Martini Chicken

eat. My parents used to talk about a trio of gay men—then in their late 70s—that they knew on the Big Island who called themselves “the Martini Brothers.” They sounded like good fun, so Robin and I arranged a meeting with them, and soon became friends, often getting together to drink—you guessed it:

one on the rocks (as my dad likes them)
on our front porch in Hilo

One of the trio came for dinner recently, and as I was perusing a cookbook—Food and Wine magazine’s Best of the Best Cookbook Recipes—for ideas, I came across an entry entitled Chicken with Olives and Pine Nuts. It called for Italian olives and white wine. Why not substitute Martini olives and dry vermouth, and call it Martini Chicken, in honor of our guest?

I set to work. You start by heating olive oil and butter in a heavy skillet:


Coarsely chop a few cloves of garlic,


and lay your chicken pieces in the pan, skin side down, scattering the garlic and several bay leaves around the chicken:


Cover the pan (I used foil since I didn’t have a lid that fit my skillet), and let the chicken brown over a moderate heat for about ten minutes:


Turn the chicken,


and then continue cooking, still covered, for another ten or fifteen minutes—until the chicken is cooked through.

Spoon off any excess fat,


and then scatter Martini (i.e. Spanish) olives (I used four or five per person) around the chicken, and pour in a half cup of dry vermouth:


Raise the heat so that the liquid is boiling, and cook uncovered, deglazing the pan as it simmers, until most of liquid has evaporated:


I served the chicken over tri-colored rotini pasta, garnished with the remaining liquid in the pan and chopped parsley (throw out the bay leaves):


I recommend the dish. The meat was tender with a crispy skin, and the salty olives went swimmingly with the tart vermouth.

Great Gyres of Garbage

eat. That styrofoam under the chicken breasts you just bought; those green plastic chairs out on your deck; the clear plastic bottle of Coke in your hand—or, even more so, its red plastic cap. Sooner or later, much of these plastics are going to find their way into one of the five major oceanic gyres: be it the north Pacific, the south Pacific, the north Atlantic, the south Atlantic, or the Indian Ocean.

If you live in the western United States, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (aka the Pacific Trash Vortex) is where your trash is likely to end up (though much of the garbage is also made up of debris jettisoned from ships). Estimates of the size of this gyre vary greatly—ranging from the size of Texas to twice the size of the Continental United States—since any estimate will depend on the degree of plastic concentration used to define the affected area.

web image [source]

Whatever the size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, however, we can all agree that it is scary. Really scary. Especially for creatures living in and around the Hawai‘ian Islands, since most debris that manages to escape from the gyre eventually makes its way down here. The coast along the Ka‘ū desert near the southern tip of the Big Island (the southern-most point in the United States), in particular, seems to be a magnet for this marine litter.

Our marine biologist friend Bill Gilmartin is the co-founder of the Hawai‘i Wildlife Fund, a non-profit organization “dedicated to the conservation of Hawaii’s native wildlife through research and education,” comprised of “educators, conservationists, researchers, naturalists, communities, volunteers and donors devoted to the conservation of Hawaii’s fragile marine ecosystem and its inhabitants.” The HWF conducts beach clean-ups every few months along the Ka‘ū coastline, and when Bill invited me to participate in one such clean-up last week, I gladly accepted.

I spent the night before the event at Bill’s home in Volcano (he cooked some delicious spicy meatballs and angel-hair pasta for our dinner, washed down by several bourbons and ginger ale), and at six-thirty the next morning we drove down the mountain to the sea. There had been a tremendous rain storm during the night, and we were greeted by the sight of a snow-covered Mauna Loa lit up by a bright pink sunrise:


Thirty-seven volunteers met at a parking lot near Naʻālehu, and our fearless leader Megan Lamson filled us in on where we’d be picking up debris, and the logistics of the day’s activities:


Next, everyone piled into the various four-wheel-drive vehicles that folks had brought with them, and we bumped and bounced our way down a dirt track through cattle-grazing country to the coastline.

Out came the garbage bags, and we set to work. My group started at Ka‘alela and headed south, and another group started at Pa‘akea and worked their way north. The plan was to meet in the middle at Kamilo Point for lunch, and to discuss cleanup finds and load the pickups with the debris we had collected.

There wasn’t a whole lot of trash to begin with. My very first find was rather odd: a collection of some half-dozen different-colored pencil erasers, their hues greatly diminished by the salt water. Here we are picking our way over the lava rocks, filling our black bags with trash:


After about a half an hour, however, we came across a stretch of beach absolutely covered with debris:


There were gigantic shards of broken and unidentifiable plastic items (mostly blue and white, I noted); hundreds of small, black, conical, plastic fish-traps; and enormous hunks of fish net and rope:

yours truly, with the debris in the background

This stretch of litter-infested beach went on for about a quarter of a mile, and we all quickly filled our bags to over-flowing. The problem was that the road—where we were to leave the full bags for later pick-up—was a good walk from the beach, so we had to schlepp our finds over the rocks and ankle-catching shrubs. Not an easy task.


Finally it was lunch time. We convened at the mid-way point, where the other group had collected together a varied assortment of interesting items, including some Japanese boundary stakes; a small glass float; several computer circuit boards; a few brown speckled (bird?) eggs; a scuba cylinder; a motorcycle helmet; a cigarette lighter from Hong Kong; some liquor bottles made in Japan and Scotland; a very old tube television set; and various car tires.

a sampling of our finds

In addition, we filled the back of Bill’s truck with fish net and rope:

adding the day’s catch of rope and net
to the previously-collected pile at the landfill
(that’s Bill in the cap)

In all, we collected in the three hours we worked on the beach 1,500 pounds of derelict fish net and rope, and 2,410 pounds of non-net/rope marine debris (including 66 XL full trash bags). Tired but content, we sat around eating our lunches, and discussed the morning’s work:


As I sat munching my cheese and homemade kimchee sandwich, I noticed that the sand at my feet was not the usual color. As I focused my eyes on it more clearly, I realized that the reason for this was that it was not just sand. It was, in fact, mostly tiny pieces of broken plastic, mixed with the sand and black lava rock:


Bill explained to me that the plastic in the ocean continually breaks up into smaller and smaller pieces, but it never disintegrates entirely. It just turns into this “plastic sand,” which continues to float in the water, and is ingested by sea birds and other aquatic creatures.

Here’s a photo of the half pound of plastic that was found in the dead body of a fledgling Laysan albatross:

web photo [source]

And here’s another close-up view of the tropical Hawai‘ian beach where we had our lunch:


And then it hit me. This wasn’t just about picking up litter along the coastline. We would never be able to completely clean it up, no matter how many people we were and how often we went, since tons of new debris were continually washing ashore.

No. My horror at the tiny bits of plastic scattered everywhere about my feet made me realize: This was about education. People like me need to actually see it to really get it. Only then will we have a chance of stopping the plastic madness that has become our modern world.

If you want to donate to the Hawai‘i Wildlife Fund, or volunteer, or otherwise get involved, click here. Mahalo!

The Lava at the End of the Road

eat. Sort of. Well, we did eat some bananas. But more about that later.

I’m now back in Hilo with my parents (Robin will arrive on the 17th). My mom and dad are lava junkies. The first time they visited the Big Island—back in 1983—they had the wondrous fortune to arrive in Hilo when Pu‘u ‘O‘o was fountaining. Upon being informed of this fact, they dropped their bags on the hotel floor, rushed to the airport to hire a private plane, flew up and circled the fountain for about a half an hour gawking in amazement at the fiery plume, and that was that. My folks were addicted. They returned to the Big Island time-after-time (on a few occasions for several months, when my dad was on sabbatical), and would think nothing of hiking 20 miles to see hot flowing lava. Mom and Dad passed this addiction on to Robin and me, which is one of the reasons we now spend so much time here.

Well, the sad fact is that my parents are now in their early-80s, and not as strong or agile as they once were. They can no longer hike for hours over sharp, uneven lava fields to get to the active flow. As a result, they hadn’t seen any hot lava for a couple of years.

So you can imagine our glee when our neighbor Don told us the other day that the flow was crossing Highway 130! (See map here.) Once again, there was a drive-in lava flow! The next morning we jumped in the car and dashed down to Kalapana. And there it was—literally at the end of the road:


As it crossed the highway, the lava ignited in dancing flames, due to the high oil-content of the asphalt. A bit like a scene from Dante’s Inferno.

The usual zanies were on the spot, of course. The crazy guy who has to prove how cool he is sitting inches from 2000°F lava:


(He didn’t stay there long, I can assure you.) Here’s the same guy (who lives nearby), with his donkey, Heidi:


This fellow tried to get his dog to sit for a photo, but the dog (Pohaku—a real sweetie) was not too keen on the idea:


This was a pahoehoe (pronounced pah-hoi-hoi) flow, a basaltic form of lava that forms ropey shapes as if flows and cools. Here’s what it looked like in the areas not covered by oily asphalt:


And here’s a view closer up:


I love how the lava has broken through the cooled crust and is oozing out in this shot:


And voilà a small molten pool. The yellow bits are the hottest:


In this shot you can see a wedge that has just popped up, a bit like an iceberg (except the opposite).


After about 45 minutes standing around staring in awe at the flow I remembered that we had the two chairs we had just bought two days earlier in the trunk. I fetched them, and Mom and Dad relaxed and continued to enjoy the view. A perfect way to christen the new chairs, eh?


This is where the aforementioned bananas come into the story. You can see one in my Mom’s left hand. I had one as well, and after we consumed them, I threw the peels onto the flow. It took about 30 seconds, but they did ignite:


A perfect Hawai‘ian morning.

Aloha from the Big Island!

My Dinner With Ruth

eat. The year 2011 is being rung in with a bit of a bang for me, as an essay I penned, entitled “Justice Is Served,” has been published in the January issue of California Lawyer magazine.

Some of you already know that several years back I hosted a small dinner party for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and that I’ve been working on a book about the experience called Cooking For Ruth. Well, I submitted a short, adapted excerpt of the memoir to California Lawyer a couple of months ago, and lo and behold, they accepted it. It’s my first published piece of writing, so as you can imagine, I’m quite pleased. (You can read it here.)

the photo I didn’t submit to go with the essay
(my mom looks on with amusement at Ruth’s and my silliness)

For all you foodies out there, I will provide a few more details about the dinner itself, which were by necessity omitted from the article. (The lawyer-types at the magazine were, alas, primarily interested in the legal details.)

We started out the evening with a couple rounds of Veuve Clicquot Champagne (the non-vintage, yellow-label, which I think is as good as, if not better than, the much pricier Grande Dame). I was happy to get down immediately to the drinking portion of the evening, as I—along with Robin and my parents—was a bit nervous to be hosting such luminaries. (The presence of five U.S. Marshals in my folks’ den throughout the evening did not serve to lessen this feeling of nervousness.)

I set out bowls of salted cashews, Japanese rice crackers, and wasabi peas to go with the bubbly, but I don’t think anyone had any. We all knew there was a multi-course meal to come, and didn’t want to spoil our appetites.

For the appetizer, I served a single plump seared sea-scallop, set on a pool of ginger-lime cream sauce, and garnished with lime zest:


Next up was a bowl of roasted butternut-squash soup finished with brown butter, and then drizzled with crème fraîche and toasted walnut oil, and topped with chopped walnuts:


As a palate-cleanser before the main course, we crunched on a baby-spinach salad with slices of blood orange (from my garden) and red onion, dried cranberries, pine nuts, Gorgonzola cheese, and a Dijon vinaigrette. Ruth did not partake of her onions, I observed when I cleared the plates. (Sorry, but I don’t have a photo of the salad, but the one I took was way too blurry for publication.)

These first three courses were accompanied by the 2004 Storrs Christie Chardonnay—a dry, citrusy (and thankfully non-oaky) wine. I highly recommend the Storrs Winery, which produces a wide variety of excellent, reasonably-priced Santa Cruz Mountains wines.

Ruth doesn’t eat red meat, so for the main course I decided on blackened ahi steaks coated in a dry-rub of spices and black sesame seeds, served with wasabi mashed potatoes and snow peas sautéed in sesame oil. Here are Robin and Marty during the main course:


Sadly, Martin Ginsburg—renowned tax law professor and practitioner, as well as bon vivant and lively raconteur—passed away last summer. He was a warm and witty man, and will be sorely missed by all who knew him. (Click here for his obituary.)

After much discussion and numerous wine tastings, Robin and I had settled on the 2001 Bonny Doon Vineyard Le Cigare Volant to go with the ahi. Here you can see Ruth—a great wine aficionado—posing with the bottle for a shot I took to give to the Bonny Doon winemaker, Santa Cruz resident Randall Grahm:


And here are Ruth and my dad deep in conversation about recent constitutional law issues (Marty and I were discussing cooking at the time, I believe):


Dessert was a selection of tart and pie slices from Amandine Patisserie in West Los Angeles, accompanied by Steve’s Smooth French Roast from the Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company. (I bet you didn’t know that Ruth drinks fourteen cups of coffee a day—according to what Marty told us at the dinner.) Ruth opted for the chocolate mousse and praline tart. Here I am serving my dad his slice of chocolate ganache pie.


If I ever publish the book, I’ll be sure to include all the recipes.

Happy New Year to everyone!