Snapshots and bites from January:

Spent a weekend on the water in Punaluu, to kick off our training for Merrie Monarch.  In between verses I snuck into the kitchen to watch Kumu’s mom make Wow Laulau: first frying lots of garlic in the bottom of a great pot, then adding a platter of pork laulau and covering with coconut milk and stock.  Good grief, it was ʻono. Here’s the moon in Punaluʻu that evening.

There’s a comment box at the bottom of every page on this blog but my family is settling into a pattern of non-verbal responses; when I wrote about substituting cayenne for a critical ingredient in Daniel Humm’s Provencal Granola, a month later half a jar of piment d’espelette arrived, bubble-wrapped, from my aunt’s own spice rack in Paris.  The more recent post about Jean Troisgros prompted this keepsake from 1973 to appear at our dinner table:

A little bit of cooking.  Best (and simplest) recipe I tried this month: blood oranges with green olives and red onion.

And gorgeous chioggia beets from MAʻO roasted into something that looked very much like striated ahi:

Chinese New Year came and went with little fanfare from us; the parents were in California so a friend and I celebrated at P.F. Chang’s.  It was my first visit there and I thought I was being sort of funny, but food-wise the joke was really on me.  Fortune-wise I think I did rather well:

And an experiment: eating unripe coriander berries, which are everywhere in a big tangle of bolted cilantro outside the lanai.  They are delicious.  Bright pop of cilantro and citrus.