Plant-based "Made in Hawaii" Potluck, Oct 15th

I just spent the afternoon shopping and preparing a few dishes for the "Made in Hawaii" potluck my friend Joy and I are hosting tonight. It was difficult to choose what to make because so many ideas flew into my mind while all the veggies simultaneously flew into the shopping cart. Approximately $100 later and I was on my way!!! I have a hard time with restraint when it comes to quality ingredients. :-) (But I will choose quality ingredients over other treats any time.)

I had a hard time with the flavor of the oil that I picked up (which shall remain unnamed) so my executive decision was to change to olive oil and use some balsamic vinegar too. Those were the only non-local ingredients in these dishes.

One of the items that I'd like to incorporate into a dessert is some kona coffee.... How to do this vegan style??? Hmmm...... Ok will work on that.

Here are some of the things that I was working with.....

Chinese cabbage, red radish, daikon, asparagus, basil, thyme, mint, lemon, orange, strawberry, lilikoi, tomato, Waialua chocolate, Japanese cucumbers, mac nuts, beets, beet greens, kale, and arugula.

Mighty Lentils

In our previous cooking class, Grains and Beans, one of the beans we explored was lentils. I absolutely LOVE lentils, and for this class we specifically used French Lentils. I find them so beautiful with their blue, green, and brown earthy, life giving, vibrant colors.

I typically ask questions like "What's so great about lentils? Why should we eat them?"

Well..... Here's why we want to get lentils into our diet. They:

• are high in protein & iron
  
• contain dietary fiber
• are low in calories
  
• contain essential amino acids (eat with rice to have a complete protein source)
  
• are inexpensive to purchase in bulk

They fill you up, but don't fill you out!

Cold French Lentil Salad

My friend Kathy turned me onto this dish that combines French lentils with fennel. I have to admit, even though I am adventurous, I was at first a little bit skeptical, until I tasted it.

The flavors exploded in my mouth, and boy, did I change my mind quickly! It was absolutely stunning!

It was so good that I immediately decided to highlight this recipe in my Grains and Beans cooking class.

When I took out the fennel, everyone got nervous and squirmed a little bit in their seats (kinda like how I had too). I could see them looking at me and thinking, "What is she about to do?!"

Here everything is ready and we are just about to eat.

(photos by Ruth)

The final recipe looks like this (below) and it comes from Vegetarian Times.

Refreshing Local Treats

I have been enjoying some local fruits from my friends' backyard gardens, specifically lilikoi and mountain apples. These are such refreshing treats.

Many Thanks

I have been really blessed lately with such a beautiful life, so I wanted to pause and acknowledge this. To my friends, customers, and teachers in life, I just wanted to express a big thank you for being a wonderful part of my life. In the past 9 months in particular, many of you have been such a beacon of love and light for me. Hope I don't leave anyone out. You are loved even if unnamed.

In gratitude to...

My family: For their unconditional love and support.
Anjali: For your friendship and skillful web design work.
Michelle D: You are always there for me. I love you!
Stephanie: For your friendship and beautiful graphic design.
Monique: For helping me shift my consciousness to a better realm.
Brenda: For your friendship.
Sandi: For teaching me about living fully. I cherish every day with you and your family.
Summer B: For your friendship.
Alice I: For always choosing love and light.
Gui: For creating an energetic space for me to reunite with myself on the yoga mat.
Paul and Amy: For both of your great sense of humor and Paul's beautiful photos.
Aprilani: For your friendship.
Joy and Shen: Blessing circles rule!
Shar and Art: For your open hearts and generosity.
Dania: For sharing important information with me with divine timing and your words of wisdom.
Kokua Market: For allowing me to develop new areas of my creativity.
MOA: For sharing space with me for cooking classes and for wonderful johrei energy work.
Baby aWEARness and Ashley Lukens: For sharing space with me for cooking classes, friendship and more cool stuff to come.
The Shintani's: For an opportunity to cook for people in life-changing ways.
Kathy: For being a colleague and friend in macrobiotics here on Oahu.
Willow: For insight into the sheer chaos!
Barbara P: For helping me manifest my heart's desire, quickly, easily, effortlessly for the highest good of all.
Nancy O: For the luscious mountain apples.
Geri: For your handcrafted dishtowels. I love them so much!
Holly & Moumen: For sharing.
Cherub & Joannie: For including me.
Divine source/mother nature: For providing everything I need.
Jeri: For helping promote me unselfishly.
Fred: Your heart is so filled with love. Thank you for touching mine. Any client who works with you is rich beyond belief.
Mavis, Ruth, Mi, Kay, Lei, Susan, Shelley, Joan, Karen, Jackie W, Arleene, Karin, and to all my incredible customers: I am honored to serve you! You make my job so wonderful! Thank you so much for your beautiful selves.

With love, Leslie

Photo by Paul Herchig of www.herchigimages.com

Adventures in Gluten-Free Baking

Sooooo many people have asked me to make gluten-free goodies, and I have honestly just resisted. Wheat is just so yummy and makes such delectable desserts. Well, I'm operating outside my comfort zone now, just experimenting, and so far the results are not bad! Possibly even truly delicious. Behold the Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins, and the Thumbprint Cookies. (I started baking on a whim and didn't have any apricot jam, so I improvised). I have to thank Lorraine for giving me a GREAT cookbook to get me going.

Heirloom Bean Soup

Sunday's cooking class is all about soups! This heirloom bean mix will be used in one of our soups that I'll demonstrate, seasoned simply with sea salt, veggies, diced tomatoes, and some herbs.

Cheesy Melty Vegan Lasagna

I'm recipe testing for future classes, and I put together a vegan lasagna that looks like it turned out pretty good.

Recent Photos from the Bento Cooking Class

photos by Paul Herchig

My Trip to Waikiki Worm Company

I've dabbled in composting before, but I was told that I wasn't doing it quite right. I had a spinning composter, but worms don't like to get tossed around. When I changed living arrangements, I sold my spinning composter and took a hiatus from the whole endeavor.

Throwing vegetable scraps away just didn't feel right, and after attending the recent agriculture conference, I committed to seriously getting back into composting. I made my visit to the Waikiki Worm Company this afternoon and purchased all my new composting items. Here is the store owner getting my worms ready for me.

Mindy explained to me how to set up my system. First, I have to shred paper and place it into my composting bin.
Then, I take the pile of worms and separate it from the vermicast, sprinkling the vermicast onto the paper to make a nice bed for the earthworms. It's important to water it so that it stays moist.
From there I take the ball of earthworms and place them onto the bed and let them wriggle their way into their bed of paper and vermicast.

Now I can begin to feed them, so I grabbed some alfalfa sprouts that I had leftover from a cooking class and sprinkled them in.

Finally, it's important to cover the food with more paper, and then wet everything down, and place on the lid.

My system is now operational! I'm heading back to her shop on Saturday to pick up some compost tea to spray on the foilage of my plants.

I'm really seriously working on getting a big container garden going. Here is my kale, basil, thyme, chives, parsley, and Maui onions.... (hard to see but they are all in there!).

Cilantro and arugula are sprouting in some other containers...

Hawaii State Agriculture Conference

On September 23rd and 24th, I attended the Hawaii State Agriculture Conference at the beautiful Ko'Olina Resort. For two days, I thoroughly enjoyed and took in as much of the information as possible, and here is my interpretation and summary of the issues for you:

• We as a nation and world are in completely uncharted territory in terms of CO2 emissions and are in dire need of innovation and new ideas.
  
• The most critical issues facing the islands seem to be the price and/or availability of energy, land, water, and the number of farmers. In addition, financing and transportation are important issues. 'Energy' and 'Agriculture' may see some big fights to come. The main recommendation is for everyone (conventional and organic farmers and ranchers) to try to "get along" and to communicate well regarding our shared issues.
• UH's College of Tropical Ag is working on aquaponics to meet some of the new sustainability standards set for 2050. Aquaponics helps solve problems of access to land. Some of the components of farming this way are expensive, so they are looking at ways to source items locally (e.g., fish food and fertilizers).
  
• We currently have 90% of our energy shipped to the islands in the form of oil. There is a big push to move to biofuels (and I was sitting between someone from the Department of Energy and another person from the Navy who were both asking lots of questions and taking many notes), but farmers and ranchers are losing their land so that biofuels can be grown and produced. Although it was left unsaid, it was implied that the biofuels are GMO crops.
• It's critical that we all move to organic and sustainable methods of production. For health reasons in particular, organics were strongly recommended. We heard from ex-conventional farmers who have completely changed their methods and yielded some incredible crop results.
  
• Consumers need to educate themselves that food doesn't come from a store, it comes from the farmers. We all really need to stop shopping at places that offer "cheap" food and start prioritizing local producers. Buying "cheap" creates more long term systemic problems.
  
• Ranchers and farmers are people on whom we all currently rely every day (so we really need to value and respect them).
  
• Ranchers are moving toward grass fed beef. The cow is becoming a key part of the biofuel industry. It's predicted that perhaps the ranchers will start building some bio-refineries and when this happens, they will be selling energy back to HECO. (Seems like we really ought to be nice to our farmers!)
• Cows and worms are some pretty valuable creatures.
  
• Korean Natural Farming Methods and biochar are a couple of things to seriously learn about and incorporate into current farming.

Although the mood was hopeful and optimistic, I came home concerned about our food and energy security.

Photos from the Lunch: Wraps & Spreads cooking class

Thanks again to Ruth for sharing her photos from the afternoon cooking class! I had some help rolling everything up for everyone so that we could move on to the next recipe. Looking forward to next week's class, Lunch: Gourmet Bento Box Items

Recovering Your Health

From The Book of Macrobiotics by Michio Kushi

In order to recover and develop our physical, mental, and spiritual health, we need to reorient our way of life in the following ways:

• we should reflect upon our own daily life, whether we are pursuing only sensory pleasures and emotional comfort, and thus forgetting our native potential for greater happiness and higher freedom

• we should reflect further upon our daily food and drink and consider whether our meals are really balanced to produce the best quality of blood and cells as well as to secure the best mental and spiritual conditions.

• we should also reflect upon our thought and behavior toward our family, friends, and other people and consider whether our respect and love are really dedicated from the heart and whether our behavior toward them is really serving for their health and happiness

The beginning of self recovery from all personal unhappiness, including physical and mental disorders, is our understanding of the perceptual order of yin and yang. In order to release ourselves from all physical and mental disorders changing our degenerative tendencies towards health and happiness, we must first apply our understanding of yin and yang to our daily dietary practice, how to choose, prepare, and take our food and drink. Through proper eating, our blood and body will become sound and whole. Mental and spiritual well being will naturally follow. food is creating us. If the nourishment we receive is proper, we are naturally more energetic physically, more comfortable emotionally, and more elevated spiritually than when our way of eating is imbalanced and disorderly. If our daily food is improper, our health declines, our emotions are disturbed, and our spirit becomes chaotic. Personal feelings, social relations, and our approach to any problems are influenced by what we eat. When we feel any frustration and disturbance, we should first reflect upon what we have been eating. Our physical and mental habits, as well as tendencies in our thinking and capacities of our consciousness all depend upon what we have been eating for a long period, from the embryonic stage through childhood up to the present. To change our food is to wholly change ourselves. Through food, consciously or unconsciously, we shape our destiny.

Kanu Hawaii Eat Local Cooking Class

Date: October 1, 2010
Time: 5:30 pm	to	8:30 pm

As part of the Kanu Hawaii Eat Local Campaign, I will be teaching a class emphasizing local produce and how we can use it in quick, easy, nourishing, and delicious meals. This class is great for anyone who wants to use more local produce and even for those who use local produce often, but may want new recipe ideas.

Location: Pan American MOA, 3510 Nuuanu Pali Road, Honolulu, HI

Prices and more details can be found on my website:
Kanu Hawaii Eat Local Cooking Class

Dinner in a pinch

My mom and I were on our way to yoga class, and then discovered that we had the wrong day and time. We decided to go shopping instead, and by the time we were done, most of the day had slipped away. We had to come up with a meal for dinner, QUICK! My Dad was coming home, and my sister and brother in law were on their way over too. So I took the leftover black beans and turned them into a delicious and hearty soup with garlic, onion, carrot, sweet potato, cilantro, and celery and it only took about 15 to 20 minutes to cook the veggies. My family likes a little extra flavor, so I took about 2 tablespoons of salsa and stirred this in with cumin and sea salt. There was some leftover brown & wild rice so that was a great side dish, and I took the kale my cousin sent us home with and threw together a raw kale salad filled with grated carrots, sliced snap peas, tomatoes, sunflower seeds, and roasted soybeans for a little bit of crunch. It was dressed with some tamari, lemon juice, brown rice vinegar, and olive oil. They had the meal with some chicken, while I skipped that part. My niece and nephew especially liked the brown rice. (The dessert is described in the next post.) All of this took from 30 to 45 minutes to whip up. It's really possible to have tasty healthy food that doesn't take forever to prepare leaving us time to play outside in the late summer sun.

Apple Peach Crisp

When I was with my cousin the other day, I picked several peaches off her tree, and when my sister called asking for her favorite apple crisp, we decided to make it apple peach crisp. After stopping at the health food store to buy some fresh Washington apples, I headed home to make the crisp for her. The crust is made with oats and nuts and this smells so scrumptious baking in the oven. My family enjoyed it with some vanilla ice cream, and it's delicious by itself with tea. I meant to take a photo of the final product, but it got eaten too quickly.

Farm-to-Table living

I have been in Washington enjoying the end of summer, and loving the farm-to-table living that is part of the lifestyle here. One highlight has been spending time with my family, and also up at my cousin Sarah's home in Skagit Valley where she lives off the grid with her family. We had two incredible meals straight from her garden including zuchinni, cucumber, tomatoes, beans, lettuce, kale, radish, celery, blackberries, blueberries, peaches, plums, nasturtiums, and borage.

the grape arbor

my niece's new friendone of the amazing greenhouses

zuchinni

pears not quite ripe yet

corn

I will add new photos in the next post!

More farm-to-table living

my cousin harvesting zuchinni and cucumbers

hops

currants
sweet peas
blackberries - we stuffed ourselves

garden art

Brown Rice Sushi

Today in the Healthy Back to School Lunch Box cooking class another one of the items on the menu was brown rice sushi. I brought home the leftover ingredients made up some extra pieces for my lunch on Monday - brown rice, natural ginger pickles, ume, carrots, tofu, and cucumber. I used to think that making sushi was difficult, but it's much easier than I ever realized, once I rolled a few. You don't need to be an expert to do this. Excited to enjoy them!

(I will be teaching how to make brown rice sushi on Sept 3rd! We'll have a great variety of delicious sushi. More info here....)