Poi was used in the old days as a way to make more palatable meats cured and preserved with salt in the absence of refrigeration.  Today it’s used as a thickener for Hawaiian foods, such as soups, stews, and sauces.

The food poi is sometimes confused with the fire-juggling art of the same name.  If your poi is on fire, don’t eat it.  

Where it is: 
The only place I’ve seen it sold with any kind of frequency is at the Hasagawa General Store in Hana.  It’s also served at luaus, mostly as an obligatory part of any Hawaiian meal. The truth is you probably won’t want it and don’t need it at a luau, much less make it yourself, so my suggestion is to try it if it’s offered to you as an act of good etiquette, and then move on to the tasty stuff.  Paste is paste, which you probably ate plenty of back in Kindergarten.

Other poi-related foods and dishes that you might actually like  include:

• Deep fried taro puffs
• Poi cocktail (milk with poi)
• Taro chips

Have you recently tried poi?  Write in or comment with your experience.

Photo by Flickr–Creative Commons, by Ebonabri

Post from: The Hawaii Traveler

You may have heard about Spam Jam on Oahu, and the Hawaiian obsession with beef jerky. And now there’s an entire cookbook dedicated to Hawaiian recipes involving everyone’s favorite pork product (you know you love it): Spam. In Muriel Miura’s Hawaii Cooks With Spam, now you can join the islands in its Spam enthusiasm anytime.
Miura’s menu of Spam delicacies even include a recipe for Spam Nori Maki Sushi, which you can find at NPR, where she was interviewed. Not only are Pan-Pacific recipes honored, but you’ll find everything, from around the world, all the food that sticky and sweet, hot and spicy. But with Spam.

And to think that there are those who say that spam is evil.

Photo by Flickr–Creative Commons, by dtweney

Post from: The Hawaii Traveler

It’s the perfect prelude to the 26th Annual Hawaiian Slack Key Festival on August
17: The fourth annual Ledward Ka’apana Aloha Acoustic Workshop, hosted by the
Outrigger Waikiki on the Beach. The workshops, held August 13 to 16, 2008, are a rare opportunity to learn from four Grammy nominees and Japan’s #1 female
slack key artist, Agnes Kimura.The registration fee for the Aloha Acoustic Workshop is $700 and includes four
full days of educational workshops and music sessions. To sign up, call the
Kihoalu Foundation at 08-226-2697 or send an e-mail to kihoalufoundationinc@yahoo.com. The workshop is limited to 20 participants. Slack Key participants who stay at Outrigger Waikiki or Outrigger Reef receive $100 off the Aloha Acoustic Workshop fee.

Post from: The Hawaii Traveler

When we went to the outfitter in Hanalei to rent kayaks, the store owner was chatting up a young couple at the window–about nothing in particular. Certainly not about kayaks. We waited our turn, and fifteen minutes later, my husband was shuffling his feet and loudly clearing his throat. We were burning daylight; the water was getting choppy. Who knew what was happening out on the bay? We were stuck at the window of the kayak operator, who had no obvious plans to help us instead of the the young couple. The young couple, by the way, had no plans of renting a kayak or any other equipment that day.

Was the store owner being rude to us? No, actually, he was just engaging in a practice called “talk story,” an informal conversation in which two or more participants  listen, collaborate, and cooperate in a discussion that may or may not have a purpose, direction, or time constraint.  It’s just what it sounds like: a personal story told with the simple intention of enjoying the pastime of storytelling.

Can it be maddening to the person who’s got a schedule, a duty to perform, or is disinterested in such distractions?  You betcha.

But to talk story–or at least to tolerate it–is to participate in an important part of Hawaiian culture, and gives us an opportunity to reflect on how we feel about time, and how we use it.  Who you are, and how you use your time are the kinds of meditations and considerations we make whenever we travel–whether we know it or not.

In fact, the talk story tradition is so important that there’s even a Talk Story Festival,  wherein storytellers from Talk Story Radio feature their own stories, and where you can get ideas for starting some of your own.

And had we been willing to jump in and try our hand at it, we may have been able to talk our story into the shop owner’s, and gotten our kayak the old fashioned way: By blending in a little.

Post from: The Hawaii Traveler