June '25: Aloha Kitchen by Alana Kysar

85 fresh and sunny recipes that reflect the major cultures that have influenced local Hawai‘i food over time: Native Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Korean, Filipino, and Western.

We’re cooking from Alana Kysar’s Aloha Kitchen all this month.

(Apologies for the delayed post. My husband and I, in an unplanned turn of events, had to move apartments - three cats, wooden furniture worth a 3-bedroom apartment, kitchen equipment, 2 work-from-home setups, life - in general… Sigh. But the good thing is, we’re mostly set up now and things are back to regular programming.)

On initially browsing through the book, Aloha Kitchen comes across as super fun, super easy and heavily inspired by Asian cuisine. There’s a section at the beginning of the book titled Regions of Influence where Alana talks in detail about how the local culture has shaped up the way that it has - immigration large numbers of works from China, Korea, Japan, Portuduese immigrants from Azores and Madeira, Filipinos…

It’s no wonder then that their food has lumpias and mandoo, malasadas and pansit. Recipes with char siu, vinha d’alhos, jook, shoyu, adobo, katsu, teriyaki seem all too familiar for those of us who live and breathe all kinds of Asian and Indian food.

Some of us have already tried making poke bowls and jook and mochi cakes and plantation iced teas. And all of them delicious. Here’s too lots more cooking this month!

And here’s Alana’s blog: https://www.fixfeastflair.com/ if you want to take a look at her recipes in case you don’t want to buy the book.