Social Media & Smiles – I’m a big social media geek.  Some people think social media is impersonal, but it has been one of the best ways for me to meet new people throughout the community.  For years, I have talked with various people on Twitter and Facebook prior to meeting them, and upon arriving, found and met them for the first time, or reconnected with others who I frequently chat with, but don’t often get to see IRL (in real life).  It was like a giant Tweetup! We ate and talked, talked and ate. It was a sweltering hot day, and we were melting, so we hid out under this tent as much as possible.

Some of the attendees that I was excited to see and meet were Dania Katz (not pictured, as she was really busy working), Marilyn Jansen Lopes (just below, who organizes spectacular farm tours), and Peter Liu. I was also so excited to see that Melissa Chang was there and she introduced me to a number of new people (like cute farmers and chefs. Thanks Melissa!). Pictured in the group photo are Peter, Dawn of Sugar + Shake , Derek, Melissa, and Monica.

Pomai and Marilyn are here, on the left.

There are so many more people there that I met and talked with, and connecting with everyone was probably my favorite part of the whole day.  The festival ran from 9 am to 4 pm and I was there drinking in every possible moment of it.

If you take a look at Peter and Melissa’s photographs, the first thing that jumps out to me is that everyone is smiling!

More Multi-Sensory Moments - When I landed in the airport, I grabbed all the free touristy magazines I could to see what was happening on the island. I made a list of restaurants that I might want to try or chefs that were notable, and I was happy to see that they were pretty much all featured at the festival as part of the Grand Taste Education, in which chefs were paired with farmers to create dishes with local ingredients. We spent $30 and went to 12 different booths to get samples of the food that they were preparing. I requested vegetarian versions of everything so I could sample the flavors and presentation.  Better descriptions are on Melissa’s blog where she got video of all the details.

carrot tempura (yes, carrots!!)

taro cake over macnut pesto, beets, and salt/pepper marshmallow

ulu, sweet potato leaves, and micro-greens

I also got to meet Chef Sheldon who was recently featured on Top Chef, James Simpliciano of KupuMaui, and saw Brian Schatz.

Walking around, I was breathing in the smells of the Taste Education food cooking, the food from other local vendors, the smell of flowers, fruits, and vegetables, as well as the feast for the eyes of colorful and ornamental displays. I ate popsicles made with island fruit and drank strawberry lemonade to cool down and quench my thirst.

Family Fun

What I also loved seeing was all the chefs hanging out with their families, including their children who came to support them during the Taste Education event.  Many local families were there taking part in the fun which seemed like a great way to spend the day, train rides and all.

Pāʻia

The rest of my time was spent reading books, soaking up sun and surf at a gorgeous villa close to Mana foods in Pāʻia town, shopping and eating even more, including lilikoi gelato!

This trip was a much-needed getaway and inspirational learning adventure.

1. Eat lower on the food chain
Grains, beans, sea vegetables, and other plant foods are lower on the food chain and take less energy and resources to produce.  This reduces use of fossil fuels and eases the pollution burden entering your body and the environment.

2. Eat foods from your climatic zone
With our global economy, we can purchase things in the store from any region and during any growing season.  However, a tremendous amount of energy is required to supply places with foods that are not grown in that climate.  The foods that grow right here in Hawaii require less use of fossil fuels to deliver them, are fresher, and when purchase organically, are also more nutritious.

3. Vary your diet with the seasons
By eating foods that are naturally available in season, we take advantage of the cycles of nature.  When you naturally adjust your diet (e.g. more cooked foods in winter to keep you warm vs. more raw foods in summer to keep you cool) you stay in touch with nature and it’s easier for you to adapt to climatic changes.

4. Select organically grown foods
Not only are pesticides harmful to personal health and the environment, they are highly inefficient.  Only 0.1% of pesticides sprayed by airplane reach their intended target.  The rest damage plants, animals, and people. Moreover, a great deal of fossil fuels are used in the production, transport, and storage of chemical fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, and other artificial substances used in modern agriculture.  Nitrous oxide, produced by nitrogen-based fertilizers, is a major green-house gas.

5. Start a backyard garden
If you can’t start your own, join one of the several community gardens on Oahu.

6. Eat foods that can be stored naturally
Whole grains, beans, sea veggies, and other complex carbohydrate foods normally don’t require refrigeration.  They can be kept airtight in your pantry or cupboards.  On the other hand, meat, eggs, cheese, chicken, and other animal foods rapidly decompose into toxic bacteria and therefore require artificial preservation.

7. Eat whole foods
Eating foods in their whole form saves energy and makes use of nutrients that are naturally available.  Milling brown rice to white, for example, wastes energy and vital nutrients.  Even the green tops of daikon, carrots, turnips, and the roots of scallions can be cooked and eaten rather than discarded.

8. Restore home cooking
A great deal of waste is generated in restaurants (like styrofoam, paper, and plastic utensils). Cooking and eating at home helps reduce the use of fossil fuels that go into producing them in addition to the buildup and leakage into the environment after they have been discarded.

9. Make your own snacks and specialty foods
This avoids the processing, packaging, and transportation of processed foods.

10. Practice an ecological lifestyle
Use natural, chemical-free fabrics, body-care products, and cleaning products in your home.  Buy compact flourescent light bulbs.   Buy in bulk.  Buy less of everything.  Compost.  Recycle.  Keep physically active.  Walk, bike, carpool, or take the bus more and drive less.  Carry canvas bags for your groceries. Develop gratitude and appreciation for the earth, water, air, and ocean.  See your foods as the condensed essence of nature, and offer thanks before each meal.

After sitting in the jacuzzi and getting our massages, we went out to the area where they serve food and tea to relax and socialize. As anyone interested in health food knows, particularly in social situations, there just aren’t a lot of options for us here on the island and it takes mindfulness to seek out what you want to eat.  This doesn’t always work well when you’re spending time with people who have different dietary choices.  If it’s to my benefit to get to know these two people, wouldn’t I want to be a little bit pro-social and kind of just go with the flow?  This is where I’m very influenced by my training in macrobiotics.

The best possible choice for me on the menu appeared to be a grilled vegetable sandwich, which had a choice of either french fries or potato chips.  I guess they didn’t notice that I had ordered french fries until they actually arrived and I started eating them, at which point, they suddenly gasped as though they had witnessed a murder happening.

Yes, I occasionally eat french fries!

Another time I was at a holiday party (hmmm, something about the holidays happening here) and was talking to someone outside about some random topic that I can’t even remember, though I am pretty sure it had nothing to do with food or my business. It was at night, so we couldn’t see each other all that well, but I was enjoying myself and the conversation, when the person suddenly said, “I feel like I have to hide these ribs from you.”  I was like “What ribs? I had no idea what you were eating until you actually just said that out loud.”

Another thing that people have hid from me includes Starbucks coffee drinks, but I personally love going to Starbucks to get tea. Recently, someone ran away to another table at a happy hour/business networking event that I was attending so that I didn’t see what he had ordered and seemed embarrassed to say what his dietary choices were. He was embarrassed to say that he liked chocolate, and I was like, “I just ate my leftover Madre Chocolate for breakfast.” (I don’t do that every day, but gosh, we’re all human, and their chocolate is yummy!)

I get really irritated when the food police show up and scrutinize what I’m eating.

“You’re eating a tomato? That’s yin.”

“You’re eating an orange. That too acidic.”

“Macrobiotic people aren’t supposed to drink coffee.”

Please, don’t hide your food!  Growing up, I ate the standard American diet too.  I now love eating healthy and sharing it with others, but I’m not scrutinizing your every move and probably don’t even notice.  In fact, I would rather just get to know the authentic you. A new friend was telling me about his adventures working out in the field in another country and the cultural importance and necessity of eating bugs. That’s interesting. I don’t want to eat bugs, but I wanted to hear about his experiences.

Eating healthy is all about creating more freedom and happiness for myself which I do love to share with the community, but when it becomes dogmatic and rule-bound, I am uncomfortable.  Ultimately, we are all responsible for our own health and that’s just part of our own personal journey. Yes, I eat plants, but I don’t push my views on others.

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Fore more on this topic, you might also like to read my post Teach Tolerance

Here’s one example of what I mean. In the past week, I was in a new retail shop, browsing the dresses.  In the process of browsing, at least 4 to 5 women inadvertently bumped into me, such as our elbows or bags collided.  Because I noticed the apologies happened so many times all in a row, I started wondering about it.  What was the purpose of their apologies?  After all, it seemed to me that the aisle was way too small and it was certainly too full. Dresses were falling off the rack. Why would these women take any personal responsibility for that? It honestly felt a little bit to me as though my 1/2 of the human species didn’t want to take up any space in the world or didn’t feel the right to be there occupying space!

I did a quick Google search about gender differences in apologies and here’s a summary of the results:

When researchers analyzed gender differences in apologies in 66 people over a 12-day period, they confirmed women consistently apologized more times than men did. They also found that women thought certain acts were 3 times more offensive than men did, and that was why they apologized. Women apologize more because they feel bad about doing anything they consider offensive. When both men and women feel like they have done something wrong, they will apologize equally.  Men just have a “higher threshold” for bad behavior and are less likely to see something they have done as offensive.

Why would we think bumping into each other is bad?  Do we expect so little personal space to be ours?

There’s a woman at my bank who apologizes to me over and over again through the course of a very brief transaction. I have to say, this annoys me, as it makes me think that SHE thinks she’s unworthy in some way.  As a woman in business, I’d much rather be respected than liked and have become consciously aware of how many times I apologize and why.

Women have just as much right to breathe the same air. I think we do ourselves a big disservice by apologizing too much. What do you think? Sign in and leave me a comment.

Vanilla beans

A cacao tree on the Windward side

Another cacao tree on the same farm

Dave was telling us about lilikoi which they also use in their chocolate

Cacao seeds are purple on the inside before they are fermented and roasted.

Dave was explaining about the roasting process

Here’s a close-up of the cacao pod, roasted beans, vanilla, and cocoa butter.

Some of the finished product on display for sale in their Kailua shop.

Grinding the cacao takes days!

Dave, pouring the chocolate into molds

Learn more about the dinner on my EVENT PAGE

I first had enchiladas al mole when I lived in Eugene, OR. There is a large Mexican population there so the restaurants are amazing, and my dear friend Mario (and his wife Jenny) used to treat me to his mole and homemade salsa while we listened to salsa music from all over the world.  I’ll be serving this tasty sauce over a pinto bean burrito, with a side of MA’O Organic Farms Sassy Salad.

Learn more on the EVENT PAGE

or

I’m not going to suggest cutting chocolate out of Valentine’s Day, but what about combining two things that will impress your significant other more than anything else: chocolate and a home-cooked meal? Over the years, I’ve learned that going out to dinner on Valentine’s Day can be quite an ordeal. Long wait times, overpriced specials and servers who would rather be spending Valentine’s Day with their own significant other than waiting on you. The solution? Make dinner yourself. She/he will love you for it.

Which brings us back to chocolate. Put it in the main course rather than a box. If you’ve tasted a piece of extremely dark chocolate, you know that it has the potential for much more than just dessert. It has an earthy, bitter taste that may be tough to enjoy on its own. But that depth of flavor works quite well in savory dishes. Keep in mind, this is dark, unsweetened chocolate, not wrapped pieces of sugary candy.

While the Olmec Indians are credited with being the first to grow cacao beans as a crop, the beans’ popularity soared after Hernan Cortes brought them back to Spain along with the equipment and knowledge he obtained after conquering Mexico in 1519. From there, chocolate spread throughout Europe. And you can imagine what it did for chocolate sales in 1624 when Johan Franciscus Rauch of Vienna declared chocolate to be a food from the devil that drove humans to be consumed with passion.

The most common savory dish that uses chocolate is Mexican mole. As with any good legend, there are varying stories on why people started using chocolate in mole. The most common is that a group of panicked nuns in Puebla threw together a dish for a visiting archbishop with the few ingredients they had on hand. This included chilies, nuts, bread, spices and, of course, chocolate.

About The Author

Peter Ogburn is a radio and television producer who loves food and cooking for his family.  NPR: Kitchen Window

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]]> http://www.macrobiotichawaii.com/2013/03/chocolate-out-of-the-box-into-the-frying-pan/feed/ 0 http://www.macrobiotichawaii.com/2013/03/favorite-foodie-movies/ http://www.macrobiotichawaii.com/2013/03/favorite-foodie-movies/#comments Sun, 17 Mar 2013 08:24:40 +0000 Leslie Ashburn http://www.macrobiotichawaii.com/?p=3162 My own favorite movies about food and cooking are:

Like Water for Chocolate
Eat, Drink, Man, Woman
Tortilla Soup
Chocolat
Babette’s Feast
Ratatouille
Tampopo
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover
Mostly Martha
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

]]> http://www.macrobiotichawaii.com/2013/03/favorite-foodie-movies/feed/ 0 http://www.macrobiotichawaii.com/2013/03/cookspace-hawaii/ http://www.macrobiotichawaii.com/2013/03/cookspace-hawaii/#comments Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:38:13 +0000 Leslie Ashburn http://www.macrobiotichawaii.com/?p=3095 When my friend Ashley sold her share of Baby aWEARness, my space for cooking demos went “aloha”!  I was trying not to worry about this (even with all the people asking, “Why isn’t anything on your calendar?” when one day, Melanie Kosaka called me and let me know about her new business Cookspace Hawaii that was coming on-line in the spring of 2013. Holy Wow! What manifesting luck was that?!  I recently had my first class there, which was a private corporate bonding event, and this space simply a dream come true.  Hope you’ll come check it out on 3/17 when I teach my Go Green Cuisine cooking class!

 

]]> http://www.macrobiotichawaii.com/2013/03/cookspace-hawaii/feed/ 0 http://www.macrobiotichawaii.com/2013/03/mexican-pop-up-dinner/ http://www.macrobiotichawaii.com/2013/03/mexican-pop-up-dinner/#comments Wed, 13 Mar 2013 08:13:41 +0000 Leslie Ashburn http://www.macrobiotichawaii.com/?p=3093 I’m really excited to include Madre Chocolate‘s Xoconusco chocolate in my next pop-up dinner (Vegan Mexican) featuring their chocolate in a mole sauce.  In case you haven’t heard about them yet, their chocolate is made “from bean to bar” in Kailua.  I’ve taken a farm tour with them to learn how they grow the cacao as well as attended a chocolate-making class and had a complete blast. Each time, I learn so much.  Listening to them talk about flavors in chocolate reminds me of wine tasting, or learning about subtle nuances in coffee roasting to create certain flavors.

Find out more about the Pop-Up dinner here: http://www.macrobiotichawaii.com/event/veganmexican/

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