Hula Girl

“I can write your Hula Girl post for you, MEH,” declared my friend who had accompanied me to Truckeroo (a food truck festival for those of you less cultured than me), as I pondered what to write about my unmemorable experience.  In a word, she was accurate, but of course I’ll elaborate a bit.  It was an amorphous meal really, comparable to when you go on a job interview or apartment hunting and leave with your brow furrowed saying, “I guess that works?”  Which really means it doesn’t at all and the said job/apartment didn’t sell you hard enough so you’re back to stalking Craigslist ads dreaming of your knight in shining armor a.k.a. job posting to rescue you from a PR firm that thinks it’s acceptable to ask demand employees to scrub the walls with Bon Ami and dress in elf costumes and then giggle about it on Facebook.  But I digress.

In my fantasy world I want every meal I consume to coincide with me rapidly rubbing finger grease all over my iPhone while I joyously tell everyone who will humor me about what I am eating.  I want to eat a meal so great I don’t even have the self restraint to use a napkin before I find myself shouting from the metaphoric social media rooftops (Instagramming).  If the meal is stupendous, I won’t need prompting on its quality, I’ll volunteer that all on my own.  But alas, this was not the case, and while the anticipation and romance of Truckeroo had me giddy, the meal did not.  I thought I had buckled up (or rather unbuckled my belt) for a scrumptious Hawaiian meal of chicken teriyaki, sticky rice, and...macaroni salad?  

This is Hawaiian.  Really.

Traditionally I have associated macaroni salad with American holidays, barbeques, and mayo fermenting in the sun.  It wouldn’t be a proper barbeque without a big plastic spoon you have to smack against your paper plate a few times for the sun-solidified macaroni to fall into place next to your hot dog.  In order to solve this authenticity mystery, I had to investigate and Google “Is macaroni salad Hawaiian cuisine.”  The results weren’t as plentiful as many things I’ve Googled such as “is Pedialyte a good hangover cure” and “Brian Boyle NY Rangers girlfriend” (devastatingly NY Post says yes as of May 26, but I’ll change that, soon enough I’ll have 12 in-laws).  However, Google did find this quote from Hawaii Magazine concluding that “Macaroni salad is a staple of the Hawaii-style plate lunch” way back in 2009, and a delicate lady by the name of “Iron Woman” posted a recipe on Food.com titled “Hawaiian Macaroni Salad” with the note “this salad is usually served on the plate lunches in Hawaii.”  Based off this thorough research, you can now cite my blog as a credible source any time you are asked if macaroni salad is Hawaiian, which I imagine occurs quite frequently to everyone reading this.  And that friends, is the takeaway point from this post: you can stop wondering, macaroni salad IS Hawaiian.  And probably don’t get too excited about Hula Girl, because in order to craft a post about it I just wrote a lot of nonsense barely related to the actual meal.
http://hulagirltruck.com/hula-girl-food-truck-dc.php?Page=hula-girl-food-truck-menu