Highlights of the culinary type

We have been enjoying mostly home made meals, largely courtesy of Mum and Dad (what a holiday!), but have been out a couple of times. The best eats:

-- kampachi.. as already mentioned, there is a delicious ocean-farmed local fish that we have cooked several times on charcoal.

-- ono ceviche.. a freebie from our fish shop, Dolphin, in Hanalei.

-- Mum's roast lamb for New Year's Eve dinner.

-- the daily papaya. Sometimes with salt and lime, sometimes piled with yoghurt.

-- halo halo shave ice. Halo halo is a Filipino (?) mixture of young coconut, a milky jelly, some kind of lychee-like fruit, sweet red beans. It seemed familiar from Hong Kong. We had two different but excellent versions of this. From Jo-Jo's in Waimea, with coconut icecream, toasted coconut and coconut cream on top-- delicious. From Halo Halo in Lihue, with vanilla icecream but condensed milk and coconut syrup poured through beautifully delicate ice. Also delicious, especially the texture and quality of the ice, but not quite as earth-shattering as Jo-Jo's.

-- everything we ate at 'Ohana Diner. At this amazing little place in a strip mall in Kapa'a, we sampled squid lu'au (actually octopus in a soup of minced taro leaves and coconut milk), lau lau (pork shoulder baked til melting in a wrapping of the same delicious, smoky-flavoured taro leaves), pipi kaula (jerky meat marinated and fried-- SO much better than it sounds, tender and crispy and intensely flavorful), kalua pig (shredded roasted pork with some kind of marinade), a Spanish style rice whose local name I have forgotten, and a wonderful dessert of chocolate haupia pie (layers of "whip" cream, chocolate, gelatinated coconut and a coconut biscuit base). YUM. The only disappointment about this experience is that Mum and Dad had already taken off and were not there to share it with us. Anselm especially enjoyed the lu'au soup, and Eliot (who ate everything except the kalua pig) spent the car ride home commenting "Good food!" and listing everything she'd eaten.