they get enough interest to expand and offer up more. I wouldn't have minded a piece of haupia to top off the whole dining experience. Oh, and they serve Pepsi. Bleh. But other than that, it was a dining dream come true.