By Request Highlights

A recipe is a terrible thing to waste. Or lose. This is the simple truth behind "By Request," a weekly column that originated decades ago in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and continues today in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s Wednesday Crave food section. Newspaper readers send in their requests for recipes for old-school comfort foods, for restaurant favorites, for new things they just want to try. The mission of the column has been to hunt down those recipes. Writer Betty Shimabukuro inherited By Request in 1998 and continues to field requests and solve those mysteries.

By Request Highlights compiles top recipes from Betty’s first two books— By Request – The Search for Hawai‘i’s Greatest Recipes and By Request 2 – The Continuing Search for Hawai‘i’s Greatest Recipes—and adds more than thirty new recipes. The collection covers plate lunch standards, long-gone classics, signature restaurant dishes, and dozens of other dishes celebrating that cuisine we call "local." It may not have a clear definition, but we know it when we taste it.

The opening chapter is a salute to the foods of the Hawai‘i’s school cafeterias. The following chapters cover breakfast foods, dishes for both meat lovers and vegetarians, and desserts. The final chapter is for the advanced motivated home cook who has the time and wherewithal to take on more complicated dishes.