Colin and the Kana Vinaka team are currently over in Bangkok taking part in the Annual Asian Organic Gourmet Festival, a four day food, wine and wellness extravaganza. 

Back In January, we started a short, 3-week cooking class in Raglan teaching the basics of cooking to those that felt they didn't have the skills to cook their own meals at home.

Talk about gourmet connections.  When people know you love edibles, they will go out of the way to make sure you connect.  Recently while at one of my Wednesday morning's wood-turning sessions at the Waikato Guild of Woodworkers in Hamilton where for about 2 1/2 years i've been turning large native wood bowls and platters, Clive, one of the senior turners, approached me with a question.  It seems that one of the old fellows has on his Te Kowhai farm some pine trees whose large pine cones he was using for stoking his winter fire.  Accidentally as one was burning, some nuts popped out on to the floor in front of the fireplace and he wondered whether they might be edible, so he asked Clive to bring some pine cones in for me to analyse.  Well, to my surprise these were the cones from pinus pinea, the favoured Mediterranean pine nut.

Not many people are into eating Octopus, probably because they don't know how to prepare it properly, it's not served on many restaurants' menus, and they have not yet enjoyed or tasted it's flavour and texture. Since the favourite diet of octopus is crayfish, especially when they are trapped in locals' craypots, you can understand why it would taste like crayfish and have a similar texture to its tail meat.  You can also understand why cray fishermen hate octopus so much when they see one or several of their captured crays eatened from within, leaving just the intact empty shells left in the pot along with the fat culprit.  You can now probably see why i get so many hated culprits given to me by the local cray fishermen.

Just arrived yesterday on this beautiful paradise island where everything is in your face... the flowers, fruits (moli-bush lemon season), sea, local seafood cooking on the grill (crayfish, opakapaka, local crabs and oysters), need I say more.  I'm looking forward to working with our team of chefs, many whom I have previously trained, in catering for the grand pre-opening week-long visit of the L.A. entrepreneur owner and his family of 24 - wife, grown kids, their partners and their children.  i know it will be hectic with high expectations and lots of coordination and planning, but we are all looking forward to creating beautiful food out of our 5 acres of organic gardens, bountiful seas and native wildlife from the surrounding islands. More later on in the week.  

Well, this is the final day of our training and everyone is amped and excited.  Ater a long and arduous assembly of produce and other cooking ingredients , we head down to the Fiji National University's training kitchen to begin prep for the big finale dinner to end the conference on Agritourism, celebrate our week's accomplishments and enjoy the best Contemporary Island cuisine to be had anywhere (not my words).

Starting this past Monday, 10 top chefs from around the South Pacific: Cook Islands, Samoa, Niue, Tonga, Solomons, Kiribati, Vanuatu and 10 chefs and chef tutors from Fiji were introduced and trained in the use of local produce in creating contemporary island cuisine by myself, Shailesh Naidu, Executive Chef at the OutRigger Hotel & head of the Fiji Chefs Association, and Robert oliver, celebrity chef and famous cookbook author.

I returned to Suva late last Friday to have a week to do research for my book, Kana Vinaka and prepare physically and mentally for conducting the Pacific Chefs training session next week, sponsored by SPC, SPTO, and USP in Nadi.  Up early on Saturday morning to search the markets for any new produce and to find out what is and isn't in season, I purchased some classic and fresh seafood and fresh local produce to prepare some new dishes for my book and to help Hogamata Farms with the marketing of their very special HoP, hearts of palms.

A few weeks ago when visiting Hawaii to research the connection between Oahu's community farms and the chefs that run the vibrant hospitality industry's appetite for local grown produce, I had the chance to visit one of my old childhood haunts, Chinatown markets.  This is where I spent many days and hours with my tireless cooking grandmother, Popo LIm, shopping daily for fresh seafood, meats and vegetables to feed her large extended family after the war. Although she is long gone, the memory comes back as I gaze down rows of vibrant, just harvested  gobo (burdock root), seqwa (loofah squash), banana flowers, papayas, longans, bananas, papayas and lychees, almost hearing her advice on selecting the best o the lot. Checking through the fresh prawns and local fish, I can almost hear her saying "that's a good one over there".  Having quickly purchased some prawns and fresh veges for a tempura, some nice young seqwa for a soup, some look fun rolls (freshly steamed rice sheets wrapped around slivers of green onions & char siu) and the ingredients to make kombu maki ( kelp sheets, gobo, shiitake, kanpyo (dried gourd strips), we were ready to head home to create a grand Hakka (southern Chinese cuisine) dinner.  

ust the other day, Louie Agard, a long time childhood friend, called to tell me about Kahumana Organic Community Farm, because he knew that I was looking for that connection between farmers and community, especially with the hospitality sector to improve their incomes and the community well being, as I'm trying to do with my work in Fiji. So we head out to Waiana'e in Leeward O'ahu where the farm and facilities are nestled on a plateau at the base of the Waiana'e ranges.  We got more than we expected as Christian, the farm manager, and CJ, his able and pert assistant, who runs the gift shop and creates herbal extractions, showed us around their facilities. Their 40+ acres not only has sustainable 10 acres of poultry, orchards, aquaculture, trading seed bank with nursery, and about 5 acres of production, but also permanent housing for the homeless, accommodation for farmstays, a vegetarian restaurant and giftshop, an apprenticeship program for farming and many scheduled events and workshops.

While visiting Milton Wong's Kahulu'u farm/orchard, I noticed a couple of lone Peach Palms growing in the corner of his property.  I wouldn't have noticed them, but for my recent heavy exposure to the same palms in Fiji which came from Hawaii. Milton had purchased them from a local nursery because he had heard of this hearts of palm and "millionaire's salad" and wanted to try it.  Well, we quickly harvested the largest palm (about 2 meters high) letting all the keikis (baby shoots) grow up. The next night i prepared watermelon balls, spoon-meat coconut noodles, baby watercress and spinach, toasted some sliced almonds and cleaned, prepared and sliced the heart of palm into different slices, shapes and thicknesses ready to make a "Millionaires Salad" for 20 family and freinds who had been summon to enjoy with some kanuka spit-roasted NZ lamb that i had brought over to share with the ohana (whanau).

Just after arrival in Kaneohe, Hawaii, Milton Wong, a close friend and former classmate of Uncle Jim Tom, dropped by to say Aloha, catching up about family and his prolific backyard farm of 10 acres.  Speaking about my new book, Kana Vinaka, I became very curious about what local farmers were growing for their markets and Milton, a high school teacher for some 30+ years and US Army communications NCO during he Vietnam war, invited me to see and taste his new hobby and semi-retired lifestyle. So our Hawaii farm adventure begins.

A couple of weeks back, we did a gourmet grazing reception for the N.Z. wedding of Kurt and Alyssa Cederman at Kurt’s parents, Brent and Diane’s Raglan Sunset Motel.  They had been married earlier in the week back in Nevada, Missouri where Alyssa is from and where they now live.

Here it is the end of summer already, but the bananas don’t know about it.  There’s about a dozen bunches in our patch plus 2 more new blooms and I’ve just harvested 2 bunches (17 hands) to share with locals and friends.  For some reason our little patch in Whale Bay on the Tasman Sea is in a little subtropical micro clime as our figs, limes, bananas and feijoas all do so well here.

I have recently returned from Fiji where I was working on my cookbook Kana Vinaka, which is about creating contemporary island cuisine to increase consumption of local produce, and connecting farmers with hospitality outlets. On the trip we came across an interesting, long-time local, Dick Watling. He is an environment consultant who has some land next to the river at Hogmata, some 23kms up the Sigatoka Valley. Dick grows the Peach Palm, which he acquired from Hawaii.

Fig season has been in full flight at our Whale Bay, Raglan home. Every year in late summer, our two fig trees groan with fruit. We get up early every morning to pick the fruit that ripened overnight before the birds beat us to it.

Tree ripened figs are juicy and succulent. They're soft and need to be handled with care. We store them carefully in open egg cartons and often give them away by the tray-full. We eat figs on everything - our breakfast, in salads, desserts. We slow-dry them in the oven to use in our catering and still can't use all we grow!

They're a fantastic fruit that thrives in the micro-climate of our seaside garden.