And Now Starring…Sandy Hu!

By Sandy Hu

This is so embarrassing to share, but when I was a little girl, I used to pretend to be doing a food demonstration as I washed the dishes, stirring up suds and transferring it from bowl to bowl as I whipped up my pretend food for an imaginary audience. I wasn’t interested in the cooking; I just wanted to be the star!

Growing up in Hilo before the days of the Food Network, a simple aspiration was to be on the stage of the electric company auditorium where free cooking demonstrations were held. It was one of the places where I saw real people performing in front of an audience and I was hooked!

The utility company home economists, along with the University of Hawaii Cooperative Extension Service clubs for homemakers, played a huge role in disseminating recipes from Hawaii’s rich ethnic culinary cultures. It’s one of the places where my mom learned about recipes from other ethnic groups and replicated them for our family.

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What to Serve a New Twitter Friend

By Sandy Hu

What can you learn about a person in 140-character comments over a single day? I learned enough about @Melissa808 to know I wanted to invite her for dinner.

Melissa Chang is a freelance writer and a social media consultant in Honolulu who tweets as @Melissa808. I, as @specialforksndy, met her over tweets just last Thursday, trying to help a friend of a friend with restaurant suggestions for her trip to Hawaii.

Although I was the food editor of the Honolulu Advertiser years ago, I wasn’t very current on the restaurant scene so I tweeted @Kamaka_Hawaii, the only foodie from Hawaii I followed on Twitter, for some advice. She, in turn, involved two people with the pulse on restaurant dining in Hawaii, tweeting back “both @Melissa808 and @thedailydish (Catherin Toth) are big time Foodies, Bloggers, Journalists from Oahu.”

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Basic Knife Skills Mom Never Taught You

By Craig Deppe

We've all been wowed and amazed by the lightning-fast blur of a master chef’s knife as they deftly dispatch a defenseless mushroom or innocent onion.

There's no doubt we all would love to have such talent but the truth is, the home cook simply needs to know a few basics to make life easier at the cutting board.

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Everybody’s Favorite Retro Salad

By Sandy Hu

It used to be that “salad,” meant iceberg lettuce. Today, with so many sophisticated and more intensely-flavored varieties of baby greens, iceberg lettuce has been consigned to the role of leaf backdrop in burger buns.

Iceberg is enjoying a mini-comeback. Its mild taste and its ability to get totally crisp (we’ll show you how), makes it the prefect foil for rich and pungent blue cheese.

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Inside Special Fork: Behind the Scenes of our Video Blogs

By Sandy Hu

It’s a gorgeous Sunday morning in San Francisco. But instead of going out to enjoy it – and heaven knows we’ve had few perfect summer days to revel in – my son Dave and I are dutifully chopping and measuring and getting ready to shoot another Special Fork video blog.

Fridays are video days on our blog site and we are committed to introducing a new video blog every week. Dave and I comb through the Special Fork beta site looking for recipes to spotlight that are quick, easy and delicious, and that offer a teachable moment. Sometimes, we simply want to show how do-able a recipe is, even for beginners.

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