A Taste of Hawaii

Kalua pork is a traditional Hawaiian dish: a pork shoulder butt (well, in Hawaii, they cook the whole darn pig) which is rubbed with sea salt, wrapped in ti leaves and slow cooked in the ground. No need to go out and dig a hole in the back yard or worry about ti leaves. Get your meat and rub some of the red Hawaiian sea salt all over it. This is very important. Do not use any other kind of salt. You can also use a mix of Hawaiian red and black salt, but I have the red and it works just fine. More and more places are carrying exotic salts, but look around at your fancy up scale grocery stores, as they are more likely to have it, or buy it on-line. Then get that bottle of liquid smoke. Then take the meat and rub in a bit of the salt, amount varies with the size of the roast. Then pour a little bit of smoke over the meat...this should now be in your crock pot or in a dutch oven kind of pan, and slow cook this baby until it is fork tender. Depends on the size, again, of the roast. What is cooking in my kitchen is a small pork roast, so it might not take the 11-16 hours or whatever it was that I read..but low and slow is the key. Then, when it is tender, pull it apart with a fork and serve with traditional rice and cole slaw if desired. Trust me, this is how they make it in restaurants. Recipes are on-line..search for Kalua Pork. Easy peasy.

Had to take auntie around for errands and we did it in record time. I had to go to the mall and I made it in and out of there okay. Then to Fred Meyer where I picked up my photos that I had printed. The traffic to get to that store was very heavy. Ugh.

When I look at these photos on my computer they look great...but they sure printed out dark. PHOTO QUESTION: How do you know how much to lighten up the photo when you want it printed? I didn't think about that....obviously.

Back home and thought maybe I'd share this recipe as a blip. It sure smells heavenly, I can tell you that.

Today was my mom's birthday. She would have been 92 had she lived a long and healthy life. I can't imagine my mother as an older person since she died a few months shy of her 41st birthday. My mom had soft black hair (she called it dark brown, but I think of it as soft black..a minor difference of opinion) and hazel eyes. She had some freckles and I suppose she would have fit right into Ireland quite well. You can see for yourself here, on my Flickr page, if you want. She was ambitious, curious, intelligent, fun and as a divorced woman in the mid to late 1950's, she had many admirers. Today was the day we usually had the Christmas tree up by. Back then, the tree usually went up closer to Christmas, instead of right after Thanksgiving as is often the case now.

Happy Birthday Mom!