{Recipe} Keleguin

This is a special post, because this is a recipe that isn't very common, but is amazingly delicious. My mum got it from her mother, who was born and raised on Saipan, a small island located north of Guam. My dad calls the dish "Pelican" just to drive my mum crazy and I'm pretty sure my youngest brother is convinced we're actually eating pelicans.

I want to emphasize that this is by no means an "official" recipe. My mum does it the way she remembers her mum doing it, and her mum never had an exact method. As such, this recipe is also not precise--these are all estimates, but as close as we could get to accuracy. 

While this recipe takes a good bit of time and effort, the payoff is worth it, and it's a dish that gets better after some time in the refrigerator as well. I highly recommend trying it if you're feeling adventurous.

Ingredients:

12 boneless chicken thighs
lemon pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, salt, and pepper for seasoning chicken thighs
4 cups freshly grated coconut
3/4 of an onion, diced
2 tbsp banana peppers
1 tbsp red pepper paste
3/4 c lemon juice
salt and pepper

Cook your chicken thighs early in the day, or even the day before. Mum gets the boneless thighs, but admits that the bone-in thighs have more flavor. She doesn't have the patience to de-bone the thighs (this is a labor-intensive recipe as it is). 

Season both sides of the chicken thighs with the lemon pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, salt, and pepper (only use the pepper on the top but not the bottom). 

Cook them until they're done and let them cool. Mum did them in the toaster oven so as not to heat up the house too much (it was another 100-degree day on the Fourth of July) so she did hers in two batches.

Then, it's time to work on the coconuts. Mum bought three of them from the local supermarket (they're in season right now). She shook each of them, and if it sounded like a lot of water was sloshing around, they were deemed worthy. We shook a couple that sounded clunky, those are apparently not good ones. 

Still, like with any other fruit with a rind or shell, there isn't a 100% foolproof way to find the perfect ones. She was hoping the three she chose were good.

By hand, she tore off the husk.

Then she used a brush to get off the dirt and other loose parts of the shell. She does this so that when she's scraping the inside of it, the brown bits don't get into the bowl.

At this point, she turned to me and said, "Tell your blog that normally, you want a machete to crack coconuts." Then we had to wait while I dissolved into uncontrollable laughter. She sounded so much like Gloria from Modern Family by mentioning the machete so matter-of-factly.

Alas, we are machete-less, so she resorted to a hammer.

(Yes, I made more than one Thor joke. "Hammer! HAMMER!")

Publix had kindly scored the shell of the coconut for us, so all she did was rap the score line with the hammer, then rotate the coconut a quarter-turn in her hand and rap it again. On this particular one, it cracked on the third or fourth rap.

When it splits open, the coconut water spills out. If you like drinking coconut water, maybe do this over a bowl and save the water! We don't drink the water so she just let it fall down the drain.

And she was happy because the inside was perfect! Lots of meat and good texture. She set them aside in the dish drainer and moved to the next coconut. 

The second one went as well as the first, but when she got to the third...

It was tough to crack (that's not a precursor for a bad coconut, but it wasn't a good sign either) and the inside was mushy and falling off the sides. It also had a bit of a sour smell, like it had just started to rot.

So she was one coconut too short. She was running to the store anyway, so she picked up two more.

She came home with two promising ones, but the first one was rotten. It smelled like vomit, I'm not exaggerating, and the inside was disgusting. It smelled so terrible that she had to take it outside and put it in our backyard pond, then had to wash down the sink to get rid of the smell. I was dicing the chicken so I didn't get any photographic evidence of these antics, but that is a graphic description of a bad coconut.

She warily cracked the second one, and happily, it was good! So we had our three coconuts.

My grandpa built and gifted my mum with a coconut-grating bench. Basically it's a stool she sits on with a metal scraper attached to the end where she can scrape out the coconut over a bowl. Behold:

My grandma had one of these on Saipan to make this process easier. My mum didn't make Keleguin a lot until my grandpa gave her this bench.

However, most people don't have a handy coconut-grating bench sitting around their house. I asked her about alternatives, and she said that before she had the bench, she used to peel the shell from the meat (it comes off in layers) until the meat was in chunks, and then she'd put it in the food processor to grind it up. It's not an ideal process but it works. 

She also recommended checking local Asian food stores for fresh-grated coconut. It will be in the refrigerated section, and it might be seasonal or not available at all.

If those options don't work, you can try scraping out the meat with any sort of utensil you think would do the trick. Amazon sells coconut scrapers you can hold in your hand, or you can see what you have in your utensil drawer that you think might work.

Above all, do NOT buy the packs of dried sweetened coconut flakes that you can usually find in the baker's aisle of the grocery store (the ones you find on the Girl Scout cookies or in the frosting of German Chocolate Cake). Those are too sweet and too dry.

In the end, she ended up with around 4 cups of shredded coconut. The amount will vary according to the size of the coconut and the amount of meat inside. (Please, resist making dirty jokes about that sentence.)

The other time-consuming part of this recipe is dicing 12 chicken thighs. You want them to be small, so it takes a good while to get it all done.

A delicious detail shot. I was proud, my wrist was hurting after all the detail painting I've been doing.

Then she diced the onions nice and small. This is one of the few dishes where she happily eats raw onions (she's not a fan), so if you have a similar aversion to uncooked onions, take her word for it, this one is a good exception.

She only used half of the coconut to mix in the other ingredients, saving the other half to add in at the end. This makes it easier to mix up without making a huge mess.

Then she added all of the chicken and mixed it up.

Now to the good stuff!

HOT banana peppers!

Dice them up nice and small...

... and add them to the dish.

This is something one of her Guamanian friends sent her a while back, but I think you can find it in Asian food stores, or maybe in the ethnic food aisle of your grocery store.

Mum opened it and sniffed it and said, "It doesn't smell hot." She was disappointed for a good while, then decided to try a bit. She immediately said "Whoa, it's hot!" and started chugging her drink. It's got some kick but it's tempered by the chicken and coconut.

Still, if you're sensitive to heat, be sparing with this ingredient. We used a full tablespoon because we love spicy stuff, but it's too much for my milk-is-too-spicy-for-me sister.

Mix it thoroughly, making sure the red pepper is as evenly distributed as possible.

Then the best part, the coup de grace as the Pacific Islanders don't say.

This is really what brings the dish together. She kept adding more juice according to her taste, but it ended at around 3/4ths of a cup.

Add salt and pepper to taste, and keep mixing thoroughly. Chill in the fridge for a couple of hours. 

Ahh, look at all those amazing colors!

The longer it sits, the better it tastes. The next day, it was even better than when it was fresh. That's the great thing about this dish--you actually get out of it what you put in. I don't like spending all this time and effort on a dish that doesn't keep. 

This, along with burgers and a delicious tomato-basil salad, made for a festive (if rainy) Independence Day. How was your holiday? Or for my non-American friends, how was your Wednesday?