Try Share

With buffalo grass to the eaves, plywood covering the windows, a rusted out Mercury in the backyard and a mattress in the carport, we took possession of our house on December 26, 2001.
Within a week a 70 year-old neighbor knocked on our front door holding a bag of dried shrimp and a bowl of poi — her favorite way to eat poi she told us. Around six months later another neighbor appeared on our porch. This time it was to inform us that the 20 foot hedge sharing his property line belonged to us and asked us to cut it back. That weekend my husband and I brought the hedge down by over 10 feet with Henry standing in his yard chatting with us the entire time.
That unruly hedge was the bridge to a friendship and our first lesson in Kaua‘i hospitality. A month does not pass without Henry calling to me from his yard to hand me a bag packed with akule he’d caught or some of the bounty of his orchard — avocado, wild mountain apple or mango. And more recently his daughter has taken up the baton and calls to us from that same hole in the hedge to deliver homemade fig jam, tapioca and eggs from her laying hens.
Try as I may to match their generosity with baked goods, after eight years I’ve learned that it is impossible — Kauaiians are unrivaled in their gift giving tenacity.
Last week another neighbor showed up with boiled breadfruit still warm from the water.
“If you don’t like it,” she told me, “just fry it in oil.”
We loved it just as it was. She swears she only boiled it and added a little salt, but Wes and I are convinced there is some secret ingredient she is not divulging. Her 16 year-old son told us how his grandpa, who also lives on our street, used to fill five-gallon buckets with peeled and sliced breadfruit he’d deep-fry and give to friends and family.
Having grown up in a migratory family with no relatives nearby, this is just one more lesson on what it means to share in Kaua‘i. Families don’t just make what they can eat, they make enough to give away to potentially a dozen other families.
It may be another decade before we have much to share from our land. The buffalo grass still rockets up in big tufts around the yard and although we’ve planted fig, lime, tangerine and lemons, they barely fruit yet.
I may not have much of a green thumb, but I can bake. It’s high time I learned to expand my recipes.