Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. We’ve been celebrating on Friday for the last few years instead of the typical Thursday. Living on an island, especially an outer island like we do, means that family may not be close by. This is no exception for us. While we’re fortunate our son still lives on Island, the rest of our family is on Oahu or the mainland. So for the last few years, we’ve invited those like us, those whose families are far away, and celebrate the holiday together. We’ve slowly created our own tradition which is something special.
We didn’t do the typical turkey dinner, rather we cooked a Hawaiian version – kalua pork, corned beef luau (a mix of my husband’s Hawaiian heritage and my Irish), ulu (breadfruit)/cauliflower mash, fruit salad, Kona crab, nabeta, asparagus/green bean casserole, squash crumble, pumpkin soup, and lomi salmon. I almost forgot we broke open the pineapple liqueur I had made. For dessert, we had kulolo and a lime/avocado pie. It was so delicious. I neglected to take pictures, but have lots of snapshot in my mind and more importantly my heart, so I won’t forget. A lot of the stuff came straight from the garden. It feels good to be sustainable and share what we grow.
On Saturday we went to Aikane Nursery in North Kohala. What a nice group of folks up there. We got some unusual tropical fruits we’re excited about trying.
This is Pandan. The leaves are used for seasoning in cooking. When fully grown it looks very similar to a lauhala tree.
Pedalai – the fruit of this plant looks like a gigantic rambutan. It’s bright orange with fuzzy hair on the outside. Its white fleshy interior is supposed to be superior tasting. We can’t wait to try this!!
We also picked up a new kind of dragon fruit, cardamon, a jelly palm (you can make jelly off of the fruit!!), a dwarf coconut, and a few other things. We’re going to make signs so we don’t forget what everything is. Right now, in the garden we have a plant fruiting that we have no idea what it is. Once it looks ripe, we’ll cut it open and hopefully with a little detective work, we can figure it out. We need to do a way better job of identifying our new plants, especially the unusual ones.
Our grotto is coming along nicely. My son’s girlfriend, Mele, gave me a beautiful orchid to add to the garden. It is a scented orchid too! We got a few ornamental plants and a few more anthuriums.
We’re still in coffee picking season, but it’s been raining since we last picked on Sunday, so we haven’t had enough sun or dry time to get out there and pick since. We definitely have to pick next week; rain or not, it needs to picked. Right now we have all our racks filled in our dry house with coffee. It’s been a little colder out, so it’s taking a little longer to dry. The house is well insulated though, so we don’t have an issue of moldy beans this year.
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