My amazing friend Global Melissa provided me with the most fantastic, supportive gift this week. Actually several gifts.  Two gift cards came in the mail, one for Jamba Juice and the other for a used bookstore (who wouldn’t need more cookbooks). And then she called and offered me her mother’s timeshare in Ko Olina to use as a workspace for the week.  I’m doing a little dance right now thinking about her (and her mothers) awesomeness.

I packed up all my work, my gym clothes and some delicious Leftovers and left my sailor with a house to himself for a few days.

Monday night I sat on the balcony wading through 9 months worth of Journals of the American Dietetic Association. I ate Green Beans from the farmers market.  And I fed my soul with this view.

The trade winds have returned and it has been pretty windy, but it’s still hot. Even at 8:30 in the morning.  And sometimes it’s just too hot to chew. So gather up all the Fruits and Veggies that look bright and refreshing and voila (I’m taking French):

Let’s see…we have some fresh Ginger, because my sailor drank all the Coffee and I just don’t feel like making anymore and Ginger is a great eye-opener. And we have two Tomatoes because I can’t remember when I bought them. A Lemon because I just bought a bag of Limes. Oh, Carrots because don’t you always add Carrots when you are juicing. Two Apples because they were hiding behind the Tomatoes. Ice cubes and topped with Ginger Mint. Delish!

And it gave me enough energy to figure out what this Twitter thing is all about.

Growing up, much of my extended family lived in NJ. Some were even in the next town.  That gave us to opportunity to have lots of Sunday family Dinners.  I am sure if I asked my brother or my cousins, they would all agree that we had Pot Roast every week.  And if I asked my parents or aunt and uncle, they would give me lists of all the different things we ate.  Children have very selective memories.

One of the things I love about moving back to Oahu is that the family Dinner can be resurrected. My brother and his girlfriend came over the other night and we had out first Hawaii Sunday Family Dinner.  A Dinner of `Opakapaka Fish Tacos, homemade Asian Cabbage Slaw, Guacamole, Tomato Salsa, and Tomatillo Salsa.  I was pretty excited that pretty much everything but the Corn Tortillas were local.  Not bad considering 85% of Hawaii’s Food is shipped in from somewhere else!

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Such is the dichotomy that is my sailor; and I imagine many of us…

It has been a VERY long time since I last wrote an entry about my adventures in food. Basically it is just lack of motivation. I’m not sure that I have even done that much adventurous cooking in the last year. But I have still had some adventures…I completed grad school (Masters in Nutrition), ate my way through Singapore, butchered a pig, ate the head of a prawn, the tongue of a lamb and the leg of a frog.

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This is a guest post from my mom, Mary…she’s witty.

Airline travel has reached a new low.

After having had my unopened bottle of water taken from me and thrown in the garbage and purchasing an identical 12 oz bottle for $4, I entered the plane and strapped myself in as if I were a product of CAFO waiting to be fed.

And I was not disappointed. Soon after takeoff the feeding process began. This was a 6 pm flight and all of the passengers were pleasantly anticipating what wonders of modern cuisine would be presented on their flight. All eyes hopefully turned toward the flight attendant as she came down the aisle. She soon reached my seat. There it was slapped down in front of me was a plastic container. And what was it that slid off the top. Beef Jerky.

What!?!

A plastic pouch of Beef Jerky complete with the chemical pouch inside to prevent the food (?) from molding.

The Beef Jerky was from Brazil. Apparently US cows and their processing do not contain enough chemicals. It contained 24% of our daily requirement of sodium. Let me see, what happens to people strapped in seats for long periods of time in a plane. They tend to dehydrate. What happens when you give them sodium? Their legs and ankles swell. Good choice of food for flight. Maybe it was the chemicals that were supposed to knock us out and keep us calm.

What else was in the “meal”…

Rondele cheese spread. If I wanted the food contents I could call an 800 number. But more salt. Crackers more salt. But redemption was there for me. Buried under my Beef Jerky there it was. A Hershey Bar. Yeah!!!! Let’s see milk chocolate. Milk is protein that’s good. Cocoa comes from a plant. That’s good. Sugar for energy. And some kind of starch (carbohydrates) to hold it all together.

I always said chocolate was a complete meal.

As a footnote, I saw the pilot as he entered the plane. I should have been duly warned when the pilot got on the plane with a sub sandwich.

>I do not believe in depriving myself to the foodstuffs that I crave.  Then again, I don’t particularly care for much in the way of dessert, rarely cook animal proteins at home, don’t keep junk food in the house, none of the normal human being stuff.  But I my not so secret craving is Diet Coke. 

>This morning I decided I needed a $6.00 Starbucks decaf soy latte so that I could concentrate on my Bioactive Compounds take home exam. Phytosterols, was that what I was craving. Whatever.  This isn’t about that …

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I was given a copy of Deborah Madison’s “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone” about 8 years ago when I was in massage school. I have played around with it a few times.  After I graduated from massage school a few of my classmates and I would get together every month and one of us would host a dinner.  I put a crease in the books spine for a few of those dinners.  Though I have no idea what I made, I remember the complements. 

My mother, in her never ending quest to satisfy my out of control pickiness about my meals, played around with the cookbook a few times.  But most of the time it just served as a massive door stop for me.

Writing this food blog has made me want to start cooking again.  I just moved into a new house with a fabulous, never been touched before, kitchen.  I did not love my old kitchen.  In fact she fought me almost every day.  But my new kitchen, she had been yelling at me for over a week, “Take me and do with me what you will!”

I took her gently. And I found the Deborah Madison cookbook deep in some box in the garage because I left it behind and my roommate remembered to bring it with her.  And what I noticed was a whole bunch of ripped yellow legal notepad paper (from my attorney mother who LOVES her yellow legal note pads, NO LOVES THEM!).  She had marked a whole bunch of recipes, some which I remember her making me and maybe the rest she planned on using in the future. I am not real good a following a recipe, but I thought it would be good to try. 

Since I haven’t made it to the market (other than to buy snacks  for my beach adventure with Marcy yesterday) since I moved in, tonight’s dinner was all about fishing out what food made it from the old apartment to the new house.  Most of what I could salvage was shiitake mushrooms, button mushrooms, cremini mushrooms and portabella mushrooms.   Now that’s variety.

Here we go…this picture…this is what I ended up with on the first go-round.  Burnt Butter.  I swear I thought I could cook. 

My Sailor tells me I can. But is he just doing that so he doesn’t have to?

>It is strange for me to live in a place where people think being lakeside is being at the beach. I grew up twenty minutes from the shore (not the beach) in NJ and when I lived in Hawaii, well you can figure it out. I don’t really know how to explain how I feel about the beach, but every woman in my family knows exactly what I mean. I don’t just love the beach, part of me always lived there. I downloaded “music” from iTunes that is just waves gently crashing on the shoreline on a beach on Kauai while doves call to each other in the background. I can listen to that for HOURS. And if I owned a heat lamp, I might turn that on too and pretend I am actually at the beach.

My friend Marcy is from Tuscon. They don’t have beaches there, I don’t think they even have water. She knows of a secret beach here in Seattle. We decided it was time to escape reality and all things homework for the day. We brought trashy magazines, summer reading type books and a rainbow of delicious snacks.

The way I was raised, when you went to the beach, you packed a lunch. Not just any old lunch. The kind of lunch that could last from 9am until 6pm. Every yummy snack you could think of, but healthy ones. We are not talking potato chips here, you could buy that on the boardwalk (an explanation of boardwalk food will have to be a whole other post at some point).

I told Marcy to just pack some snacks that she might want and I pack some more. Let’s see we had salsa, guacamole, chips, fresh carrots broccoli, cauliflower and snap peas, hummus, cheese, crackers, garlic stuffed olives, cherries, strawberries, blueberries and chocolate. And Marcy may not have been all that new to this idea, she packed a bottle of red wine.

It was the perfect day. We talked, we read, we eat, we relaxed and went we home that night ready to face the next week of graduate school with clear heads!

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I really enjoyed that egg salad that I didn’t want to share with anyone. It was well worth my selfishness.