My family has engaged in a cooking competition during the holidays every year since 2010. This oddball tradition began as a fun way to evenly distribute the labor of getting Thanksgiving dinner on the table: everyone made a course, then we scored each dish based on creativity, taste, and presentation. The rules quickly grew quite complicated after that. 2011 wasn’t too bad: it consisted of a series of Chopped-style showdowns using “basket” ingredients. In 2012, though, we all had to cook a dish which: 1) corresponded to a specific course (appetizer, entree, or dessert), 2) was inspired by a specific Christmas carol, 3) included a secret ingredient purchased by another competitor which was linked to one of the carols, and 4) also utilized a specific kind of breakfast cereal. This more or less culminated in 2017 and three rounds of head-to-head matchups based on the cooking show Knife Fight in which we cooked as many things as we desired featuring sets of three secret ingredients during two-hour-long cooking sessions. I won that year, and if I remember correctly prepared 13 separate dishes during my six total hours in the kitchen.
We chilled out a bit after that, and the requirements of recent editions have been as simple as making Christmas cookies (first round) and a casserole (second round) in 2019 and creating an edible tableau which was judged solely on appearance and description in 2020 when we couldn’t gather in person because of the pandemic. This year’s rules were similarly straightforward: with everyone gathering in a crazy pirate-themed house in Davenport, Florida for a rare pre-Thanksgiving family vacation, we decided to each make a snack inspired by a Disney movie. My partner Lucy and I selected Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders’s Lilo & Stitch, which, fun fact, appeared on my very first official top ten list for The Pitt News. Here’s a picture of the Disney “2-Disc Big Wave Edition” DVD that I don’t remember picking up, but obviously acquired sometime after 2009 when it was released:
You can also stream Lilo & Stich via Disney+ with a subscription or from most major streaming video services for a rental fee. We dubbed the salty-sweet concoction we created in its honor Hurricane Elvis Popcorn. It’s basically a mash-up between the Hurricane Popcorn recipe from the food blog Delicious Not Gorgeous, the Perfect Popcorn recipe from the food blog Simply Recipes, and an Elvis sandwich. Here’s how you make it:
12 ozs. diced thick-cut bacon
1 2.7 oz. bag Bare® Simply Banana Chips
2 oz. arare, broken into bite-sized pieces if necessary
1/8 cup furikake
1 tsp. kosher salt
1/2 cup popcorn kernels
2 Tbsp. salted butter
2 Tbsp. roasted peanut oil (not to be confused with regular peanut oil: you want a finishing oil like La Tourangelle that punches you in the nose with the smell of roasted peanuts when you open it)
- Cook the bacon in a skillet until crisp. Remove to a paper towel-lined plate using a slotted spoon.
- Strain 4 1/2 ounces of bacon fat into a large saucepan. Warm over medium high heat, adjusting temperature downward as necessary to keep it from smoking.
- Put three or four popcorn kernels into the pot and wait for them to pop. Remove them to a large bowl with a slotted spoon when they do.
- Add the rest of the kernels to the pot in an even layer, remove from heat, and cover.
- Count to 30 slowly, then return the pan to the heat until nearly all the kernels have popped, gently moving the pan back and forth over the burner to prevent burning.
- Remove the popped corn to a large bowl.
- Immediately add salted butter to the still-hot pan you cooked the popcorn in and melt it. A little browning is a good thing–it adds flavor! Once the butter is melted, add the peanut oil. Set aside.
- Toss the popped corn, melted butter/peanut oil mixture, crispy bacon, and remaining ingredients in a very large bowl or plastic bag (see below). Season with additional salt as necessary and serve.
I mentioned a bag in the instructions above: part of the reason we went this route was because we didn’t know quite what kind of kitchen we’d be cooking in. At home we have a HUGE metal mixing bowl which works great for this, but down in Florida we found a plastic bag to be the best tool available:
The young man in this picture is my nephew Pete, who kindly offered to help us out with this part. Although we only finished in fifth place, we’re quite proud of our handiwork! Here’s a photo of Lucy and me with the finished product:
It seemed like a waste not to turn this into another bonus Drink & a Movie post, so I selected a drink to pair with the movie and snack, the Halekulani Cocktail from Martin and Rebecca Cate’s Smuggler’s Cove book about their legendary San Francisco rum bar. Here’s how to make it:
1/2 oz. lemon juice
1/2 oz. orange juice
1/2 oz. pineapple juice
1/2 oz. demerara syrup
1/2 teaspoon grenadine
1 1/2 ozs. bourbon (Hudson Whiskey Bright Lights, Big Bourbon)
1 dash Angostura bitters
Combine all ingredients and shake with ice. Strain into a chilled coupe or Nick and Nora glass. Garnish with an edible orchid flower if you have one handy, or leave the drink unadorned like we do here:
We made this with Smuggler’s Cove’s house demerara syrup (which is thicker than most of the ones I’m familiar with) and grenadine, recipes for both of which can be found in the book, but I feel like any ones you like would work fine here. The Cates explain that this drink originated at the House Without a Key lounge in Waikiki Beach in the 1930s and call for it to be made with bourbon, but decline to recommend a specific brand. I first tried one of my go-tos, Elijah Craig Small Batch, but felt that the result, although extremely well-balanced, lacked character. Then I read a Punch article by Chloe Frechette which notes that the Halekulani Cocktail would originally have been made with “[t]he only native spirit of Hawaii, okolehao, commonly known as oke, [which] is, in essence, Hawaiian moonshine,” and realized that New York’s own Hudson Whiskey’s Bright Lights, Big Bourbon would work perfectly here. Despite the fact that it’s aged for a minimum of three years, it still tastes a bit on the young side to me, but that’s a feature, not a bug in this particular application and many others–whereas the Elijah Craig just sort of disappeared into the drink, the taste of this spirit shines through.
For anyone not familiar with the film, an alien on the run from the Galactic Federation voiced by director Chris Sanders crash lands on the island of Kaua’i, where he masquerades as a stray dog to avoid being recaptured. He is adopted by a little girl named Lilo (voiced by Daveigh Chase) who names him Stitch. In an effort to turn him into a “model citizen,” she encourages him to emulate Elvis Presley:
Hurricane Popcorn is a popular Hawaiian snack, Hurricane Elvis is the popular name of a severe storm that hit Memphis, Tennessee in 2003, and the Halekulani is a famous Hawaiian hotel with more than a century of history. So that’s how everything connects. I actually don’t have a heck of a lot to say about Lilo & Stitch that wasn’t covered in Bilge Ebiri’s recent definitive oral history of the film, but to echo a few points made there, the film contains absolutely gorgeous watercolor backgrounds of a sort that literally had not been seen in a Disney movie in sixty years:
The interactions between Lilo and her sister-turned-guardian Nani (voiced by native Hawaiian Tia Carrere), capture both the extreme frustration:
And intimacy that can emerge from such a complicated relationship:
Art Director Ric Sluiter is 100% right that the pink sea foam in the surfing scenes looks incredible:
And designing a social worker around Marsellus Wallace and then actually casting Ving Rhames to voice him really was a stroke of genius:
I’ve also always loved Pudge the Fish who controls the weather:
And the scene in which Stitch builds a model of San Francisco just so that he can run amuck over it:
Goodness knows I don’t stand by my 22-year-old self’s writing style, but it’s nice to see some signs of the adult human being he would eventually grow into in his work. Now if I could just get my real-life daughters to actually *watch* Spirited Away. . . .
Cheers!
All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife, except the one me and Lucy wearing pirate hats, which was taken by my mother. Other entries in this series can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 