Food Trip: Maui & The Maui Foodist Bucket List

When asked to think of Maui food, you probably imagine fresh pineapples and fresh poke--and understandably so! It would be a disservice to yourself and to the island to not enjoy those little wonders while visiting the Aloha State. But there is a lot more to Maui cuisine, something I quickly learned during two long, food-centric trips. I was doing research (read: eating anything and everything) with my man-friend for his book, The Foodist Bucket List: Maui, which compiles the island's top 100 edible adventures, from farm to fork. If you're headed to Maui (or just enjoy reading about food) I can't recommend the book enough--it's funny, useful, and truly a joy to read. In the meantime, I've narrowed down my own (much shorter) list of must-try Maui food. I stuck with more casual options (you don't need me, or anyone, to tell you Mama's Fish House is excellent), and I've divided it up by location for convenience. Enjoy!

Hana Highway

Coconut Glen's: Truly an oasis on the long, winding, Road to Hana, the small colorful shack that is Coconut Glen's serves freshly made coconut-based vegan ice cream, made from coconuts harvested in the adjacent rainforest. Passing this place up is a grave mistake, for vegans and dairy-lovers alike.

The Upcountry

La Provence: Butter and carbs and more butter. I know, it's not exactly the picture of a Maui vacation. But do not visit the upcountry without stopping at this small, authentic French bakery. Get there early, as the baked goods often sell out before 9 am. Order the quiche, finish with the almond croissant, and start your day in the upcountry off right.

Surfing Goat Dairy: What if I told you there was a magical, tropical place, with prancing baby goats, expansive ocean views, and flights of farm-fresh goat cheese? Well, this place exists and it's called Surfing Goat Dairy.

Grandma's Coffee House: The perfect, local, family-run spot for a classic breakfast, with delicious food (go for the weekend benedict special), a quaint patio, and killer island views. Plus, they've been growing, processing, and roasting (in-house!) their organic coffee since 1918. What's not to love?

Makawao

Makawao Sushi and Deli: Ben's Rainbow Roll. Absolutely loaded with crazy-fresh fish, hand-rolled by Ben himself, and served by his wife in this small, unassuming, deli-style restaurant. That's all.

Paia

Paia Bowls: Tucked away off the busy streets in this once quiet hippy/surfer town is this perfect little acai spot, with 100% acai bowls, yummy toppings, reasonable prices, and the cutest plant-ridden patio to enjoy it all on.

Paia Bay Coffee: The most perfect Hawaiian coffee shop imaginable. Also tucked away off the bustling Paia streets, this coffee shop is a lush, tropical plant-filled paradise, free of tourists and full of fresh Maui air... and great coffee.

Mana Foods: Think Whole Foods, but way smaller, more local, totally Hawaiian, and actually community-based. The perfect little grocery store to fill up on any and all food needs--like fresh, beautiful, local produce for snacking, or packing a sack lunch before hitting the road to Hana.

Kahului

Poi By The Pound: You can't go to Hawaii without trying actual Hawaiian food--which, contrary to popular belief, is not fresh fruit and fresh fish. Classic Hawaiian food is more like spam, white rice, mac salad, pork, and poi--a strangely textured taro root paste. Go to Poi By The Pound, try the kalua pork, the lau lau, the poi, and embrace Native Hawaiian culture.

Kihei

South Maui Fish Company: The. best. poke. ever. Not the best poke I had in Maui, not the best poke I've had from a food truck, just the best. The freshest-tasting and most perfectly-textured poke I've had. Period.

Lahaina

Choice Health Bar: The beloved Hawaiian acai bowl may not find any greater glory than the version that is offered at Choice. A massive bowl of thick purple acai with plenty of granola, bananas, coconut, and more. Not to mention, healthy and vegan salads, plate lunches, and bowls. This place is the real deal.

Everywhere

Most importantly, don't forget to look out for serendipitous discoveries of fresh ripe fruit still hanging on the tree--a very common occurrence all over the island. After all, the overwhelmingly lush and abundant landscape is the true wonder of a place like Maui, and is the reason it has so much good food in the first place. So, as always, shout out and mahalo to Mother Earth.

Any spots you love in Maui that I missed? Let me know! :)

Dreaming of Jamaica | Sourdough & Garlic Sauce

On the north coast of the island of Jamaica, 1.5 hours from the hustle and bustle of Kingston, 3 hours east from the resort relaxation of Ochorios, and just a few miles up the road from Robins Bay town and into the bush, sits Yerba Buena Farm. And on Yerba Buena Farm, bananas, mangoes, and sugar cane thrives. Chickens and goats wander. A family lives.

I had the privilege of staying with Kwao and Agape at their small farm, where they keep bees and raise their six boys (and do plenty of other things). All of the boys resemble their father, whose long, lean frame is topped by his dreads—except four of the boys' dreads are a sun-bleached blonde, and none of them can grow a beard. Agape has longer, thicker dreadlocks that graze her lower back.

Atop a hill sits the kitchen, a mostly wooden structure, relatively open to the elements, where racks of bananas and plantains hang from the ceiling. Buckets of fresh Jamaican all spice (a key ingredient of "jerk”) rest along the wall. Kittens and lizards come and go as they please. And in the middle of the day, the entire family gathers to escape the Jamaican heat, during which time you can hear any of the boys (Kwao included), pining for a refreshment: "Agapeeeee, watahmelonnnnn."

When you exit the kitchen and follow the stone path downhill towards the ocean, the farm surrounds you. The compost pile and sugar cane on your left. A massive mango tree and a built-by-hand brick oven on your right. You pass two bungalow-type structures that serve as bedrooms, until you reach a third, the largest one, at the end that the whole family sleeps in.

We stayed in one of these rooms, towards the bottom of the hill, right on the coast. Days were slow, salty and sweaty. Spent wrestling with 7-year-old Enoch. Learning to make sea salt from 13-year-old Melchizedek. Trying to understand 4-year-old Kofi's adorable mix of English and Jamaican Patois. Visiting the market with Kwao and 15-year-old Emmanuel.

But most often, days were spent talking with Agape. About her life, and Kwao's, and theirs. About Jamaican culture, about their farm, and of course food. They are Rastafarians, which—contrary to popular stereotypes—is not very common in Jamaica. It's why their whole family has dreadlocks—also not very common in Jamaica—and why they eat entirely vegan.

Agape cooks exclusively over fire—either on a metal stove made of rebar or the brick oven Kwao built. They eat what grows on their farm, what they can get from the market in Kingston, and a lot of oil. Upon finishing the last of a bowl of sautéed green bananas, in which I admittedly left more than a tablespoon of oil at the bottom, Agape said:

You know, Kelsey, the real Jamaican way to eat that would be to mash up your bananas so you could sop up all this oil—for the calories.

Though she smiled as she said it, my mind filled with the talk of low-calorie foods and calorie-counting diets, and I couldn't help but feel a bit silly wondering how we in the United States (as well as other nations) had gotten ourselves into such a strange predicament.

At Yerba Buena, when we weren't passing around guinep from the market or sucking on sugarcane pulled straight from the ground, we were eating a variety of vegetables, fruits and grains. We ate starches like plantains, breadfruit, or cassava and rounded out meals with rice, lentils, or Agape's insanely delicious homemade sourdough.

In the style of traditional sourdough, she mixes flour and water and lets it sit out in the heat, kickstarting a fermentation process that results in a unique, thriving colony of bacteria and yeast—an active sourdough starter. After she prepares her dough and lets it rise, she places it into her cast iron skillet and puts the whole thing right into the fire of her brick oven.

Agape was actually raised in San Fransisco. Her and Kwao have both lived in the United States and Jamaica, and have gained a valuable and unique perspective because of it. Alongside her nourishing sourdough, Agape often served a sauce made by blending just garlic and oil, which somehow results in a creamy, white, and extremely potent garlic sauce. This, she learned from her Greek grandmother.

This is the world we live in today: so connected to each other that two Americans—one of Lebanese descent and the other Norwegian—can sit in a kitchen in the Caribbean and share a meal with Jamaicans that includes tropical fruits and vegetables, a bread preparation that likely originated in the Middle East thousands of years ago, and a dish from Greece.

Cuisine fusions are not so much a category of restaurant as they are the natural and unavoidable result of our interconnectedness and our ability to travel places and get ingredients that historically were inaccessible.

Last week, I found myself longing for Jamaica, and Yerba Buena, and the boys, and Kwao and Agape, and Agape's meals. And so we decided to recreate this one dish to get a taste of our Jamaica—which ironically, is actually a taste from Greece. We made a dense loaf of sourdough that included sprouted lentils, rice, and wheat in our cast iron skillet, and paired it with a blended sauce of yogurt, olive oil, and plenty of garlic. We opted for yogurt instead of using just oil because we're lucky enough to not have to eat strictly for calories.

Despite the apparent differences in lifestyle between Yerba Buena and my hometown in Illinois, the similarities are unavoidable. As I watched and interacted with the boys, I was reminded of my own little cousins, and I was struck by how similar they really were to each other. How they are motivated and entertained by the same things. How they try to play with and engage me in the same ways.  How I could use the same exact tactics to dodge getting dragged into something if need be.

And even beyond the kids, when it's dinner time and Agape calls out to everyone, and they trickle in one by one to gather in the cozy kitchen and eagerly fill their bowls, how different is it really than my own home, my own mother, calling out to my own family when dinner is ready and waiting to be served? Though I am not the first to notice it, there is comfort in that fact. That maybe the one thing that is really shared across most cultural divides is the creation, anticipation and nourishment of a meal—and perhaps most of all, the enjoyment that comes from sharing it with others.

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CREAMY GARLIC SAUCE
For dipping, spreading, or drizzling.

Ingredients
3/4 cup plain yogurt
1/4 cup olive oil
3-4 cloves of garlic
pinch of sea salt

Instructions
1. Add ingredients to blender.
2. Blend until creamy and garlic is totally incorporated.
3. Enjoy however you please - I recommend as a dip with hearty sourdough.

Note: This will have a strong raw garlic flavor! If this is off putting to you--or you're worried about your breath--try using less garlic, or roasting it first.

Farm-to-Fork | Pig-to-Plate

Inspiration: Video, Of Land and Sea | Patience and Preservation from Terasu.

Farm-to-fork -- the ever trendy, catch-all term for food that was cultivated by hand on a homey little farm, and transported directly to your plate for happy, guilt-free consumption. Don't get me wrong--I love a good farm-to-fork restaurant as much as the next hip 20-something. But let's be honest here: what do you picture when you hear farm-to-fork?

Admittedly, I picture manageably-sized rows of fresh greens, of carrots, of tomatoes, of peppers. I picture a wise, able man in a worn-in flannel kneeling next to his bounty as he scoops purple heirloom potatoes out of the cold, promising soil. I picture a brown woven basket filled to the brim with Mother Nature's gifts, ready for transport from the farm straight to a white, bright, minimalistic kitchen to be quaintly prepared by a true artisan, ethical chef, and served to me within the walls of an earthy-toned, uber-trendy, self-aware restaurant.

Farm-to-fork experience at O'o Farms || Maui's upcountry || January 2016

That sounds great and all, but unless you are a vegetarian or vegan (which most estimates say make up 5% or less of Americans), you're not thinking about the same process that had to occur to put that 100% grass fed beef, or organic, free range chicken on your plate right beside those farm-fresh vegetables. To ignore this aspect of the farm-to-fork experience, doesn't do justice to the farm or the fork.

This video from Terasu beautifully shows the process by which Brandon D'Imperio converts pigs to prosciutto at his Washington ranch--a true farm-to-fork, or pig-to-plate, experience. The video does not shy away from the harsh reality that the pig must be killed, nor does it vilify it, but rather, it invites the viewer to confront that reality. The reality that even if the pork on your plate was ethically raised, make no mistake, life was lost.

In most cases, it seems we either condemn the killing of animals for food, or we choose to ignore it. Many people are horrified at the thought of killing an animal, and yet they eat meat on a daily basis. Herein lies the tragedy. We are so far removed from our food that, somehow, we are able to eat meat and not once consider the life that was lost in order to bring it to us. In this blindness, the relationship between man and animal is forgotten.

Watching the video was a bittersweet experience for me--as meat consumption probably should be. Though I don't think eating meat is unethical, it is still a sad thought that a breathing, sentient being is slain on my behalf. Sad, but surely beautiful. In the video, Brandon tells how his relationship with food has evolved:

In the beginning for me, food was more about flavor and nourishment, but through the times and experiences I’ve had it’s grown into being more about relationships, love, and patience.

Because he understands everything that goes into putting a piece of prosciutto on his plate--caring for the pig, killing the pig, cleaning the meat, salting, waiting, the patience, the care--he is able to fully appreciate it. He's able to appreciate the relationship between man and animal, the love and care that can go into food preparation, and the animal itself. After all, when all "pork" is to you is a tasty piece of meat that has magically been prepared and served to you neatly on a plate, can you really appreciate the animal from which it came?

In some sense, life on earth exists in clear, decipherable ways. Plants rely on microorganisms to grow, plants convert sunlight into energy, animals eat plants to obtain this energy, animals eat each other, and of course, life after death persists in the form of new life.

And so it goes, humans play our part too. But when we ourselves do not kill an animal, when we don't even think about the fact that an animal was killed so that we could eat it, our role in this cycle grows undecipherable, and we lose the closeness that we once shared with our food and with the earth. And only by once again deciphering our role in that cycle, can our food systems begin to be repaired and our relationship with the natural world be restored.

Do you think about the relationship between man and animal when you eat meat? Do you refuse to eat meat? Or do you choose not to think about it? Let me know your take in the comments!