Vintage Honolulu

We snuck in a couple vaca days in Honolulu before I had to report to work at my summer job this week. I'll be leading a team of 17 and 18 year olds on camping adventures on the Kona side of the Big Island, where I live. Along the way, we will be doing conservation work like building trails, planting native trees, and removing invasive species. I am more than stoked.

We stayed in Waikiki and just chilled since Dustin had hurt his back. This was totally fine with me having just finished a nightmare 2012-2013 school year, I needed some downtime.

Everywhere we went in Honolulu clues from the past kept popping up. I couldn't help but wonder what Waikiki would have been like in the '60s.

We also took some time to look at a few sailboats, we'd like to buy one next summer and plan so do a little world cruising. For real.

Aloha vintage Honolulu!

My friend Danielle introduced me to the La Mariana Sailing Club tiki bar. It is fully decked out in tiki regalia, complete with dive bar status. If you have never been, it is a must.

Of course we had SPAM musubis for breakfast, this one has bacon and egg. Nom.

For Memorial Day, Magic Island hosts an annual lantern lighting ceremony in which a message is placed in a lantern for a lost loved one, lit and set free in the ocean. (Don't worry, the lanterns are collected so they won't harm the environment). It is a beautiful way to remember and honor those that have gone before us.

We enjoyed some classy drinks poolside at The Modern Honolulu including a fab deconstructed mai tai garnished with a shiso leaf.

Even the carpet patterns are vintage.

Love the turquoise.

A rare snapshot of me. Hi!

Ka'u Coffee Festival Ho'olaule'a

Iced mocha from the Flyin' Hawaiian

The Ka'u Coffee Festival's big event was held on May 4th in Pahala. Crowds of people from all over the Big Island and beyond gathered to enjoy the best coffees Ka'u has to offer.

There were plenty of coffee samples, ono food, crafts from local vendors, music, dancing, and the "Ka'u Coffee Experience," a sampling of coffees prepared in a variety of different methods by brewing experts.

Clouds for days but no rain

Who knew there were so many different ways to make coffee? The coffee experts carefully weighed the beans before grinding, brought the water up to specific temperatures before brewing, and showed us that the size of the spigot matters when pouring water over coffee grounds. The most unique brewing method was the cold brew; ice slowly melts and drips through a coffee filter to create a special drinking experience 12 hours later. Now that's caffeine commitment.

Cold brewed coffee

We enjoyed a teriyaki beef plate made with local beef by the 4-H club and an iced mocha from the Flyin' Hawaiian coffee truck. Our favorite coffee of the day (although it was extremely hard to choose) came from Rusty's Hawaiian with great, fruity flavors.

4-H'ers say, eat local!

If you missed it this year, mark your calendars for next year's Ka'u Coffee Festival held in spring in Pahala.

Make Your Own Limoncello

Limoncello has buried itself in the memory part of my brain, right next to dusty days under the hot Greek sun, walking endless straight lines through silvery olive groves, eyes to the ground in search of ancient pieces of pottery. Limoncello also butts right up against memories of Dustin and I, confused lovers on a quest for meaning in a tiny stone apartment, again in Greece.

Like many college grads, I headed off to Europe for a summer trek to celebrate my accomplishments. It would be the trip that sealed my love for solo travel. (Did you know my trip to NYC this summer was solo? A friend pointed out that I never mentioned this in any posts.) My sister happened to be on the island of Crete in Greece helping out on an archaeological project, so of course I headed her way. Their assignment was to survey miles and miles of farmland and open fields and record any pottery that happened to be lying on the ground. Imagine hours of hiking in the hot summer sun, scrutinizing every stone and dirt clod for possible signs of long gone life. It was grueling for them, week after week, sometimes finding nothing. It was joyous for me, handling a cup thousands of years old among the olive trees and screaming cicadas.

We'd head back to homebase, after these hours of surveying, exhausted and covered in reddish brown dust only to collapse around the shared courtyard in the setting sun. Somehow bowls of pasta materialized, along with liters of local wine, and after, rounds and rounds of creamy limoncello.

Limoncello glides right along, in between and in and out of my memories of Greece. After a few tormenting months in Denver, Dustin and I abruptly left the city and boarded a last minute flight to Europe. I couldn't wait to share with him the beauty I'd found the previous summer on Crete. Bouganvillea covered archways, candlelit shrines hidden deep inside caves, rocky hillsides, the wine-dark Mediterranean.

We spent our nights listening to music out of speakers fashioned from earbuds and paper cups, playing Egyptian Rat Screw on our pushed-together twin beds, trying to figure out whether forever was our future. I'd slice up a couple of impossibly red tomatoes, a cucumber, and the richest feta cheese to go with our homemade wine stored in recycled water bottles. And then in went the rounds and rounds of creamy limoncello. Sweet and tangy.

Sipping limoncello brings me right back, to somewhere in between starting a life and avoiding one.

Limoncello (not creamy, sorry!)
adapted from the recipe by Giada de Laurentiis

10 lemons (or 5-6 Hawaii sized lemons, like softballs)
750 ml vodka (1 bottle)
3 1/2 cups water
2 1/2 cups sugar

Peel lemons with a vegetable peeler, reserving rest of the lemon for another use. It helps to peel them in long strips. Using a very sharp paring knife, remove as much of the pith (white part of the peel) as you can. This takes time, but is the key to a good limoncello. Place peels in a container (like a juice pitcher) and allow to steep at room temperature for 4 days.

Heat water and sugar over medium heat in a sauce pan until sugar dissolves. Allow to cool and add sugar water to pitcher. Steep for another 24 hours.

Strain limoncello and discard peels. Bottle and store in the fridge for up to a month. Enjoy!

This recipe is featured on Foodie Friends Friday

Sustainable Sunday: Hawaiian Sugar & Lemonade

Packed in Hilo, grown in ?

Part of my Sustainable Sunday mission is helping you find locally made products. There are more and more products becoming available in everyday grocery stores, which makes it much more accessible for those that don't have the time or resources to make it out to a farmer's market each week.

Today I bring you a controversial "sustainable" product because I'd love to get your input on this issue. Hawaiian sugar: good or evil?

Hawaii has a long history with the sugar industry, dating all the way back to the very first Polynesian settlers who brought the plant to the islands in their canoes. Big business entered the scene in the early 1800s, creating huge sugar plantations all over the state. The sugar industry was a major job source for the people of Hawaii for generations. In fact, many people immigrated to Hawaii to work on the plantations from all over the world, contributing to the multi-cultural population we have today. In the early to mid 1900s, the sugar industry in Hawaii began to decline as companies moved their crops overseas seeking lower labor and land costs. This was a blessing and a curse as thousands lost their jobs while the land began to recover from years of environmental damage, including air and water pollution.

Today the only remaining sugar processing plants reside on the island of Maui. Monsanto, a giant agricultural conglomerate that basically drives the food industry and has come under fire for such issues as GMO plants, has been buying out Maui's remaining sugar farms. If you know about some of the issues surrounding Monsanto, you know that this has been a touchy subject. Not to mention the heavy environmental toll sugar production has, particularly when it comes to water usage.

So what is a Hawaii resident to do when it comes to purchasing sugar? We have the option to buy locally grown and processed (NOT sustainable) sugar, for the double the price I might add. Or we have the option to buy shipped-in, organic varieties that are (probably) not owned by Monsanto but have a heavy environmental impact due to the importing logistics. There are of course cheap, table sugars shipped in from points beyond that are definitely produced by Monsanto and the corporate farming like.

It's not a black and white issue. We have bills to pay and cakes to bake and not enough time to weigh the issues as we push heavy shopping carts along the aisles of the local KTA. What would you do?

In the meantime, make this lemonade and think it over. Lemons came from my backyard, ginger from the farmer's market, and sugar from KTA.

Lemon Gingerade
serves 6-8

2-3 lemons
large piece of ginger, about the size of your hand
8 cups water
1 cup sugar
2 cups water

Using a food processor or similar contraption, pulse the ginger until is ground-up into pieces about the size of grains of rice. Place in a coffee filter and brew with 8 cups water in your coffee maker.

Squeeze lemons into a juice pitcher. You should have 11/2 - 2 cups of lemon juice.

Heat a small pot over medium heat and add 1 cup sugar and 2 cups water. Heat, stirring occasionally, until sugar dissolves.

Allow the brewed ginger and sugar water to cool before adding to the juice pitcher with the lemon juice. At this point, taste to check the level of sweetness. If it is too sweet or strong, simply add more water. I like mine fairly mellow, so I'd probably add 4 more cups of water, but do your own thing. Serve over ice. Enjoy!