Hawaiian Chicken with Ginger and Peach is a chicken and rice dish with vaguely tropical sensibilities.   If you’re expecting a traditional plate-lunch style chicken you’ll need to look elsewhere:  this dish is more Nixon-era casserole than luau food.  very salty rice pilaf topped with pan-seared chicken breast. The only thing even remotely Hawaiian about the flavor profile is a little bit of ginger and coconut.  The peaches add some much needed sweetness, but I suspect there’s nothing remotely like this served on the Islands.   The recipe comes from a mid-90s California community cookbook, prepared by an aging congregation and filled with recipes that are certainly much older than the book itself.

The original recipe calls for an ungodly amount of bouillon and soy sauce in the rice.  More than enough to overwhelm any of the sweet, tropical goodness of the rest of the dish.   I call this sort of dish “smoker’s food”, and I find it a lot in older cookbooks.  By “smoker’s food” I mean extraordinarily salty American cuisine meant to satisfy a dulled palate.  I’ve dialed it back considerably in my adaptation to allow the rest of the flavors to shine.  Coconut, ginger, and peach is a winning combination and makes a plain Jane chicken breast more than palatable.  And the recipe does an admirable job of keeping the chicken juicy and tender.  This is no small feat for a boring old chicken breast. 

But even with the reduced sodium content there’s still something missing.  I’ve got some half-formed ideas of layering fresh ginger under the chicken breast or replacing the beefy rice with a milder coconut rice.  If I make significant improvements I’ll report back.  In the meantime you’ll need to rely on your side dishes to fill in the blanks.

Hawaiian Chicken with Ginger and Peach is also kind of fun to make.  The chicken and rice are wrapped up in little foil boats and cooked in the oven.  After cooking, you peel back the foil, sprinkle with ginger and coconut, top with a peach, and broil until the coconut is toasty.  In principle you could transfer the little foil boats directly to the dinner plate.  The recipe can also easily be adapted for a makeahead meal:  just place the foil boats in the fridge or freezer before putting them in the oven.  This adds some cooking time on the back end, but also makes it weeknight friendly.

There’s not quite enough fruit in the recipe for me to consider this a complete meal, and you’ll want to avoid side dishes that pair poorly with peaches.   We served a simple mixed green salad with a sweet poppy seed dressing.  If you’re not counting carbs a buttered Hawaiian roll would be a tasty addition.  Fresh tomatoes, sweet corn, or sliced pineapple would also work well.  Or if you want to add some traditional island flair to a decidedly non-traditional dish, serve it up with a big scoop of macaroni salad.   Enjoy!