Hawaii's Share Your Table

This Thanksgiving, as a culmination of my Eat Local Challenge, in which I pledged to eat only food grown in the Hawaiian Islands for a month, I decided to give thanks for all the experiences the challenge had provided me by preparing a Thanksgiving feast using only Hawaii-grown ingredients. It was my way thanking all the farmers and ranchers and fishermen, some of whom I had met through my challenge, for growing all the food that nourished me for a month.

After the Eat Local Challenge, I had gathered plenty of resources for local ingredients, so coming up with dishes that didn't include the usual turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce was easy. But one of the hardest things about eating local is making time to prepare everything from scratch. Instead of opening cans, friends and I juiced pineapples, squeezed coconut through cheesecloth and roasted vegetables for stock.
 
For the Thanksgiving meal, we gathered Hawaiian chilis, herbs and tangerines from our backyards, based our dishes on what we could find at the farmers' market and grilled fish our friend had caught days before. Our only non-local ingredient was black pepper; everything else, from the Big Island fennel to the Waiahole purple sweet potatoes to the Hamakua mushrooms to the Waimanalo nutmeg, was harvested from our islands.

The Pilgrims were locavores out of necessity. These days, we have a choice, and we use it to support our community and our farmers. It's a great time to be a locavore, and we give thanks for that.