NOTE: An updated version of this recipe appears in my cookbook, The Ancestral Table.
Loco moco is a Hawaiian dish and popular breakfast meal on the islands. It’s the ultimate breakfast meal prior to a big workday, consisting of rice, a hamburger patty, fried eggs, and brown gravy. Its unique mix of ingredients create a distinct taste that I’ve been missing lately, so I decided to whip one up the other day.
Saimin is a dish unique to Hawaii, and a marriage of the many cultures found on the islands. Chinese egg noodles are served in a Japanese broth with garnishes taken from Chinese (char siu), Japanese (fish cake), Filipino (adobo), Korean (won bok cabbage), and Portuguese (sausage) cuisine. My favorite saimin in Hawaii is found at Shiro’s Saimin Haven, which features 70+ variations of the dish (my favorite is “dodonpa” – 10 garnishes!). Likewise, fried saimin is a stir-fried version of the soup, and is also popular in many saimin shops. It’s a refreshing break from noodle soups and your everyday lo mein-style dishes. Unfortunately, saimin noodles are made with wheat.
To remedy this, I settled on sweet potato-based noodles, which as far as I know are a Korean invention. They are made with just sweet potato starch and water, and are similar to glass/bean noodles used in dishes like chicken long rice.
Although breakfast is my least favorite meal to eat, I definitely like to prepare it. For a couple years I worked at a restaurant that served breakfast, and learned a couple cool dishes. The one you see above we called a “hobo” , which may not be the most politically correct term out there for it. Luckily, the chances of offending a homeless person is pretty low, since I assume that most homeless people a) don’t have access to the internet and b) don’t visit this site when they do get online.
A hobo is probably called that because it’s made by throwing a bunch of ingredients into a single pan. As far as I know, it always contains eggs, cheese, and potatoes, and some sort of meat. I like making this dish because it’s an easy way to get rid of leftover meat, as well as ingesting a good amount of healthy coconut oil.
I don’t write about breakfast much but I thought I should do a real quick post on my typical starting meal.
On weekdays, I generally focus on three items that I take to work: meat, cheese, and fruit. Breakfast is the only time of day that I actively eat fruit, one or two pieces a day. I tend to eat applesauce, berries, plum, or kiwi. The meat is generally four slices of uncured lunchmeat (usually from Applegate Farms), beef jerky, smoked or canned salmon, or a can of sardines. Cheese is usually Kerrygold grass-fed Dubliner or Blarney cheese, or Trader Joe’s grass-fed cheddar.
Weekends is usually the same combination but only one piece of fruit max, with eggs and bacon added. Often I skip the cheese as well. I’m not a big fan of mixing eggs with other ingredients, so I don’t usually make omelets or those crazy Paleo concoctions you’ve probably seen floating around the internet. Sometimes we’ll make something with potatoes, and very rarely we take a stab at gluten-free pancakes (usually to disastrous result). Fried rice for breakfast is pretty tasty, too, and nothing beats spam musubi every once in a while.
That’s basically it. What do you eat for breakfast?
This is a recipe borrowed from my father-in-law, who often uses breakfast foods as the base of his fried rice. I thought I would take it a step further and make this a breakfast-centric dish, while also retaining the bacon grease to fry the rice.
I should mention that although I use the word “wok” in this recipe, we actually use a Calphalon 12″ Chicken Fryer which has a larger bottom and can fry more food at once.
Bacon was a hot commodity in my house growing up – four siblings can do that to a family. I fondly remember watching anxiously as my mother cooked the bacon and we fought over who was getting the next slice. We were told that we couldn’t eat too much, because bacon was bad for us. And that’s how it was back in the day, during the height of the saturated fat craze. Now things are turning on their head and experts are starting to believe that carbs/sugar, not fat, are what causes all those heart problems that we unfairly pinned on poor bacon. And it makes sense. If the human race evolved over the course of millions of years eating mostly meat, how would it be that newly-introduced products like grain and sugar are better for us?
The Domestic Man 