How To Eat on Hawai'i, Part II

 

      The farmers market in Hilo has been an additional source of food when we feel the need to branch out, or when nearby stores don't stock what we're looking for. It's also helped us do some research on what we've been eating, as far as names and spelling are concerned (“rambutan”, to my ear, kept sounding like “ramatan”). I was interested to find out that the kind of bananas we've been eating are apple bananas; and if they aren't, they look just like the ones we saw at the market, whatever they are. We had our first opportunity to try atemoya, a green, knobby fruit with an interior that is soft and creamy, almost like a sorbet; and soursop, a fruit that appears similar to atemoya but has more tang to its flavor.

      We kept our eyes open for durian, the notorious fruit that is reputed to stink like rotten meat but taste great, if some testimony is to be believed. We first heard of it on the show Bizarre Foods—Andrew Zimmern was not a fan. Janice told us she likes it a lot because of its pleasing, creamy texture, but you have to toss out the smelly rind so you don't condition yourself to associate the flavor with the smell. A couple of other people have told us they not only enjoy it but, rather than turning them off, the smell heightens their anticipation for the experience of eating it.

Durian

      On the few occasions we've gone to the market, we contemplated buying a durian, but the specimens on sale seemed substandard or unripe, and it can get expensive. The ripe ones were usually sold by the time we arrived. It never looks like they have many, although a vendor told us that the season is only just starting. If more are available, I'm certain we're going to wind up with one. A guy hanging around outside the market had bought one and was eating it as we strolled by—we both had the urge to ask him if we could smell it, just to see if our fears were well founded. The inside looked yellowish and similar to the inside of a jack fruit. I didn't detect any weird rotten odors, though I should point out that Janice says there's more than one kind. Maybe he had a non-stinky variety.

      It's tough not to splurge at the market: on one trip, we took home a small container of local chipotle salsa; a sauce called East/West Sauce made with, among other ingredients, tahini and ginger, and produced by a company called Broke the Mouth; a jar of macadamia honey; and peppers and sweet basil. We lunched on green eggplant curry and a Hawaiian-style bento box with chunks of roasted chicken, Portuguese sausage, spam, and rice. As a dessert we bought sweet rice cakes that were going for just a dollar apiece.

      The hardest part about storing food in our shack is keeping it safe from animals. It's always an uphill battle to keep insects and rats from getting to our food before we do. There's nothing like opening a jar of honey or peanut butter and finding a dozen or so of them racing around inside the lid. We have a spray bottle filled with a mixture of vinegar and water to discourage them from gathering around the condiments.  Nevertheless, we've begun to have a grudging acceptance of insects, both living and dead, floating in our glasses of water and speckling our plates of food.

     And rats have lately been a more pressing issue than they had been before. For several nights we heard them scurrying in the dark around the area where we keep stuff like flour, cornmeal, and hot cereal. They raided a small sack of sunflower seeds I'd unthinkingly left out, leaving empty husks all over the floor, and during the course of which doing a lot of squeaking, fighting, running along the edges of the walls, under the floorspace where the kitchen is located, or even on the roof. A bag of cereal we hadn't even gotten around to eating had a hole chewed in the corner, and there was no way we were going to touch it after that.

      We set out traps, but never caught anything in them. They always managed to get away, or circumvented the traps altogether as if equipped with maps. We had a stroke of luck when Elmer came across a bag of rat bait somebody had tossed out at the dump. We left out two blocks of that, two nights in a row, and both blocks were gone the next day. Since then, the rat problem has been halved, at the very least. There's one more block it sitting out that nothing has touched yet, waiting for the next rat to give in to temptation.

      Now, most of our food is in lockdown, assigned to protective custody, lest we see it walking away on the backs of vermin. Grains go in jars, sealed tight like a bank vault. Anything sweet such as honey or some brands of peanut butter is zipped up in resealable plastic bags. With that partly taken care of, we have the lack of refrigeration to deal with.

      We tend to get so much food in trade, there's no way we can eat it all before it goes bad. We try, but rarely make it more than halfway through whatever bunch of greens or rambutans or bananas we have before they start to wilt or get mushy or become little more than bait for fruit flies. For about a week we were giving bananas away to anyone who'd take them. The huge bunch hanging in our shack ripened all at once, some even falling on the floor in the middle of the night (and becoming yet another attractive prospect for rats), and it wasn't long before we were sick of eating them. And we weren't the only ones with this problem—during one attempt to fob a dozen or so off on a neighbor, he flatly told us, “No. I'll give you fifty.” It's just as well we didn't take him up on his offer. We now have another fifty or so bananas, fresh from Elmer's farm, hanging or stowed away in the shack.

      We're not likely to starve any time soon.

How To Eat on Hawai'i, Part I

   

  For a while before we came to Hawaii, and for a short time after we arrived, I was concerned about how we would be set for food. Most of what we would eat, we realized, would have to come to us through work trade, and I couldn't imagine that was going to add up to very much. We ate reasonably well back in Tucson, cooking good, mostly healthy food at home and even managing to go out to a meal from time to time when we weren't feeling too cheap. During our three-week stay in Washington, we ate at a level we both found a little embarrassing, especially when you take into account the lofty goals we had set for ourselves before leaving.

      Our biggest fear was that the transition from a sometimes-rich to consistently spartan diet would be a terrible shock to our systems, and to deaden the impact we concentrated on eating healthier meals in smaller portions, with an increased amount of vegetables and whole grains. We got into eating multigrain cereals in the morning, and brown rice or quinoa with dinner. We told ourselves that when we got to Washington, we'd just have to insist to our families and friends that we just weren't going to eat the same gut-rotting poison that everyone else was eating—oh no, we were health nuts now, our bodies were goddamn Buddhist temples.

      The first meal we had after being picked up at the airport was an all-you-can-eat buffet at the Tulalip Casino off I-5. We stuffed ourselves with grilled salmon and fried chicken and crab legs and pork ribs and pie. And while we stayed with our parents, our meals were, if anything, heavier than what we'd normally eat at home: we had steak one or two nights, a pork roast was consumed at some point, we dove into yummy treats at the Calico Cupboards in both La Conner and Mount Vernon (not to mention some of the fatty, sweet, big-as-your-head apple fritters from the Donut House in Anacortes) and, even though I had weaned myself off of caffeine for the previous two weeks to prevent the inevitable withdrawal symptoms from the lack of same in Hawaii, I spent our time with the folks drinking Costco coffee every morning, plus the odd latte, just because I could.

      We were going to be wrecks when we got to Hawaii. I visualized us trying to squeak by on two spoonfuls of cooked rice a day, monastic rations that wouldn't keep a hummingbird from dropping dead. We'd resort to foraging off the land, forced to eat worms and bugs and roadkill. After two weeks, we'd have the sunken, emaciated look of war refugees, or vegans.

Now that about a month has gone by, I'm pleased to say that we didn't die. We've lost some weight, enough that some of our tighter clothes fit a little looser, and this can be put down the combination of exercise and not eating nearly as many sweets as we used to. We showed up to the farming co-op with a few handfuls of trail mix and a couple of apples. By the next day, we were inundated with fruits and greens. It was still much less than we were accustomed to eating on a daily basis, but we seemed to do alright and never felt like we were going hungry. Mostly I put it down to the stress of moving to a new, unusual place, and the implicit understanding that we were going to have to adapt or be very uncomfortable.

      It was only a few days later that a package we had mailed to ourselves from Tucson arrived at the post office, and along with some extra supplies such as rubber boots, a small frying pan and saucepan, there were also rice and beans. These had been a staple for us back in Tucson, and we've found they go very well with fried greens and a little soy sauce or hot sauce.

      After about a week we made into town to replenish our pantry even more, mainly with basics such as peanut butter, tea, more rice and beans, hot cereal, and things we'd need to prevent our diet from becoming monotonous and bland such as hot sauce (Hula Girl chipotle habanero, with a vintage-looking 1940's grass-skirted pinup on the bottle), curry, cinnamon, and cumin. As we've gotten more settled in, we've become better situated to prepare meals that taste good and cover most of our nutritional needs.

      Which isn't to say there haven't been mishaps. We were told that the pea of the pigeon pea tree is perfectly edible, and we were interested in giving them a try, seeing as we had a bunch of it growing just a few feet away. We elected to boil it, and flavor it with some sweet chile sauce. Unshucked pigeon pea, as we discovered, boils up fine when it's young and tender. As we were told later, they're mainly good when they've matured and been shucked from their pods. That in-between phase? The pods are tough and chewy like hay, bad enough that we had to spit most of them out. It's something like chewing on the woody part of an old asparagus. It also stained the water red like raspberry Kool-Aid, which made us wonder if anyone's ever used it as a fabric dye.

      That's been the only really negative culinary experience we've had so far; most of the time I'd say we do great. The jack fruit and yamagata avocados I described in the first post finally ripened after about two weeks. Neither of us knew anything about jack fruit except that its flavor is reputed to have been the basis for Juicy Fruit gum. That's not surprising—as we've found, the meat of the fruit is mildly fibrous and chewy, giving it a consistency not unlike a wad of bubble gum. Most of the meat is comprised of soft, yellowish pods encasing seeds about the size and shape of beach pebbles. There are other portions that contain no seeds. We had to use a butchers knife to cut through the fruit's thick, spiky hide, separating it into two halves. As you can see from the picture, the interior isn't pretty to look at, a bit like an extraterrestrial egg or the inside of an ant colony.

      The avocados went well with sea salt, salsa, chips, or sliced and served in an omelet. We each ate half of one avocado one morning and were full until lunch. Seriously, they're at least as big as softballs.  They also make a damn fine guacamole. We recently acquired three more, which is good because the tree they came from is about done for the season.

      I've included a few photos of some things we've put together in the last few weeks. Not all of the ingredients came from local farmers, but a lot of them did. Elmer supplied us with eggs from his own chickens. They're fertilized eggs, which are allegedly better for you. Not that we care either way—farm eggs are always better than store-bought. The chickens tend to be better fed, have room to run around, and always produce a better-tasting egg. The first time that I recall eating local eggs, I couldn't believe the difference in quality. It makes you think that the factory-raised stuff must come from some pretty sickly chickens, fed the same kind of stock feed all day and stuffed into cages where they can't forage on their own. Chickens that eat well, lay well.

Eggs over easy with tapioca hashbrowns and sliced bananas

Barbecue pork over sautéed kale, onions, and garlic 

      Tapioca root, we're really pleased to find out, makes decent hash browns. The farmers that gave them to us said that they never really cook down to the point where they're soft, so Hannah figured that by grating and frying them, we might wind up with something similar to, but firmer than, hash browns made with potatoes. We've done this twice and they seem to fry up really well with a little butter and oil.

Fried banana chips and ketchup

      Cooking with green bananas has been another discovery for us, and a useful way to reduce the huge quantity of bananas we seem to wind up with. At that stage, they have almost the same consistency as raw potatoes, and can be cooked much the same way. Hannah's decided she prefers banana french fries to the traditional kind. They seem to fry best when sliced to about a quarter inch. We tried boiling them once and the result was adequate but not satisfying, plus the sticky latex sap from the peels is a pain to clean off the inside of the pot.

Continued in Part II

Wildlife Encounters on Hawai'i, Part II

     The shack we stay in is partly open on two sides. There is no door. Anything can come in any time it wants, and there's not much we can do about it if we're asleep or not home. As you can imagine, this arrangement has its drawbacks. We now have three rat traps set up around the shack, mainly to protect our food. We've made two fruit fly traps from jars filled with an inch of vinegar and hole-punched plastic stretched across the openings, because it's gross to have hundreds of fruit flies where you live and eat.

      But the same arrangement has benefits. Some mornings we have stunning, green day geckos hunting for bugs in the kitchen corner. We first noticed them climbing around on the walls outside the shack a couple of days after we arrived. They're bright green with three red spots on their backs, like paint splashes, toward their hind legs, and blue toes. I've included a picture of one that I think might be one of the best pictures I've ever taken, simply because the animal is so impressive to look at.

So far we've seen three of them—one about six inches long, the other two a little shorter and less thickly built. One of the smaller geckos has made itself useful by eating some of the fruit flies and ants that congregate around the narrow window over the propane stove.

      We've seen other, less colorful geckos, the nocturnal species, often hunting around in the spaces between the corrugated metal roof and the beams. According to an article Hannah read on the way here, geckos, while not native to Hawaii, have been here for 1500 years, brought over on boats going between the Hawaiian islands and Tahiti. The colorful day geckos are more recent. A naturalist released some into the wild in the '70's for no other reason than he thought it would be cool to have them here. He was right, if incredibly irresponsible. People like them so much that they're reluctant to give them up to animal control officials. I can't say I blame them. We really enjoy the ones we have.

      There are chameleons as well, but I'm not expert enough on the subject reptiles to identify them properly. They're very different from geckos, with smaller eyes, longer, more streamlined faces, skinny tails, and thinner, clawed, more elongated toes. They engage in territorial behavior such as push-up displays (which I've observed in one Southwestern species as well), and puffing out a round, flat neck-frill. They also seem aggressive; I've seen a couple chase off lizards that come too close.

      Earlier I mentioned a vague, nagging fear about the idea of tarantulas on Hawai'i. I associate tarantulas with banana trees (which you can blame on Harry Belefonte), and there are a lot of those on the island. Janice never said anything about them, and I'm actually pretty sure that Brady Bunch episode was full of shit.

      It might have been nice if she had said something about cane spiders, though. I'm not saying I wouldn't have come to Hawaii if I had known about them, but it might have been nice to mentally prepare myself for the eventuality of their arrival in the shack.

Take a good look at the pictures I've included here. Those are two of three different spiders that have turned up in our living space. The first one, the one pictured both on a package of toilet paper and in my gloved hand as I was preparing to release it into the guinea grass, I spotted one evening as I was reaching for a book under the bed. I was taken very much by surprise, accompanied by a feeling that was, oddly, something like relief. At least now I knew. There are big spiders here, and here was one of them. It was big, but not tarantula big. More like a very young tarantula, or a very, very large garden spider.

      I put on a glove and snatched it up to take it outside. I'm like a lot of people in that I'm pretty creeped out by spiders, but I had no interest in harming it. I just didn't want it crawling across our sleeping faces one night while it looked for something to eat. We have rats for that. I walked about thirty feet from the shack and placed it on the fallen branch of a pigeon pea tree. I was astonished to feel how strong it was as it pushed its way out from between my fingers, and unnerved to see it leap two feet like a grasshopper to first one blade of guinea grass, then another, and on into the darkness.

      I thought to myself, I hope that's the only one I see for a really long time. No such luck. A week later, in the space of a few hours, two more appeared. As I write this, the smaller of the two still lives on top of one of the beams, nestled in the little archway made by one of the hollows in the corrugated roof. It comes out for a few hours during the day to sit and wait for stray insects to fly by. The bigger one is the biggest I've seen so far. It could probably cover the palm of my hand with leg to spare. I discovered it hiding behind the washcloth we have hanging from a nail next to the bed.

      By this time, as a result of all the fruit we had, there was a serious bug problem in our tiny house.

      “I wonder if he'll eat some of the bugs in here,” Hannah mused, and as if by way of an audition, the arachnid grabbed a small moth out of the air with its forelegs and hungrily consumed it. In both appearance and behavior, it reminded me a lot of a crab. I was both horrified and fascinated. I'd never seen a spider hunt in that manner, with no recourse to a web.

      As nervous as I was having it around, it was that behavior that resigned me to its presence; I have no problem with giant spiders if they help clean up around the house. And don't bite me.

      I said something about it to Janice the next morning and she said she'd never heard of anyone being bitten by a cane spider. After watching it feed, I wonder if it even has much venom, or any. Spiders use venom to immobilize their prey and suck the juices from them at a later time. The spider I saw ate that moth like a man wolfing down a buffalo wing. A disturbing sight, but it makes me feel more secure that we don't have spider bites to worry about.

      I want to leave off by saying that, in spite of how negative some of the experiences I recount might sound, we really do get a kick out of our new environment, and the novel and sometimes enchanting creatures we share it with. Every morning we've woken to the song of a female cardinal, her staccato chirps heralding us out of bed at around 6:30, and continuing on for a good hour or more after that. Sometimes her mate turns up, a bird with brilliant red plumage that stands out against the greens and browns of our surroundings like a stop light. There are tiny, fat little green birds and even smaller birds with with reddish feathers on their heads and tails that keep us company throughout the day. There are husky bumblebees that hover around the blossoming plants. At night, for the last couple of weeks, we can hear whales exhaling noisily through their blowholes and slapping their tails on the water. The sounds have grown more frequent, indicating that more might be gathering for the winter mating season. I want us to try to make an effort to see them from shore, now that we know a way to get closer to the water from where we're situated. That's the kind of thing we came to Hawaii to experience, including everything we've experienced so far. And as our stay lengthens, we'll savor these times that I don't think we could have had anywhere else.