OK, so what’s this about. The first post on a Cape Cod blog comes from Hawaii. Well, the truth is that this vacation is the first chance I’ve had to get this thing rolling, so even though Thanksgiving dinner was not made from Cape Cod local ingredients, there is a connection.
If you read the About page you’ll get a sense of where this whole “eat local” thing started with me. So after spending a good part of the summer and fall becoming more and more of a locavore on Cape Cod, I decided to apply some of those principles while vacationing in Hawaii.
I started by Googling “Hawaii farmers market” to see what I would get. On Kauai, there is one just about every day, and a big one on the Monday after I arrived. Great. Having been to the island many times before, I knew where it was and had a sense of where to park. I was not prepared for the turnout.
If you’ve been to the farmers market in Orleans during the summer, you know that at 8am the bell rings and there is a mad dash. On more than one occasion I have been nearly run over by determined octogenarian ladies bent on getting to the best produce first. I thought this would prepare me for the Knudsen ballpark market in Koloa. I was wrong.
I missed the opening bell (or whatever they do here). I think that was just as well as I fear I may have been crushed. Let me tell you, the word is OUT. There were perhaps a dozen or more vendors. Crowded around each were a couple of dozen locals and tourists. One had to change one’s perspective from “spirit of aloha” to “getting on New York subway”. I managed to elbow my way in to one booth and got a sense of the fare. Lots of local fruit- bananas, papaya, lychee nuts (or something similar, we called them gnips in the Virgin Islands), limes. There were local sweet potatoes, corn, herbs, tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, plus a host of things I didn’t recognize. And it was too crowded to strike up a conversation with the booth owner. I thought there was going to be a stampede when one Hawaiian lady, who was selling chilled coconut water (she was pulling the coconuts out of a cooler and lopping of the top with a machete) announced that there was only one left.
I ended up with a huge bunch of apple bananas (short very fat stubby bananas), some lychees, limes, scallions, tomatoes, lettuce, avocado (nicely labeled for the novice as to what day it would be ripe), cilantro, and a nice bouquet of Hawaiian flowers for the table.
Later that day I was speaking with a very informative local at Pohaku Ts, they sell shirts and other local crafts. They also self-publish a little guidebook for the area that is not based on advertising, but on their personal favorites. In there I found a local farm that sold meat, poultry and eggs, Medeiros Farms. I was hatching my plan for a mostly local Thanksgiving.
Since there were just two of us, a traditional bird with leftovers made no sense (we are off to Kona two days after T-Day). I did some hunting around on the Internets and found the blog of a Hawaii resident who made a local T-Day meal on Oahu. Now Oahu has many more resources than Kauai, as it is the most populous of the islands. But it gave me ideas.
I decided on beef. We don’t have beef very often. If it were just me I would probably never cook it just for myself, but my better half is a meagan by nature. Vegetables must be cooked creatively if I expect them to be eaten at all. So I ordered a couple of small filet minion from Medeiros (and they were cheap!). This completed my plan, so the menu for today is:
- Filet minion with hollandaise
- Avocados stuffed with curried lime bananas on a bed of local greens
- Local sweet potato baked in butter (the butter isn’t local, never found a local dairy)
- Local corn on the cob
- Fried bananas (yea, I had a lot of bananas)
So just about everything is sourced locally, except the butter and the curry. Eggs came from Medeiros, marinade for the beef was made from limes and macadamia nut oil, and just about everything else came from the farmers market. I start cooking in a couple of hours (the curried banana lime stuffing is already done). I’ll let you know how it comes out.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Addendum: The meal turned out great, but the potatoes were a bit dry (shoulda made poi, I guess).
Kauai sunset, after dinner…
