How many ways can I eat the bitter melon I keep harvesting from my garden? I love it with black bean sauce or as a namasu or as the Okinawan champuru. On this day, I harvested a few that were ready to be picked and decided to try and make a Korean pancake with the bitter melon. I also harvested some garlic chives from the garden and used my Hawaii Eco farm box green onions grown at Hamakua Forest Farms. I saved the root section of the green onions to plant in my garden and chopped up the extra green onions that I wasn’t going to use in the pancake and froze it for a quick late night saimin topping.

I thinly sliced the bitter melon and sprinkled some salt on it for about 20 minutes. I chopped up garlic chives and green onions in about 1-inch lengths. I mixed about 3/4 cup flour and 2 T mochiko and a teaspoon of salt with some 3/4 cup of cold water until it got to a thick pancake batter consistency. I added an egg and a T of oyster sauce and added all the veggies in the batter. I fried it in a hot nonstick pan for about 2 minutes on each side and that is it!

I ate it with a mixture of chili pepper water, shoyu, and sesame oil. Living Hilo Style.