Breakfast - Mango Bread

Last year, about this time, I decided to purchase several cookbooks about both authentic Hawaiian cooking and Polynesian-pop (vintage, nontraditional recipes) cooking. My hula teacher, Malia, let me borrow a wonderful book filled with recipes of a family friend of hers, and I have been inspired to pull through my old books again to start making some of these recipes.

It is quite difficult to figure out where to start when wading through these books! I decided to check them out one at a time to try and make the recipes that sound most interesting and tasty.

The first cookbook I chose for my new project is "A Taste of Hawaii" by Jean-Marie Josselin. A little background on the author: he was born in France, received his culinary education in Paris, and worked in the US before heading to Hawaii and opening restaurants both in Hawaii and Las Vegas. So I guess you would call his style Pacific Rim fusion?? His cooking seems largely influenced by Hawaiian ingredients and several recipes include methods of cooking (i.e. steaming, tabletop grilling) that are used frequently around the Pacific Rim.

Many recipes in this book sound simply delicious, and I am eager to try them. To make you drool, here are some included recipes: Guava Sorbet (I will make this soon), Huli-Huli Roasted Chicken with Lime-Honey Glaze (roasted on a spit!), Mashed Potatoes with Five-Spice Powder, Mai-Tai Sauce, Imu-Baked Onaga (Hawaiian Snapper) with Hawaiian Salt (We will have to make this when we get a house...we hope to put an Imu or underground oven in our backyard! Hopefully!). Mmmm. Delicious.

I chose to make something on the "easier" side first, a quick bread containing mango and macadamia nuts. The recipe was pretty easy, but there is a fair amount of prep that goes in to cutting the mango and chopping up the macadamias.

We had a little "banana bread" issue with this loaf, and I was afraid it would end up undercooked... however we left it in the oven a good while longer than the recipe called for, and it came out beautiful! The crust got a little dark, but it is not burnt so that was a good thing.

Mango Bread

Ingredients:
-2 cups flour
-2 teaspoons baking soda
-1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
-1/2 teaspoon salt
-1-1/2 cups sugar
-4 eggs
-1/4 cup chopped macadamia nuts
-1/4 cup walnuts, broken in pieces
-3/4 cup vegetable oil (I used 1/4 cup vegetable oil and 1/2 cup applesauce)
-2 cups ripe mango, cut in small cubes (I took the lazy way and used frozen mango, defrosted and diced smaller)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Spray 9x5 inch loaf pan with cooking spray.
Combine flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt.
Make a well in the center of mixture, then add sugar, eggs, macadamia nuts, walnuts, and oil/applesauce.
Stir well.
Add mango, stirring in gradually.
Pour batter into a loaf pan and bake for at least an hour, checking the loaf until it is done (when a knife inserted in the center of loaf comes out clean).

We probably ended up baking our loaf for about an hour and 15-20 minutes. It took a LONG time, but eventually came out okay. I was a bit worried. It is a good way to bring a little summer to your house! Enjoy!