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.