Cleaning out the yard

Stir fry of eggplant, tomatoes, celery, preserved lemon, shallots and garlic over quinoa. Harvests in the yard are becoming meager as the daylight hours wane, and our shaded sliver of a backyard gets even less sunlight a day. We're cleaning out our fridge, yard, and feeding the worms extra scraps in anticipation for our weeklong trip to the Pacific Northwest. And we thought it was cold now...

Get out and eat!

Last night, we celebrated Restaurant Week Hawai'i by going to 12th Ave Grill and ordering the Kim Chee Steak, a special during Restaurant Week. There's no actual kim chee in the dish...instead, lightly pickled cucumbers and red bell peppers garnish a shoyu and sugar marinated steak (we think skirt), served over Big Island bok choy and jasmine rice.

Like almost all restaurant events, Restaurant Week is a benefit. This time, profits help support the building of the Culinary Institute of the Pacific at Diamond Head. Having witnessed incredible talent at a competition of culinary students a few days ago, I'm avidly behind giving our next generation of cooks all the tools and resources they need.

Still, sometimes I wish we could throw a benefit for the very restaurants that help support all our community causes, from lupus to film festivals. I know chefs and cooks here are an overworked and underpaid bunch...it's time to help them out, especially in light of current economic times.

Getting fancy with local ingredients

Throughout the Eat Local Challenge, market finds dictated meals, not recipes. Meals were often made up of less than five ingredients and were simple to throw together. But I do have a collection of glossy, picture-saturated cookbook/coffee table books that I occasionally like to cook from. Yesterday, it was Boulevard's cookbook, and I wanted to make the duck breast stuffed with apples and chestnuts, roasted in bacon, with an apple brandy sauce. Only problem was, not a single thing on the ingredient list was was locally produced. Of course, the challenge is over and I can eat anything I want, right? Yes and no...I'm not going to forgo the bacon and duck just because they're not local (who could ever resist bacon?), but I want to use the great variety of fruits we do have in Hawaii instead of relying on imports. So...what did I end up with? Duck stuffed with Hashimoto Farms persimmons and chestnuts, roasted in bacon, with a local tangerine sauce on top of mashed breadfruit. I was going to skip the chestnuts since they're not local, but every vendor in Chinatown had a basket of the mahogany colored nuts so evocative of the holiday season that I couldn't resist.


So how was it? Well, I learned that fuyu persimmons don't seem to soften, no matter how long you roast them. So the crisp texture of the persimmon distracted from the duck. Maybe next time I'll try papaya, or something that cooks down into a soft compote.


More successful was the pineapple vanilla bean crostata. I love crostatas...really just a lazy cook's pie...a flaky crust baked around fresh fruit with a touch of sugar and spices if desired, nothing else. They're usually filled with apples or peaches or other mainland fruits; I'm on a mission to bake as many locally-grown fruits into a crostata as I can.

I love experimenting with our local ingredients because to me, this is the new direction of Hawaii Regional Cuisine. There are beautiful cookbooks from the mainland and Europe where they do lovely things with apples, peaches, potatoes, and duck. But how many glossy cookbook pictures do you see of guava, dragonfruit, breadfruit, and monchong? Not enough! But the more we start cooking with our ingredients, the more we may see them given the glossy treatment they deserve.

Christmas tree ornament or fruit?

I'm not a huge fan of Suriname cherries as a fruit...they're extremely tart, like gooseberries. But they're beautiful and for a locally grown Christmas, I have visions of suriname cherry fairies on a Helemano Farm Christmas tree. More beautiful than an air-shipped Christmas tree with stinging wasps and leapin' lizards (as have been found on imported Christmas trees in the past), no?

Coconut sorbet ordeal

Revisiting coconuts in order to get enough coconut milk for a sorbet. After taking a hammer to the coconuts to break them open, I had trouble getting the meat out. Upon advice of a friend, I put them in the oven at 350F for half an hour. Once cooled, I was able to pry the meat out.


I didn't bother scraping the skin off since I was eventually going to strain the meat. Grated the meat in a food processor, then let it soak with a cup of hot water for half an hour.


Squeezed the meat through a cheesecloth, and ended up with a little over two cups of milk. Dissolved a half cup of sugar into the milk, churned it, and some three hours later from when I broke open the first coconut, I finally had a sorbet!

The verdict? Honestly, I couldn't taste the difference between my hand-squeezed coconut milk from the canned variety. And given all the trouble, I think I might be opening a can next time. It's a shame, but now I know why so many coconuts on the island go to waste.

A visit to Frankie's Nursery

Made a trip to Frankie's Nursery to do some "grocery shopping" for an upcoming early locavore Thanksgiving feast. Whereas most markets frown upon grazing, our fingers quickly get sticky from sampling all the fruits, like the rambutan above.


I love shopping in Chinatown, but sometimes the parking and the crowds chafe on my nerves. At Frankie's, backed against the Ko'olau mountains, it's a totally different, serene experience (that is, after applying insect repellent).

I'm usually not interested in ornamental plants...if I can't eat it, I don't care about it, but these pineapples, about the size of my thumb, are too adorable:


These are also ornamental, but I couldn't resist capturing the colors:

Too busy eating carbs to blog

Life after the Eat Local Challenge: have not wasted any time to start eating all kinds of flour derivatives...look fuen from the factory in Chinatown, fried sesame balls, baguettes from BaLe, and above, the famous No-Knead bread from the recipe in the New York Times some years back. Having just cut into this loaf, I'm already making another.

Funnily enough, as soon as the challenge was over, I came across two articles describing the link between carbohydrates and serotonin levels. Basically, carbs make people happy. As much as I enjoyed the challenge, I often found myself in inexplicable bad moods. I think I've found the answer. Welcome back carbs!

Ultimately, food should be about pleasure, even in the face of current food politics. So dairy and grains are back in my diet without any guilt. But everything else I’d like to keep the same: eating local produce and proteins, learning about the people who grow my food, exploring and appreciating the incredible variety Hawai’i has to offer, and always questioning, where is this from? (More thoughts on my experience can be found here).

Thanks for joining me through the challenge! I'll still be chronicling my adventures in locally produced food here, so stay tuned!