Food

Eating in Hawai'i has been an adventure, and I've enjoyed it. As our family has settled into patterns over the years and Nephi and I have divided up responsibilities by necessity and interest and sometimes just by inertia, it's happened that getting the family fed is mostly my job. Nephi makes breakfast most mornings, but shopping, lunch, and dinner is generally my realm. So arriving in a new place with a bunch of kids who will soon be hungry presents an immediate challenge. The first night we arrived I headed to the grocery store. It was overwhelming. Everyone says that food is expensive in Hawai'i, and they are right. Stunningly expensive. Like loaves of bread for $5-$7 (and $3 on a really good sale), milk for $5 a gallon, a dozen eggs for $3. Processed food from the mainland seem to be about $1-$2 more per item, so things like a can of tomatoes can get pricey. And how about a half gallon of Breyers ice cream for $11? We'll wait a few weeks. I was driven to do things like buy Ragu pasta sauce. I know. One surprise in the super market: half an aisle devoted to different kinds of soy sauce. And only the one fake Kikoman brand fish sauce, just like in Colorado. As the days went by we found a few tricks to save a bit of money, but I still think we spent about double our usual grocery budget over the month. Which is ok.

The most wonderful and enjoyable discovery was the farmers market in Hilo on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

 

 

There was the most exhilerating array of such beautiful, exotic, reasonably priced produce; I just loved being there. And it wasn't the pretentious, fake kind of farmers markets where you go because it seems like the hip thing "white people" and Michael Pollen like to do, and you end up buying a bunch of sorry looking kale for $4 and an artisan loaf of bread for $8 and think that farmers markets kind of suck. No, this was the real deal; real food for great prices. Long beans, Japanese eggplants, tomatoes, greens, bok choi, lettuce, cucumbers, gigantic avocados, purple sweet potatoes, basil, apple bananas, and papaya out the wazoo. Papayas everywhere. Five huge papayas for a dollar. Puna is the papaya capital of Hawai'i, and maybe the world. We passed huge papaya farms every time we left our home there. Too bad papayas are gross. We pretended to like them for a few days, but then just admitted they taste bad and snuck the rest of what we had in a few smoothies. Sadly, no mangos. This was going to the mango vacation when we ate delicious mangos three times a day! But no crop this year. Our neighbor said last year was the year of the mango. Oh well. There were pineapples, but they cost and tasted about the same as on the mainland. But the little apple bananas are everywhere and we ate them like candy. So delicious. And there were plenty of exotic, new fruits to try. Lychees, mountain apples, soursop, rambutans, longans. It was fun to try spikey new red or green things. Here's what I got the first day.

 

Shopping at the farmers market was really, really enjoyable to me; I loved the people, the smells, the sights, and the tastes.

Another great find was this place:

 

Suisan fish market in Hilo. I fell in love with it. It seemed there was always one kind of fish at a really great price; we ate lots of mako shark and ahi. Also, they sold amazingly delicious poke, marinated raw fish. And they had a markdown dairy section with super cheap yogurt and cheese, leading my kids to forever associate Yoplait yogurt with Hawai'i. I never buy anything but plain yogurt at home, and they eat and like it; the fruit and sugar-laden yogurt is totally off limits. But when I could get a twelve pack of mountain blueberry for $1.50, and everything else is so expensive, I just bought cases and cases. The kids were in heaven. It's vacation, right?

Another treat we ate quite a bit this trip was malasadas, Portuguese donuts with tasty fillings. They are pretty common here. (History: did you know that 90% of the origional Hawai'ian population died off due to disease within a generation or so of westerners arriving? By the time folks wanted to really get sugar plantations going in the late 1800s, there just weren't enough native Hawai'ians around to exploit, so they had to import workers from Asia and Portugul. And I guess the Portugese brought their donut recipe with them).

The final culinary highlight of the trip for my kids was the quintessentially Hawai'ian food croutons. We were at a restaurant getting malasadas one day, and they had huge bags of tasty looking croutons for $1. Wow, did my kids want to eat salad with those babies on top. They liked them so much that they wanted to drive back and get some more, even though it was an hour and a half away.

We got loco mocos from Cafe 100 in Hilo, a local hotspot. One day I found a markdown seafood case at a grocery store in Hilo and we had an amazing lunch in a park of poke and sushi. One day we got shave ice for the kids, which still seems kind of gimmicky to me. A snow cone for $3 a piece? And in Kona on the tip of my friend Ashlee we got some super delicious lau laus from a lady who essentially sells them from her home. They are pork wrapped in taro leaves and steamed. Yum. So I feel like we've had some culinary adventures. But we'll leave poi for the next trip, I think.