Kona, HI
Taken on April 6, 2002

“In our last episode…”

Isn’t that the way the old radio mystery serials and soap box operas used to begin? Well, in our last episode, Hurricane Party (Part 1), I said I hoped that you would be understanding and let me re-print two posts from my sister’s blog, Lava to Lilikoi. This way I can keep to my twice-weekly Inkwatu post schedule but yet handle the preparations and eventualities of being smack dab in the path of tropical storm Fay…due here the evening of the 19th. Since both these “emergency posts” are being prepared early and pre-scheduled for automatic publication, I hope they’re not being published posthumously!

“Stay tuned for next week’s episode to see if our wiley Inkwatu blogger managed to survive on chianti, pork rinds, and guacamole!”

Seriously, things should be OK and all will be back to normal by next Wednesday’s post of Inkwatu. Thanks for your patience and understanding. In the meantime, I know you’ll enjoy more from Lucy Lee with this second of two posts from her blog, Lava to Lilikoi. See you next week!

Taking Time For An Update

I’m just a baby in blogging years, but here I am at Post #16 – sweet sixteen! I think it’s time to do a brief update on my progress. If you look back at my previous posts, you’ll have something to reference when I talk about certain plants and animals.

Chickens: A few loud cackles a couple mornings ago informed me that eggs were finally being laid. The girls are doing their job, and I had the first eggs for lunch that day. They are small, but I had read that might be the case with the first few eggs. I had just started integrating layer pellets into their food this past week, and the nesting boxes were ready for them.

I had also read that it might be necessary to put fake eggs in the nesting area to let them know the exact purpose of the nesting box and material. They don’t have a lot of places to hide eggs in their run, but I didn’t want to have to crawl in there to rescue eggs.

So far, most of what I gather are small brown eggs from the Rhode Island Reds, but one of the Araucana had found her way into the nesting box by this afternoon. In this picture, you can see the difference between the brown eggs and a light one that I think is from an Araucana. Their eggs can be all shades and colors.

Water Tank: I’ve been able to maintain a fair amount of water this year. Last year, I ended up buying 4,000 gallons (a water tanker full) by this time of year. The year before that, I had to buy two loads (8,000 gallons). A few threatening hurricanes have blown a couple of residual rains our way. If we haven’t had a heavy rain, we’ve at least had misty days.

I still have 50” of water in the tank, which is wonderful! Also, with the rains, I haven’t had to water my plants, which helps to conserve my supply. I keep the chlorine and pH at the proper levels. I had the tank vacuumed toward the end of June. This was the first vacuuming of algae off the bottom of the tank since I moved in two years ago.

I learned a trick from friends about how to put bicarbonate of soda in the tank. I’d been pouring it in around the edge, but they dump an entire twelve-pound bag of soda into an old pillowcase, tie it up with a line, and toss it into the tank. Gradually, it seeps out into the water and gets mixed in to keep the pH between 6.8 and 7.0.

I have a net filter where the water runs into the tank from gutters on both the house and the shed. There has been a fair amount of debris caught in the nets lately, which goes into my compost pile.

Garden: I have a fresh crop of beets coming up. I couldn’t wait, so I bought fresh beets at the Na`alehu Farmer’s Market last week, along with more corn.

My Japanese pumpkin (kabocha) is growing, but no matter how many seeds I put out, only the one vine has really done anything so far. It’s bearing, however, and has plenty of blooms on it.

The Hawaiian Pepper seeds I’ve put out aren’t doing anything yet, but the pepper plants I bought at the nursery are producing nice little peppers. They are hard to see here – hidden by the leaves and blending into the fig in the background.

I have a few figs getting ripe, enough for a one-person snack.

The herbs that burned back from the sulfur dioxide in the vog have started to come back and fill out.

At one point, the rosemary spread out over a three-foot area. The sulfur dioxide got to it and here is what’s left after cutting back the dead portion. I hope it regains strength and vigor.

I know most people would love to keep their mint from spreading so far out and completely taking over their garden, but I feel very lucky to have this little patch growing. I wonder how mint will taste with those word I may have to eat someday?

The coffee trees are about a third or less of what they should be by now, but at least they continue to put out new leaves. If I’m lucky, they might make it enough for me to brew at least one pot of coffee someday.

All my triangle palms have new shoots and are looking fairly healthy, in spite of the bad air. I have to add iron to them periodically.

I have several small triangle palms on my front steps ready to go in the ground. I’ve been lining my driveway with triangles.

Most of my protea have been totally lost, although I have a couple of banksias that are still growing. You can see that this one has a little of the sulfur burn on it.

The Barbados Lily has put out lots of healthy leaves. You can computer this to the picture taken 4 weeks ago.

The peanuts are growing! You can see a couple of tiny yellow blooms hidden among the leaves. In the Deep South, where I spent many years of life, and where my father grew up, we called them “goobers.” There was the “goober” man who walked the streets selling his peanuts, calling out “Goooooobers! Goooobers for sale!” That also reminds some of us of the peanut vendor at baseball games. I grew up loving the St. Louis Cardinals as a kid.

The lilikoi (passion fruit) is sending out feelers, reaching for the fishing line I’ve put on the side of the shed.

I get impatient, however. It feels like everything should be growing at a much faster pace. Any soil or “pig dirt” I put on my plants just sifts down into the cracks between the lava rocks. I add more, it rains (or I water), and I lose that much more. It’s a slow process, but certainly a learning experience.

In spite of the hard mix of sulfur dioxide and unforgiving lava, some things seem to get more beautiful by the day. These pink plumeria were just small cuttings this last spring. I’ve put them out all over to provide a bit of color – a sweet smell to end this post.

Back to normal next week

Thank you, Lucy! And, thank you all for welcoming Lucy and her guest posts while I deal with the necessities of preparing for tropical storm Fay. We’ve learned here that you take the baby storms as seriously as the big, bad ones. We’ve also learned that all storms are capricious–you can never fully predict their direction. Inkwatu will be back to its usual self next Wednesday. See you then…!

Tropical Storm Fay

Part of living on southern coastal waters is living with tropical storms and hurricanes. The best part is that you can see them coming and have time to prepare. I’m prepared: yesterday I bought three big square plastic containers of drinking water, today I went and bought eight bottles of Chianti–that and the pork rinds and guacamole should tide me over…me and whoever else comes over to get in out of the rain. Since things are a little hectic right now, for this post and the next one, with her permission of course, I’m reprinting two of my favorite posts from my sister’s blog.

I think you will enjoy these two guest posts. Not only is Lucy Lee my only sibling and closest and most long-standing friend, she’s a terrific and very interesting person. She’s a professor of psychology living on the side of a volcano in Hawaii trying to farm on top of solid lava–hence, the name of her blog, “Lava to Lilikoi.” (Lilikoi is Passion Fruit.)

Inkwatu will be back to “normal” by next Wednesday. By then, TS Fay should be history and I’ll be able to focus on writing more Inkwatu blogs. In the meantime, please welcome Lucy. All the pictures below are Lucy’s and the narrator (the first person, “I”) is also her. I hope you have a minute to check out her web site and blog (see above); I’m very fond of Lucy Lee and of her blog.

This Little Piggy…

In several of my posts, I’ve referred to what I call my “pig dirt.” It is given to me by friends who have a piggery nearby. I knew it was rich and produced good veggies for me, but had never gone to see the source.

A couple weeks ago, I went with Dane and Terry Shibuya to their pig farm, mauka of Na`alehu. For the benefit of my readers who do not live in Hawai`i, we talk about the location of anything up the mountain from where we are as mauka. Everything that is below us toward the sea is makai.

So we drove mauka a short distance over a dirt road from Na`alehu to “Masazo’s Pig Farm.” Masazo was Dane’s grandfather who originally owned the land that has been handed down through three generations, with a fourth generation in waiting.

I was warned about the smell, but I honestly wasn’t bothered by it. It’s the smell of good manure that will become wonderful “pig dirt” for my raised beds.

My limited experience with pigs was with two of my children who raised pigs for the 4-H club. Their dad and I were community leaders of one of the local 4-H clubs in California. Even with only two pigs on our small farmette, I learned a fair amount about pigs. Here Mark and Inga are training their pigs to walk with a tap of the cane.

By the time the pigs got to the state fair for showing and judging, they were in prime condition, ready for market. I never knew pigs could be so smart! Here is Inga in her 4-H uniform showing her freshly cleaned, greased and powdered pig.

At Masazo’s, I watched as Dane and his daughter went about the business of “slopping” the pigs and preparing the stalls for the next step in creating my “pig dirt.”

There are two lines of stalls with a large “ditch” between them. The stalls slope toward the middle so that Dane can push all the manure into the ditch with his Bobcat. The gathered manure is then carried out to a yard area where it will be spread out to dry.

There are special stalls for the farrowing (birthing), to protect the babies and keep them cleaner. The mother can accidentally roll over her babies and smother them.

The completed product has no smell whatsoever, and it’s what I have piled up in my side area here. He told me there was no soil mixed in with it, other than a little that might get scraped up in the process of gathering it. They suggested that I can mix it with a little garden soil and/or a bit of cinder, or even use it as it is.

Any gardener needs to know about N-P-K. N (Nitrogen) is necessary for the rich, dark green vegetation that grows above ground. P (Phosphorus) is the element that produces strong roots plus any fruits or flowers. K (Potassium or Potash) helps to prevent water loss due to dry weather and cold air, thereby keeping strong plants.

Depending on your purpose, the ratio of these three elements will vary. For instance, if you want a rich lawn, you’ll look for a fertilizer that is high in Nitrogen. If you want more flowers and fruits, then you want high Phosphorus.

According to nutritional standards set by the government, the highest rate this kind of manure can get is a “3” and this manure has passed with a “3” in all three categories. No wonder my plants do well with the “pig dirt!”

Another regulation I wasn’t aware of is that wild pigs are not allowed to breed with domesticated pigs. The Masazo pigs are protected from any wild pigs getting to them.

After having four children (at separate times), I can sympathize with the Mama Pigs (sows) who have large litters of piglets. It takes three months, three weeks, and three days from conception to birth.

The babies are weaned after about five or six weeks. Three days after weaning, the sow is ready for breeding again and can produce two and a half litters per year.

Even though the sow looks too lean for breeding again, Dane said the skinny sow makes the best babies, “just like a skinny wahine makes better babies,” he said.

One of Terry’s friends will be going into my freezer soon! It might be more difficult to cook them, after seeing them at Masazo’s, but I think I can force myself!

Many mahalos, Terry and Dane! You really know how to show a girl a good time.

Thank you, Lucy

Hope you all enjoyed this reprint from Lucy Lee’s Lava to Lilikoi while I’m off dealing with preparations for TS Fay. Saturday’s post will be another reprint from Lava to Lilikoi, then I’ll return to Inkwatu a week from today.

How many times have we discovered, too late, that we had been in the presence of something which at the time it was available we ignored, dismissed, or just didn’t see but, now, we would love to experience, but cannot because circumstances have changed and that thing is no longer at hand? (This goes for places and people, too, of course; not just things.)

So it is for me with the countless Vietnamese sandwiches I could have experienced at the Manoa Marketplace Ba-Le, but didn’t because I was (1) too enamored of their phở gà, (2) too ignorant of what a Vietnamese “sandwich” was (“pork sandwich doesn’t even come close to describing it), and (3) too sure of what I thought a “sandwich” was.

Now, in true Kung Fu Panda fashion, I must philosophically turn those missed opportunities into more auspicious ones. It means I have the opportunity for a QUEST: finding the best Vietnamese sandwich I can in St. Petersburg, Florida. Unfortunately, never having had an authentic one, and therefore lacking an experiential standard for comparison, I’m at a bit of a disadvantage.

But…I have a pretty good imagination and I have some excellent reference resources. There are three features that make a Vietnamese sandwich unique:

• the bread
• the vegetables
• the meat.

Wandering Chopsticks has recipes on her site for two different kinds of Vietnamese sandwiches, “bánh mì” in Vietnamese. Here are the links to her two recipes:

• bánh mì thịt heo nướng
• bánh mì xa xíu.

The text and pictures for those recipes helped explain things quite a bit. I’d read elsewhere that the flour that’s used for the bread for Vietnamese sandwiches is a mix of wheat flour and rice flour.

I stopped and got my first, banh mi sandwich with xa xiu (barbecued pork) filing.

I’d never noticed bánh mì in any of the several Vietnamese restaurants I frequent. So, one day while shopping at the Cantho Oriental Market, I asked the proprietress, with whom I’ve become quite comfortable asking Asian cooking questions, where was a good place in town to buy bánh mì. “Why here!” she said. “Come back Saturday, noon, and you can have special one.” So…I did.

An old professor to the core, I did more online research before I returned the following Saturday. I found a terrific resource for the different types of bánh mì that I printed out to take with me for her to point to, so I could accurately report on the type of sandwich she prepared. It’s an extremely informative list of each type of bánh mì and its contents. Please check it out: Fillings on the Battle of the Bánh Mì subpage of the White on Rice Couple blog. There are four other bánh mì articles on White on Rice Couple that are very relevant:

• Party Ideas
• Meat & Veggie Recipes
• Daikon/Carrot Pickles
• Make Your Own Bánh Mì

When I returned to the Cantho on Saturday for my bánh mì I had my printouts in hand for her to use to identify which kind I was getting. Turns out it was the “6. Xa Xíu (Bar-B-Que Pork)- Sweet, pinkish colored pork cooked to the style of Chinese bar-b-que. Cuts of pork can also vary like those of grilled pork.” (Quote from the White on Rice Couple’s Fillings list.)

She had me come back behind the meat counter at the back of the store that I’d never paid much attention to and she showed me different types of bar-b-qued beef she had freshly cooked. She let me sample a sliver of each. I picked the one that I liked the best—hard choice, they were all tasty—and she began preparing my sandwich. She explained how she trims from different parts of the meat for each sandwich, a little from the crunchy part, a little from the soft part. Then she asked how much fat I want. I admit to being a pig fat fan (if it’s properly prepared) so I said, “oh yes…a little, please.”

She only has the standard French baguettes, not the ones made with rice flour, but the meat was so good, I didn’t care. This was my first bánh mì, and the details didn’t matter! She put on some of the pickled vegetables and wrapped the sandwich which I took home and promptly ate, pausing only to snap the picture at the top of the article.

When I returned for more shopping this week, I told her how much I enjoyed the sandwich. I can truthfully say the bar-b-qued pork—which they cook themselves, fresh—was fantastic. I also told her I’d like a bit more of the pickled vegetables next time. She brightened up and said, “You like?!” Then she explained that usually she didn’t put many on because some folks (unfortunate foreigners such as me, I’m sure she meant) don’t like them. I assured her I do, so I’ll be back for a better balanced one next weekend.

Turns out that only on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays does she fix the special bánh mì such as the xa xiu I had, but on any weekday you can get the cold ones like the “1. Chả or Chả Lụa (PORK ROLL)- Ground up pork is packed tightly into a roll, and wrapped with banana leaves (and or aluminum foil) then steamed or boiled , hence producing the dense ‘pork roll’. Sliced thin like bologna, these make up one of the most common cold cuts found in Bánh mì.” (Quote from the White on Rice Couple’s Fillings list.)

She also sells the pork rolls not in a sandwich, but all wrapped up in their banana leaves, right beside the counter, so you can take them home and make your own sandwiches. There’s an excellent Chinese bakery over on the Tampa side. I’m going to call them and see if they make the wheat flour-rice flour combination baguettes or if they know of a Vietnamese bakery in the area. If I can find the wheat/rice banquettes locally, I’ll get some, buy some of the pickled vegetables, and try making my own xa xiu or cha lua myself.

Or, maybe I’ll see if Ba-Le has any plans to open a restaurant in St. Pete any time soon. If not, I’ll be forced to fly back to Oahu for lunch. Either way, I won’t be quite so quick to assume I know what a “sandwich” is.

Too often, when people think of Hawaii, they think only of Waikiki. Waikiki is beautiful. Even the locals enjoy its energy and fun. Fascinating, I think, is that actual people live in locales that most of us consider exotic. They have a day to day existence there, they work there, grow old there, have families there…it is their home. Particularly fascinating, I think, is that those lives are supported by an infrastructure that is often exotic in its own right.

I had the opportunity to live in Hawaii for a while, recently. Through my sister, who lives there permanently, and other friends, and from my own residence there, I became familiar with a day-to-day world that most tourists miss. But, if you know it’s there, you can find it, and I guarantee you will enjoy it. One such place is Honolulu’s Maunakea Marketplace, 1120 Maunakea St., Honolulu, HI 96817, 808-524-3409 (map).

This place is not for “show.” It’s where the people who live here buy their groceries. It’s located on the edge of Chinatown, and explodes with motion, smells, and sound. It is an authentically Asian experience, with every Pacific rim cuisine represented in tiny stalls selling street food that you can eat standing or seated at long, extremely narrow communal tables. According to the 2000 Census Data, the racial profile of Hawaii of either one race alone or in combination with one or more other races (21.4% are of mixed race) is 39.3% white, 2.8% African American, 2.1% American Indian and Alaska Native, 58% Asian, 23.3% Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander, and 3.9% some other race. The Asian population is Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. This diversity is the thing I miss most about Hawaii, even more than the weather, which is unparalleled.

These tables and stalls are squeezed amidst a vast number of tables of produce, meats, and fish. Vegans best stay home. Those who’ve only ever bought food at sanitized mainland supermarkets will receive an intense lesson in just how many parts of an animal can be eaten. If you’re willing to try, you may be surprised that you, too, can learn to efficiently eat chicken or duck’s feet. Efficiently really is the operative word; although I enjoy them, I still haven’t developed the knack of reducing them to just a few bones as my Chinese friends can.

Above, fish—just a few of the many varieties available both gutted, as here, or still living, swimming in tanks. Below, mussels—again, just a few of the many types of shellfish available at the market, both alive and recently alive.

Nothing is pre-packaged of course. It’s bulk food heaven. Just as there are many new animal products to discover, there are many unfamiliar Asian vegetables that, on the mainland, you can only find in Asian grocery stores, but in Hawaii are in any market. Fortunately, large mainland American cities and certain parts of the South now have an abundance of such stores. If you see a–to you–peculiar plant food (you might not even know if it’s a fruit or a vegetable), ask what it is and how it’s prepared. The people in these markets are more than happy to share the secrets of their national cuisine. So much of our identity is tied up in the foods we, as a people, eat. When you seek to appreciate and duplicate those foods and ask for their help, you honor them and their heritage.

Quite near the market is the Chinese Cultural Plaza—to be covered in a different post—and the myriad markets and stores of Chinatown. One such market is the Ying Leong Look Funn Factory. Also spelled fen (pronounced like our “fun”) , fen is rice, or mung bean, noodles. I adore them (see Chinese noodles) and fix them far too often (not for restricted carbohydrate diets). A Hawaiian noodle dish I miss—and there are many—doesn’t seem to be found even in Asia, although it certainly is Asian inspired: Saimin (pronounced “sigh-MEN”)! It even beats out ramen in the late-night comfort food department on the islands. Of course, other local comfort foods, such as the plate lunch, will have to wait for a later post.

Regardless which ethnic cuisine you eat while in Hawaii, be sure to have “fun” (bad pun intended).