A Birthday Celebration

The drive down the hill to the beach was breathtakingly beautiful

Last Tuesday was Dylan’s 29^th birthday and we spent the better part of the week in celebration, starting with a trip to the beach. We took the day to ourselves and woke up slow, sipped some iced coffee, ate a banana each and finished off our batch of honeyed barley before heading to check out Ho’Okena beach at just before 9am. We had planned to go sea kayaking but we couldn’t find anyone or any signs about renting them, just a stack of rainbow colored kayaks resting in the shade. We were immediately greeted, however, by a pod of dolphins swimming in the bay, jumping and twisting and splashing about. We had been told that dolphins often frequent the waters at Ho’Okena but I hadn’t expected to actually see any. What a sight to see them so close playing around and sharing the beach just as we were. I have been dying to go back again ever since. Apparently pods of dolphins gather regularly in the bay there every full moon.

Ho’Okena has quickly become my favorite ocean spots in Hawaii, with its sandy beaches, quiet local crowd and beautiful soft blue waves. We spent the morning alternating between reading in the shade and floating along with the ebb and flow of the tide. Dylan brought the extra pair of flippers and used them to catch wave after wave, riding them until he crashed against the soft sandy shore. We splashed around all morning, savoring the cool ocean breeze as the sun warmed our shoulders. Compared to the heat of the morning air the water felt cold as I first ventured in, but Dylan assured me that after a few minutes it would feel like bathwater. He was right and I could have bobbed up and down in that water all day, watching the light dance along the surface and breathing in the salty sweet Hawaiian air. Dylan still has sand in his hair from playing so hard and I managed to find a new level of tranquility that I have been slowly building since our arrival on the island. Ho’Okena left me feeling renewed, despite the exhaustion from a day in the powerful sun.

Happy Birthday Dylan!!

As we packed up our things and sprinted across the piping hot sand toward the truck, we bade farewell to the dolphins, already eager to return again. We toweled ourselves off, hopped in the truck and begun our ascent up the winding road toward home, ready for the epic Kalama’s burgers I promised Dylan for his birthday lunch. About a month ago, I wrote about these burgers from the little shack at the bottom of our driveway, which left Dylan dreaming about them nearly every day since. He dubbed them “the best burger I’ve ever had, ever!” So to round out his 29^th birthday I bought us lunch, the first time we’ve bought any prepared food since we got here. Dylan has been talking about these Kimchi burgers so much that my interest in eating beef has finally been piqued. I bought Dylan his burger, a side of fries for us to share and two dill pickles. I still ordered myself an Ahi burger, which ended up being a giant grilled tuna steak sandwiched between a soft potato roll with some mayo and shredded cabbage and a million times more amazing than it sounds, but I bravely accept Dylan’s offer to try a bite of his.

First bite...so good!!

Each time I have tried a new kind of meat, one I haven’t had since I was eleven years old, the sensory experience has come flooding back to me in a wave of familiar flavors. This burger, however, was a brand new experience. I ate plenty of burgers back before I became a vegetarian but I had no point of reference for this one. I have never had anything like this burger. Perhaps it’s the pasture-raised Big Island Beef, or that the meat isn’t all the way ground so the texture is a little more steak-like, or perhaps it’s the sweet Kimchi juices that caramelize the outside of burger while it cooks slowly on the grill that makes this burger a culinary anomaly. Either way, I think Dylan’s description and admiration of the Kalama’s Kimchi burger is apt, it is definitely the best burger I have ever tasted. I’m even a bit tempted to order a whole one for myself the next time we treat ourselves to a Kalama’s lunch date. We’ll see.

That night, after a burger-induced afternoon nap, we worked on a few creative projects together at the table and snacked on some tortilla chips and fresh guacamole for dinner since we were still mostly full from lunch. Dylan’s birthday celebrations carried over into our Wednesday farm potluck, a French theme of his choosing. We all decided to make it a fancy dress dinner since French seemed to lend itself perfectly to such an occasion and it’s a good thing we did because this was a fancy food potluck if I’ve ever seen one. There was fresh handmade pate, a beautiful charcuterie plate overflowing with French sausage, salamis, prosciutto, smoked salmon, olives, sliced baguette, a triple cream cow’s cheese and a long-aged parm alongside a wheel of baked brie slathered with honey from the farm up the street. There were wine pairings with all three courses and entrees of salade nicoise, bleu cheese rib eye steaks, provenciale roast chicken (our offering), and L’ognion Lyonnaise (French onion soup).

I actually made them myself!

I made coconut macaroons for dessert to accompany the éclairs and other baked goodies brought by some friends who joined in on our feast. Everyone agreed that it was our most fanciful farm dinner yet, although it seems that every week we say that the bar for our potlucks is on an ever-rising climb to perfection. Wednesday left us feeling filled to the brim with delicious food and wonderful company. Dylan even received a birthday apron that I know he’s just dying to show off for you the next time I photograph him cooking. I think you’ll all come to appreciate it just as much as he does. I, however, will bite my tongue and let you enjoy the surprise on your own. I’m sure the wait won’t be long.

We hadn’t planned anything special for Thursday, but then a surprise care package arrived in the mail from some of my family in Vermont, filled with goodies from home. Among the contents was a gold box of Buttercrunch candies from Mother Myrick's, the sweet chocolate and nut covered butter toffee squares of my youth. It wasn’t until he sunk his teeth into one of these tasty treats that Dylan understood the excited gasp I let out as I pulled them from among the Green Mountain Coffee packets and mail. Noel, Dylan has been thanking you profusely for introducing him to these treats and blames you if he gains 50 pounds from eating them all summer while we’re living in VT. The Dakin Farms summer sausage added new dimensions to our typical sautéed kale and eggs breakfast as well as kicking our potato salad up a notch and we were grateful for the variety it brought to our meals.

Just a glimpse of the beauty of this place.

Before I skip ahead to our potato salad and Saturday BBQ at the pole house, I have to tell you about our dinner date on Friday night. We had long been planning for a Friday night out, since we’ve been here two months now and have not once gone out to dinner. For those of you who might not know us as well, this is a major accomplishment for Dylan and I. Following the recommendations of just about everyone on the farm, we decided to celebrate Dylan’s birthday with a romantic dinner at Holuakoa Café, a beautiful open air restaurant boasting some of the best food on the Island. We arrived shortly before sunset and snagged a quiet table in the corner looking out over the rest of the space. The gentle salty breeze mingled with the fresh mountain air among the light-wrapped trees and columns and the koi ponds and we selected a crisp, light Washington Riesling to compliment our mood and all the delicious fish we were about to order.

Over courses of Silver Snapper draped with a creamy leek sauce, a simple and refreshing blue cheese salad, and grilled Ono atop rich corn risotto garnished with crispy clusters of oyster mushrooms and lightly sautéed snow peas, we debated the idea of extending our stay here on the farm. Since I am spending so much of my time here helping get the preschool ready to go, and loving every bit of it, Heather asked us in earnest if we would consider staying and continue our work so that I could teach at the preschool once it opens and Dylan could get more into cooking here. We have certainly let ourselves imagine staying before, it is so beautiful here and we’ve melted nicely into the framework of the farm and the families that have brought it to life, but our musings were just that. We both joked about this happening before we came out here but never did either of us consider the fact that we might be convinced to stay. After two months, it is quite easy to understand why so many people we know here arrived on the Big Island with temporary intentions and years later cannot imagine life anywhere else.

Sunset over the ocean from the front house porch

It will be hard to leave here, to start over yet again, especially knowing that we still have another temporary stay ahead of us in Vermont before we finally settle in Maine. But after much and serious discussion, we both knew in our hearts that as hard as it will be to say goodbye to paradise, it would be harder to stay and leave behind our families, friends and dreams of Portland. I did not expect to fall in love with this place as much as I have, but in doing so I have come to appreciate New England all the more, for no matter where we go it will always be our home. So no need to worry, we will be continuing with our plans as we originally intended, despite how much we will miss this farm, this island, and all the people who have made our experience here so memorable already. These next few weeks, though they will likely fly by, will be savored and treasured for a lifetime to come. I am just glad that I became aware of the impact this place has on me while we still have so much time left to enjoy and appreciate it.

Potato salad topped with parsley & our jar of homemade mayo!

Well, now that the heaviness of that conversation is in the past, I can get back to our Saturday BBQ at the pole house, which is what we call the big brown house behind the main garden where we gather every week for our potlucks. We call it this because the ground floor is mostly open air, with large poles supporting the two-story house above it. Brenna and Daniel and their infant Eva live on the first floor and work here on the farm while Chris and Jodi rent the house upstairs. Heather and Paul, our hosts, live in the main house at the front of the property with Karuna, their daughter whom I work with. A few weeks ago we all got together to watch the pilot episode of the short-lived series Firefly, Ever since we’ve been dying to watch the follow-up episode but other things kept coming up. So to make an occasion of it, Chris and Jodi bought some local beef and invited everyone to join them for a BBQ and Netflix night. Dylan and I made potato salad, including homemade mayonnaise using the eggs we collected from our farm chickens. I had never seen him do this before and it was quite the treat. I tried another bite of Dylan’s hamburger since the beef came from the same farm that supplies Kalama’s. This one was spiced with our homemade hot sauce and stuffed with blue cheese and Dylan and I both agreed that it was equally as tasty, leading me to believe this burger phenomenon has more to do with Big Island Beef than anything else.

Plumerias at Ho'Okena Beach

We rounded out the week with a Sunday filled with food production and group harvesting of some of our most abundant plants. The eggplants are overflowing and so we went back to our tried and true caponata recipe, a spread of chopped and roasted eggplants, onions, garlic mixed with a few spoonfuls of tomato paste and a lot of capers and olives and finished with generous amounts of balsamic vinegar. This, I think, might actually surpass eggplant parm as my favorite way to eat eggplant, at least until the next time I eat eggplant parm that is. All week, Dylan had been feeding his ginger bug, a cheese cloth covered jar of water wit sugar and shredded fresh ginger in preparation for making homemade ginger beer using a recipe he found in Wild Fermentation, a gift from Libby and Mike that just keeps on giving. He boiled tons of ginger and turmeric together with honey, attracting a swarm of bees to our outdoor kitchen, and once the mixture had cooled he added the ginger bug and filled 9 empty Kombucha bottles with our homemade ginger brew.

It will take a few weeks for the drink to ferment but I am fiercely excited to try it. Ginger ale is and always has been my favorite sparkling beverage. I’ll let you know how this project progresses and in a few weeks we’ll know if it was worth the wait. Now that Dylan’s birthday week has passed and we’re heading into the last few weeks of our stay we’ll be working hard to fit in as much fun and work as we can. I am helping get the preschool off the ground and Dylan is soon going to start collaborating with Heather and I on a few building projects for it. We still have to visit Volcano National park and have a few more beaches to check out, not to mention lots and lots of cooking. I hope you all are enjoying the slow arrival of spring and a bit of warmer weather, it continues to be hot and sunny as ever here. I’m just glad we planned to end our trip when New England is getting warming up and turning green again so that by the time next winter arrives, I might actually welcome the cold.

Ho'Okena Beach, sandy beach and beautiful, lush mountains to the left and bright blue open ocean to the right... paradise.

A Bountiful Harvest

Last week Dylan spent an entire morning pruning the two tomato plants in the main garden. They were huge; an avalanche of leaves exploding out of the cages, but hardly any tomatoes. At least, before Dylan pruned the plants, that's what we thought. For as big as they were, we had only gotten maybe one ripe tomato out of the two plants and only saw a few more green ones. With a pair of garden shears, Dylan uncovered a wealth of green tomatoes that had been hiding beneath the leaves, just desperate for some vitamin D therapy. Within a few short days, I pulled out a handful of luscious red fruit, with plenty more left on the vine. I couldn’t resist popping one in my mouth, I’ve never had much will power when it comes to these things. I used to eat a pint of grape tomatoes each week as a snack or mixed in with my kale and eggs for breakfast back in Seattle. I love tomatoes. Just as I had hoped, these crimson beauties came about as close as anything to the Mountain Magic tomatoes Dylan and I gorged ourselves on every weekend they were in season at the Ballard Sunday Market. We just couldn’t help ourselves and for 6-8 weeks we spent the majority of our market cash on tomatoes. 

In addition to fresh sweet tomatoes, we also have suddenly found ourselves with an abundance of eggplant. We have the long, skinny Japanese eggplants as well as the dark, fat Black Beauties. I have been monitoring the eggplants' growth with little K, checking in on them every morning to see how much they’ve grown. Since she’s had family in town and I’ve been doing projects all week, it had been a few days since I last looked in on them. When I went out to see about the tomatoes, I peeked over at the eggplant bed and found armfuls of eggplants, many of them ripe and begging to be harvested. The plants themselves are so heavy under the weight of their plump purple fruit that many of the eggplants sagged all the way to the ground, vulnerable and in need of rescue. I snipped off the ripe ones to distribute between the farm families and propped up the plants so the bugs wouldn’t get into the littler ones that still needed a few more days on the vine.

Naturally, I am insisting that we make good use of these wonderful new ingredients and make eggplant parm, one of my favorite dishes. We have everything we need to make it, even the cheese thanks to Margaret, Dylan’s mom, who sent us some recently. Eggplant parm is one of my most favorite foods and has been ever since Dylan made it for back when we first moved in together in 2008. Before that eye-opening culinary experience I thought eggplants that had been fried, soaked in tomato sauce and covered in parmesan cheese were designed to be served atop a bed of spaghetti, as they did at the Olive Garden. Back when I was a vegetarian, that was about the only dish I ever ate there and I was a frequent customer before I met Dylan and was introduced to a new level of quality eating. I could not have been more wrong about eggplant parm. By skipping the pasta and pressing the sliced eggplants for hours before frying them, they stood on their own as a casserole dish loaded with flavor and just the right amount of crispness to keep them from being mushy. I will never eat eggplant parm another way now. Who needs the pasta when the eggplants steal the show?

Luckily eggplants and tomatoes are quite the complementary pair, so we are in no shortage of ideas for what to do with our garden bounty this week. Dylan plans to make what is sure to be a delectable batch of vegetable antipasti, plenty of tomato sauce, an excess of baba ganoush, and as per my request, some eggplant fritters, my latest farm food obsession. I blame Dylan for getting me hooked on fritters, he should have known I would fall for them. It all started this week with our potluck theme of soups, stews, and comfort foods. Chicken soup and potatoes au gratin had already been claimed and so we settled on skillet pizzas having been inspired with last week’s successful sandwich wraps. We figured why not try out a skillet pizza? So Dylan prepped the dough and eventually spun out seven 8-inch, thin crust skillet pizzas. We got all our toppings from the garden and I seized the opportunity to make my favorite, eggplant parm pizza with the long slender Japanese eggplant I had picked earlier in the week that needed to be used. Reluctantly, Dylan agreed. He knew it would make for a delicious and interesting pizza after all and the skinnier eggplants are far less annoying to prepare and fry.

I haven’t had a whole lot of this skinny bright purple eggplant, it’s not the right size for eggplant parm, but I’d had it in some of the veggie dishes at our favorite restaurants in Seattle’s International District, where our first apartment in the city was. There was this one place, Shanghai Garden right across from the Asian grocery store, Uwajimaya, where we always used to get takeout from. One of our favorite dishes was garlic roasted Japanese eggplant, a Szechuan style dish that makes my mouth water just thinking about it. Before arriving in Hawaii, this is the only time I can remember eating this style of eggplant but it has quickly made it onto my list of favorites now. I guess that’s a good thing considering how many of them we are going to be eating over the next few weeks.

Back to our pizza-making endeavor, these long purple plants were the perfect size for our skillet pizzas, coming off the frying pan soft yet crispy and about the size of pepperoni slices. I would happily never buy a bag of potato chips or eat a french fry again if I could have these little treats whenever I wanted them. They were so good one their own I could barely restrain myself from eating them all before Dylan had the chance to get them onto the pizzas. I think I am going to have to learn to make these little fritters myself because there is no way I am going to convince Dylan to make them as often as I want to eat them. Despite how good he is at making eggplant parm, it’s one of his least favorite dishes to prepare. Something about being too time-consuming and a pain in the ass...whatever, I stop listening at no and get lost wallowing in my own misery because I know I won’t be eating any anytime soon. It’s high time I learn how to do this one myself. They are by no means difficult to make, I’ve watched Dylan fry eggplants plenty of times, it’s just easier (and faster) to let Dylan do it. In fact, I think I am going to make a batch of them tonight. I’ll let you know how they turn out.

PS. Isn't this watermelon radish the most beautiful vegetable you have ever seen? I'm in love, yet again...