Help with our Hiliday Luau

So we just bought a house and are having our first of hopefully many Luau's in a couple of weeks. We are hard at work getting our tiki room ready (there will be pics inthe appropriate place when it's finished) and planing our menu. But we'd love to hear what all of the folks out ther in TC-land think we should have at the pre-festivus Luau?

Here is a list of what we are thinking.

• Kalua pork, (Not the whole pig, the oven version. I'm not tearing up my yard after I spent the whole weekend landscaping it.) with rolls, and hawaiian BBQ sauce and/or polynesian mayo.
• Mini eggrolls
• crab rangoon
• Maui Onion Chips
• Mai Tai's (Mrs. Frostiki's secret recipe. OK not really secret, but I can't remember what the ratio's are for it)
• beer for the non-tiki drink folk
• Some sort of non-alcohloic tropical punch for the underage tiki folk.

What else foodwise should we have? Any ideas on our punch? let us know what we are missing, my brain is failing me this Monday.

There are a couple of good sounding punch recipes in the Beachbum Berry books. I can only vouch for Grog Log and Intoxica, but I'm sure the Taboo Table book would be a really good purchase for you. Might even have some other good recipe ideas. Check it out!

Thanks, I'll have to take a look at it when I get home tonight. Oh yeah I forgot to add Rum cake to the list.

Pineapples!

Use the empty pineapple shell as a serving "bowl" for cut-up fruit. The easy way out for fruit when it's not summer is buy some of the Dole tropical fruit jars/cans in the canned fruit section. Drain and drop into the pineapple shells along with pineapple chunks and any other fresh tropical fruit you can get your hands on.

I'll have to try that, it sounds like a great idea. Thanks

I would suggest Sabu's Spicy Coconut Chicken Skewers. I did a large amount of roast pork for my luau and ended up tossing a large amount. It just was not very popular. The chicken skewers, however, vanished completely.

Rather than mini eggnolls, I got the regular sized ones and cut them into thirds. The regular size is just a better product and cutting them up makes them more snack-worthy.

Nuts!

Spam musubi! Well, okay, a spam roll of some sort. Gotta have Spam and you can make it a nice finger food and it'll get eaten.

Drop the roast pork from the menu.

Use small plates to encourage people to have to refill and move around. A large plate means you may get waste from people filling their plate and not eating it all, and they may sit and eat and never mingle. Cocktail plates are an important part of the social engineering of a party.

One of my favorite luau foods is chicken long rice. It can be served as a soup which might be good if temperatures are a little cold there now, or just as the cellophane noodles with chicken. It's easy to make and delicious. A general search and you'll have no trouble finding recipes.

Those all sound like great ideas, We may have to pass on the spam stuff though. I grew up way to close to the Hormel plant to ever want to have spam again.

So we have revised the menu for the Luau.

All of the Drinks are the same, only the food has changed.

Sabu's spicy chicken skewers
teriyaki Chicken skewers

Carved pineapple and fruit
Deli Tray (not very tropical, but it's cheap and feeds a lot)
Hawaiian Rolls
Cheese ball and Crackers.
I'm not sure if the have a name, dates, stuffed with almond, cream cheese and pineapple and wrapped in bacon.