Honolulu Lite
Eventually, everyone will be a guest on a television cooking show. It's simple mathematics. The growth in the number of new cooking shows is greater than the country's birth rate. There's even an entire television channel devoted to cooking shows.
I got to tape an episode of "Sam Choy's Kitchen," which will air next month on KHNL Channel 8. Choy's is an unusual cooking show because he does the actual cooking and the guest just kind of stands around and makes small talk. (What's that you're adding there, Chef? Salt? Hmmm. Interesting.)
I like Sam for a number of reasons, not the least of which is he makes me look pretty darn slim. Sam is a large guy. And that's the way chefs should be. Skinny chefs make me nervous. They are like auto mechanics who ride bicycles.
I worked my way through college as a cook, part of the time in a large resort on the Oregon coast. I was the lowest cook on the staff. And the skinniest. If I screwed up, the sous chef would back me up with his big, fat gut, yelling at me. He came from the bulldozer school of cooking.
But I felt privileged being allowed into that fraternity. Learning by experience is the tradition of professional cooking. And those guys taught me a lot, even allowing me once to work "on the line," the long cooking station where the hotel's elite chefs prepared meals for the gourmet dining room.
And so, I didn't take going to Sam Choy's restaurant lightly. (I know, no one takes Sam Choy lightly.) You don't become a cook of Sam's stature simply by personality. The fraternity won't allow it. There simply are too many good cooks out there. To break onto the international stage the way Sam has, you have to know your stuff.
I'm sure most of Sam's guests are a little nervous to be in front of a battery of television cameras. I was nervous to be back in a professional kitchen. I immediately reverted back to my lowest-cook-on-the-planet persona.
But it's hard to stay nervous around Sam. Within a few minutes, we were joking around, hardly aware of the cameras.
I gave him a certificate making him an official member of the Worldwide I Hate Mayonnaise Club, of which I'm the founding father. He promised never to use mayo again in his cooking, but I'm not sure he was serious.
I told him I wasn't much of a fish eater because my mom used to punish me with cod liver oil. If she had punished me with tacos, I would be one slim fish-eating guy now. Sam wondered how he might have turned out if his mom punished him with laulau.
He whipped up Poke Patties, which essentially is poke fish, seaweed and shoyu mixed with egg and bread crumbs and fried in a wok. While he cooked, I asked him what it was like to cook for Arnold Schwarzenegger, which he did recently in Los Angeles. At that party, Charlie Sheen came up to him and asked, "Hey, Chef, what's this poke stuff?" Pronouncing poke like "Coke" or "broke." That's pok-ay, brah, Sam told him. Sheen apparently loved it.
The second dish Sam made was ginger lobster, which was one of the best lobster dishes I've ever had. The lobster was so fresh it was still twitching in the bowl before it was cooked. The producer asked me not to point that out to the viewers. They apparently like to think food doesn't come from actual animals.
In the end I gave both dishes Honolulu Lite's highest culinary rating: OSB (Ono, Sonny Bono.)
But the real thrill was just being back in the kitchen. It made me remember two things: even if you are the lowest cook on the planet, you are still higher than just about everyone else; and never pick up a hot wok with your bare hands.
