{"id":474,"date":"2012-11-19T00:06:00","date_gmt":"2012-11-19T00:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdonthewire.org\/?p=474"},"modified":"2013-01-05T00:06:48","modified_gmt":"2013-01-05T00:06:48","slug":"island-foods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/birdonthewire.org\/2012\/11\/island-foods\/places\/","title":{"rendered":"Island Foods"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_0334\"<\/a>Now comes the part I love \u2013 the foods of Hawaii. This is honestly my favorite kind of food. Everything is so fresh! You can go down to the harbor just north of Kona and buy fish right off the boat \u2013 beautiful ahi, opah, ono, and many more, that you can take home and grill. And the fruits and vegetables \u2013 too numerous to name.<\/p>\n

At our little cottage in Hilo, on the east side of the Big Island, we\u2019d go down to the office every morning and get  cups of rich Kona coffee, fresh coconut-pineapple muffins, and papayas and bananas, picked from trees on the property. I couldn\u2019t have asked for a better breakfast! Those bananas were small and so sweet that they almost tasted like a different fruit altogether. <\/p>\n

When we\u2019re on the Big Island, we usually go to Peter Merriman\u2019s eponymous restaurant up in Waimea (horse and cow country). I believe he was the first chef to serve wok-seared ahi \u2013 crispy on the outside and rare on the inside. That was also the first place I ever tried corn from Pahoa (an agricultural area near Hilo). Here\u2019s what Merriman does with the fresh corn: he cuts it off the cob and sautees it in butter for a few minutes \u2013 that\u2019s it. And it\u2019s to die for! I\u2019ve tried this at home, and it\u2019s pretty good, but nothing tastes like the sweet corn from Pahoa. <\/p>\n

This time on the island, we went to Merriman\u2019s caf\u00e9 on the Kohala coast and had his fish tacos. That day, the fish was ahi \u2013 delish!<\/p>\n

Our other favorite chef on the Big Island is Sam Choy. We\u2019d been going to his unassuming restaurant in an industrial area of Kona for a long time. But now he has a beautiful place, up on a hill in Keahou, with a 230 degree view of the ocean below. When we went to the new place, we started with some  poke \u2013 raw island fish with greens, onion, and seaweed. For my main course, I chose \u201cSam\u2019s Trio of Fish,\u201d consisting of three kinds of fish, sauteed and served like a teepee over garlic mashed potatoes and island green beans. (Are you hungry yet?) David, my husband, had the \u201cSeafood Laulau,\u201d (Sam Choy\u2019s mother\u2019s favorite), consisting of fish and vegetables wrapped in tea leaves and steamed. Yum! <\/p>\n

Sam also serves pork, beef and chicken. we just love the island fish. In fact, island beef, raised up in Waimea, is some of the best beef I\u2019ve ever tasted — grass-fed and tender.<\/p>\n

The other great food experience we had on the Big Island resulted from our trip to a farmer\u2019s market in Kona, where we bought some fruit we\u2019d never tasted before. In the photo above, you\u2019ll see dragonfruit, papaya, and rambutan. When I first cut open the dragonfruit, I actually gasped when I saw the wine-colored flesh inside, peppered with fine black seeds. It has a texture that resembles firm jello and has a mild, sweet taste, something like a pear. The rambutan appears as a fuzzy red ball, and this red skin must be cut away to reveal the white fruit inside that has a grape-like flavor. Of course, we\u2019re all familiar with the papaya, but it\u2019s so much better fresh off the tree. <\/p>\n

Any kind of vegetable you can imagine grows well in Hawaii. I mentioned the corn. Tomatoes are to die for, and the Chinese long beans are a local favorite \u2013 like green beans but much longer.<\/p>\n

The one Hawaiian food I\u2019ve never gotten used to is poi. I agree with the person who said it tastes like wallpaper paste!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now comes the part I love \u2013 the foods of Hawaii. This is honestly my favorite kind of food. Everything is so fresh! You can go down to the harbor just north of Kona and buy fish right off the boat \u2013 beautiful ahi, opah, ono, and many more, that you can take home and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":489,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdonthewire.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdonthewire.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdonthewire.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdonthewire.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdonthewire.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=474"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/birdonthewire.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":596,"href":"https:\/\/birdonthewire.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474\/revisions\/596"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdonthewire.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdonthewire.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdonthewire.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdonthewire.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}