For this event we charged everyone 550 yen and we were hoping to get at least 40 people to attend the party. However about 30 people came and not everyone that signed up the event showed up. Thankfully there were a lot of people that showed up for the party even though they did not sign up.
People were pretty happy with the food, and they were happy to keep the leis, and take home leftover food. Here are pictures from the Hawaii Night from my friends.
Compared to the last two Hawaii nights, I expected this one to be a disaster because one of the Hawaii girls that was also in charge of cooking could not go to the party this time, but thankfully Keli'i is also a really good cook so he had people make macraoni salad, meat jun, li-hing mui pineapple, and hawaiian-style sesame cabbage.
In addition, there was a Swedish party on that day, and a Capture-the-Flag event so I thought people would not want to go to Hawaii Night.
The Hawaii Nights are fun, but they require a lot of planning, and it is difficult to cook a lot of these foods for a huge amount people. Therefore a lot of people were disappointed that this was the Final Hawaii Night because they could not go due to another commitment.
My Hawaii friends from this semester and I were not the ones that started Hawaii night, but we were happy to continue this tradition that my other Hawaii friend started our first semester at AIU. For his Hawaii Nights he made foods such as spam musubi, haupia, saimin, chicken long rice, tuna poke, and Hawaiian tea.
I think one of the reasons we continued Hawaii Night after he left was because we wanted to make Chocolate Haupia Pie. In addition, there were a lot of foods that my other Hawaii friend did not make for his Hawaii Nights so we wanted to feature them as well such as meat jun and lomi lomi salmon.
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| The guy with the red hair is the one that started the Hawaii Nights |
One of my friends that tried some of the Hawaiian foods said that we should start a Hawaiian restaurant in Akita, Japan. However, I think I managing a restaurant is too difficult. In addition, I prefer if more people became more aware of Hawaiian recipes, so regardless of where I go, I can eat good Hawaiian food anywhere.
Some of the popular foods we featured at the Hawaii Nights such as meat jun and pork adobo are not Hawaiian food, but they are very popular at Hawaii, and there are not too many restaurants at Japan that sell these types of foods.
Anyways this week some of my friends and I are planning to make Hawaiian guava cake, avacado cake, and okonomoyaki. One of the foods that we invented at AIU is Pineapple Okonomiyaki. None of the Japanese people have tried Pineapple Okonomiyaki before, but they really like it.
In addition, I finally met this girl that is also from the University of Hawaii at Manoa that is here for the six-week summer program, so Keli'i and me are looking forward to showing her around Akita.
Here are some websites that I found online that have Hawaiian recipes.
http://cookinghawaiianstyle.com/
http://www.foodland.com/recipeshttp://www.foodland.com/recipes
http://www.hawaii.edu/recipes/http://www.hawaii.edu/recipes/
http://www.alohafriendsluau.com/recipes.html
