Category Archives: Lifestyle

Culture, Environment, food, Lifestyle, maui, Travel

Growing Maui Vanilla Beans

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The harvest and drying season in Maui for vanilla beans has just ended, and pollinating season has just begun. Growing a single vanilla bean takes about one year: In May, vanilla orchid flowers bloom, during which time they must be pollinated by hand with a paintbrush. If that goes well, a single bean will erupt from each flower. Nine months later, the vanilla beans are ready for harvest. After three months of drying, the beans are ready to eat, and the annual process starts again.

This year was a bumper crop, according to one Maui grower, who pollinates about twenty thousand orchid plants by hand each year to produce the decadent Madagascar variety of vanilla beans. There are less than a handful of vanilla growers in Hawaii, and only two are working on such a large scale.

maui-hawaii-vanilla-beans

Vanilla beans in the process of drying

Growing vanilla beans does lend itself easily to commercial processes, which is why genuine vanilla flavor costs more than artificial. Vanilla orchids lack natural pollinators, so each plant must be pollinated by hand, using a tool like a small paintbrush. The window of time for pollinating stays open only as long as the flower blooms. The process is hectic, painstaking, and time-consuming. And there’s no guarantee the pollen will bear fruit.

But for growers and connoisseurs alike, there is no substitute for the rich, creamy flavor of real Madagascar vanilla. It’s the variety favored by pastry chefs around the world. The other variety, Tahitian vanilla, has a more floral aroma and lighter flavor. I like to grind up real vanilla beans and mix with Maui sugar or infuse them whole into a bottle of rum for baking.

Culture, food, Lifestyle, Random

Former Maui Chef Tops Taco Tournament

Rand Packer, former Maui boy and long-time chef at Roy’s Restaurants (both Kahana, Hawaii Kai and Tampa) opened his own taco stand, Mekenita’s Mexican Grille, in Tampa, Florida. His take on Mexican adds a little aloha style to traditional Oaxacan traditions. Now his taco joint has been voted into the #1 in the area’s Tournament of Tacos.

Packer’s Citrus Grilled Pacific Wahoo Tacos come heaped with charred corn, homemade roasted chili salsa and enough flavor to make you start yor own Mariachi band to sing his praises. His wife, Tiffani, helps him run the joint, named after their oldest daughter, Mekena, as in the famous beach in South Maui.

Culture, Environment, Family, Health, humor, Lifestyle

Natural teeth whitener removes bathtub stains, spares reefs

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My dental hygienist kindly offered me this tip at my last cleaning: to keep teeth whiter between visits, brush once a month with a mixture of baking soda (tsp) and hydrogen peroxide (1 cap full). These compounds when mixed together remove coffee and tea stains from teeth naturally. Turns out baking soda comes from a mixture of calcium carbonate (shells or limestone) and sodium chloride (good ‘ole table salt). So I’ve been following her advice, and it works. My teeth are whiter for pennies. (Disclaimer: this is not medical advice.)

Happy with my whiter teeth, I wanted to take a nice hot bath after a long day of moving into a new house, but the bathtub was severely stained. It looked like about five years of thick yellowish soap scum. Gross. When I leaned in close to see how bad it was, I noticed some scratch marks on the fiberglass surround from where previous tenants had scrubbed ineffectively, possibly with a Brillo pad, and gave up. I wondered if the baking soda hydrogen peroxide mix would clean these stains, like it had cleaned my teeth.

With nothing to lose but yucky scum, I mixed up a bowl full of the mix and spread it on thick. After letting the mix stand and work for half an hour, I came back with a regular kitchen sponge to investigate the results. It took a little elbow scrubbing power, particularly in the corners, but all those gross stains came off. The tub surround was about 10 shades lighter, even better than the results on my teeth.

Best part is that I didn’t wash any toxic chemicals down the drain. Here in Hawaii, a lot of what goes down the drain eventually finds its way to the ocean and kills fish. Even though I wanted a hot bath in a clean tub, I didn’t want to kill a living reef to do it. A bonus suprise was that my hands and nails were fine afterward, no rashes or burns like with standard store cleaners.