Hawaii

A last minute dose of family time.

White sand beach, beautiful turquoise and blue water and all I can think about is the slew of items I will forget to pack for Paris. The waves crash on the sand in front of my feet as I lay next to my sister under a slightly romantic shaded couples pod.

Hair brush, nail clippers, emergency with electrolytes, ginger chews.

After a long first full day in what some would call paradise, personally my paradise is a less overwhelming hot place called Santa Monica, I found myself longing for a kitchen to cook in. Luckily on this trip my longing was satisfied with the dinky supply of kitchen utensils and meager spice selection.  

Claire set up a nice one man cooking challenge. She and Dad were the judges and Mom stepped in as a mentor.  

The ingredients for the first challenge were flour, blueberries, cinnamon and peanut butter.

To start, I will tell you exactly what we had in the pantry to work with: saffron, vanilla, cinnamon, powdered sugar, 3 salt and 4 pepper shakers, hot pepper flakes, a small bag of flour (less than a cup bought for mac and cheese), 1/4 box of granulated sugar, cumin, beef bullion, some other less useful spices and the small selection of foods we had picked up from the market the day before.

I stood in the kitchen utterly stumped as my mom suggested baking something or a pavlova (that was suggested at least 5 times).

I finally settled on cinnamon and sugar tortilla dippers with blueberry sauce and a cinnamon peanut butter dipping sauce.

For those of you who are wondering where the flour went, I used a tiny bit to thicken the blueberry sauce (mostly because I had to use the ingredient and had no baking powder or soda to use for a baked good).

I presented it as a play on campfire food.

Pictures are unavailable for the first challenge at the moment.

Later in the day I took two market trips and came back with some of the ingredients chosen for my next challenge.

The next four ingredients were marshmallows, graham crackers, bananas and peanut butter. I continued on my play on campfire foods.

Since there is an electric stove and no real fire source other than the tiki torches that lined the path on the opposite side of the golf course, I had to use goat think so I popped the marshmallows in the oven. When they were baked they looked like giggly puff (the pokemon) without the creepy face.  Since I had bought chocolate ice cream for my brother at the market, I substituted the chocolate with the ice cream and sautéed the bananas in butter and the cinnamon sugar I had previously made. YUM

Not only was the dessert incredible, the challenge was such a fun experience, as my sister dragged Dad out of his chair to judge the dish. There was quite a bit of laughter and tears from laughter as my dad used what he has learned on Chopped to analyze and critique the flavor, presentation and texture of the dish. As soon as all the melted chocolate was lapped up from the judges' chins, Claire declared that I was eligible to move on to the next round, competing against myself.