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.

Not really, but it was too good a headline to resist.

So here at last is a tale of two stove-top espresso makers. They work in similar fashion. The bottom section unscrews from the top section. You fill the bottom section about 3/4 full with water. There is a funnel-shaped basket for holding the ground coffee. This basket goes into the bottom section, you add the coffee, then screw the top section on. Maybe the photo helps to explain it. You put the unit on the stove-top, and in about 8 minutes you hear a low rumble build up to a sort of jet engine roar as the brew rockets under pressure up into the top portion of the device. Either of these units makes a potent brew of espresso, completely blowing away their wimpy counter-top Wal-Mart equivalents.

So how do they stack up? Either will produce a better espresso that you'll get out of the aforementioned cheapie tabletop units. I've used french press coffeemakers, and these units produce a brew that has got to be 3 times stronger, not to mention, much hotter. No need to heat up some half-and-half, the coffee in the stove-top unit will be hot you'll want to use milk or half-and-half right out of the fridge. Both units produce enough coffee to make a nice 16-ounce latte or breve, despite their terms such as "6-cup". With espresso makers, "cup" refers to a demitasse cup, which is not much more than a shot glass in size.

Oh yeah, the comparison. The BonJour unit is priced less than the Primula, and the fit is a bit looser. When pouring coffee out of the BonJour, I find it best to do so over the sink. I've got a similar unit packed in our camping gear, it being caked in soot and not really fit for the kitchen anymore.The handle on the Primula is a bit heaver, making it a bit easier to handle. The Primula unit is stainless steel instead of aluminum, so for those who are paranoid about aluminum particles going into your brain or whatever, you'd want the Primula. For those who think the aluminum cookware thing is more tinfoil hat stuff, then the BonJour will work just fine for you and cost less to boot.

I prefer using Latin coffees, my current favorite being the Estrella shown in the foreground. Absolutely fantastic espresso coffee. I've found the latin coffees are the thing to use for espresso, while the typical French roast is good for drip coffeemakers.

So, okay, back to the comparison. On a daily basis, I find myself switching between the two units, cleaning out one while using the other. The stainless steel Primula is very nice looking and even came with this sort-of-odd-looking satin bag, sort of like you'd see around a fancy bottle of booze. The BonJour has a nice coffee bean shaped knob on the top, plus the classic beveled stove-top espresso look. Timeless. I love both of 'em, and they will get plenty of use.

Another Christmas has come and gone. Our family started the morning out with Hawaiian sweet bread French toast and a viewing of the animated classic "A King is Born". Jesus was born this day, and we celebrate it, Amen. Our children received a wide variety of gifts, as did we, and love to you all.

The Christmas dinner consisted of my first crown roast, which I tell you the photo here does not do justice. I always thought a crown roast was a strip of ribs tied in a circle, but no, it's more a strip of pork chops tied in a circle. Oh delicious pork! Stuffing! It took about oh, just under 2-1/2 hours to cook. It was a challenge to carve, but carve it did at the table, just like the Grinch carving the Roast Beast. The meat was juicy and tender, and the stuffing that cooked inside the roast, well, it was worth fighting over. I cooked up some more stuffing to put around the outside, but forget that! The inside stuffing, oh that was good. I cooked the entire roast on top of some sliced acorn squash, which served to keep the roast up off the bottom of the roasting pan. That was some of the best squash I've had, seeing how it roasted in pork fat for a couple hours. Mmm. It would have been great to give some to a vegetarian, "Here try this, it's squash!" I'd convert 'em over to the meat lifestyle in no time. It was a fine Christmas, a joyous celebration it was.

I was, oh where, in church I think, on Sunday, when I was feeling the need for a roast. I went to the store that night and came across a very nice looking 7-bone roast. I don't know how much it weighed, maybe a couple pounds.

Well, I had to wait a couple days, but that was fine. I got time to pick up a couple onions which I didn't have at the time. So here is the story on the 7-Bone Roast With The Most, the roastest with the mostest!

Ingredients

• 7-bone roast, a nice big one.
• 2 onions
• 1 big yam
• 1/2 bottle Stubbs Moppin' Sauce
• 1 head of celery
• A few of those small red, yellow, and green peppers from Costco
• Garlic salt
• pepper

Directions

Slice up one onion into oh, maybe 1/8" or thicker slices. Lay the slices in the bottom of a big roasting pan. The onions will serve as both flavor and a riser to keep the roast off the bottom of the pan. Now get that roast. Generously salt and pepper one side with garlic salt and black pepper. Place that side down in the roasting pan, on the onions. Now do the same to the top of the roast in the pan. Dump a half bottle of Stubbs Moppin' Sauce over the top of the roast, and spread it around a bit so it covers the top of the roast. Take care to not push too much of the sauce off the top of the roast.

Cut up the remaining onion in similar fashion, and cover the top of the roast, letting the onion slices sink into that most excellent sauce. Wash off one big yam, and dice it up into large chunks. Lay the chunks around and on the roast. Dice up a whole head of celery into large slices and toss those in too. Get a few of those small peppers from Costco, clean them, halve them, and toss those on, too.

Cover the roasting pan and preheat the oven to 300°f. Yes, that's right. 300 degrees, and not one degree higher. Cook the roast for about 4 hours.

You won't need a knife to serve up the roast, it will be so tender and juicy it will come apart with the least effort. Oh, you dump a wad of that roast and those cooked up onions and all over a plate of rice, and "broke da mouth".

The Puka Guide is a fantastic little book sent to me by my mom. Anybody going to Hawaii to visit needs this book. For sure. All the classic hole-in-the-wall food joints are listed here. All the islands are covered. The nice thing about this book is it does not bother listing the many multi-location places available to eat, you can always find those without too much trouble.

To be sure, the book is not exhaustive, but 100 restaurants should be more than enough, right? It doesn't include "famous" spots such as Shiro's saimin on Oahu, or Cafe 100 on the Big Island, but then, you probably know about those places anyway.

Well, this might not be purely low-carb, but it's pretty good. So, I'll file this under "Guilty Pleasures". Okay, it goes like this:

Ingredients

• 8 boneless skinless chicken tenders, defrosted
• 1 package of defrosted bacon
• 3 cups corn flakes (generic is fine)
• Italian Herbs
• toothpicks

Directions

Crunch the corn flakes up in a big bowl. You want them to have that nice "Ooh that would be great chicken coating!" size. Put the bowl aside.

Lightly pound the chicken tenders flat, but just a bit. You want them to be 1/4" thick, but no thinner. Too thin and they will fall apart.

Lay a piece of bacon out and place a chicken tender on top of it. Roll the bacon and chicken tender up so that the bacon is on the outside. There should be a couple inches more bacon than chicken tender. Use that remaining bacon to go around the chicken again, covering up as much chicken as you can. Use a toothpick to secure the bacon in place. Place the roll-up aside and repeat the process with all the chicken tenders.

Get out a nice big skillet and put it on medium heat. Once it is hot, fry up the remaining bacon it. Your intent is to get all the fat out of the bacon and in the pan. Remove the bacon when it is done, and use it for whatever you desire.

It's fryin' time. Be sure the bacon fat does not overheat. Turn down the heat on the frying pan if necessary. Now, with each roll-up, dredge it in the corn flake crumbs, then place into the frying pan.

You should be able to fit all eight into the pan. Once all the chicken is in the pan, dust a fair amount of Italian herbs over the top. After that, put a lid on, and allow to fry for 5 minutes. When the time is up, flip the pieces over and let the other side fry for 5 minutes, too.

When done, remove the pieces and carefully pull the toothpick out of each piece, which will be pretty hot. Serve up, and enjoy.

Note: Today, a great man of God, Dr. D. James Kennedy, passed away, never fully recovering from a heart attack some months ago. He has ascended to glory, amen!