taste of hongwanji

Do you have church bazaars in your neighborhood? We had a pretty big one today. It was called "The Taste of Hongwanji". The Honpa Hongwanji is one of the largest buddhist organizations in Hawaii. Every year they have a bazaar and the food items are supposed to be based on the recipes from their collection of 6 cookbooks. My mom's church, the Pearl City Hongwanji participated in this bazaar.

Every year from January to March when I am home, I go to help the Fujinkai. The Fujinkai is a group of ladies (like a club) within the church. Fujin is wives, kai is group. These ladies get together to make tsukemono (pickled vegetables), sushi & baked goods to sell at this bazaar. And the amount of tsukemono that they make is nothing to be scoffed at either, we're talking hundreds of pounds of daikon (radish) that need to be peeled then sliced! They also use hakusai (chinese cabbage or called makina in hawaii), nasubi (eggplant), kyuri (cucumber) and carrots which are then marinated in different sauces and different types of tsukemono are made.

Sushi was rolled the day before the bazaar and boy, did they roll...over 600 of them~! (yipes!)

And baked goods baked a couple of days in advance.

There was LOTS of great homemade food including jams and jellies. Plus, there are plate lunches! Plate lunches are basically your whole meal on a sectioned plate, usually styrofoam box type with a cover. A basic plate lunch in Hawaii consists of the main dish, macaroni salad and 2 scoops of rice (at some places, you can get more that one main dish!). There was teriyaki barbequed short ribs, chili and rice, stew and rice and curry and rice plates. I had the chili and rice! It was spicy and delicious!

Another thing that they had was rotisserie chicken by Koala Moa. Whole chickens are cooked rotisserie style while moving down a ramp (as it cooks, it moves down the line!). This is a newer version of cooking chicken in Hawaii, when we were growing up we used to have "huli-huli" chicken. Huli-huli chicken are half chickens sandwiched between two large grills then flipped. The flipping action is called "huli-huli" in Hawaiian (a lot of school organizations used to sell these chickens as a type of fundraising). I prefer the rotisserie chicken because is doesn't get as burnt.

The only thing that hampered things was the weather. It apparently has been raining in Hawaii for the past 3 or 4 weeks! That is a LOT of water...

Still we were able to sell most of our goodies and eat some good food!

Hope you are dry where you are.

Take care and have a great week!