TROPICAL TASTE - A Late Summer Evening Meal

Today's Tropical Taste is a little bit different from my usual. 

During these hot days of late summer we have been changing our eating patterns quite a bit... As usual, we rely on a lot of locally grown and fresh produce, but are not adverse to buying imports when there is not a local source for a particular item we might crave. 

Whether from your yard or gardens, gifts shared by friends or purchased in local farmer's markets, fresh produce is always at it's peak in the summertime....although here in Hawaii we are fortunate to have year'round excellent growing conditions, I realize that not everyone else does.

Of course, there are some things we just don't grow in Hawaii, such as wheat for flour, but we have bakeries.  We have mushroom farms but they don't raise certain types of mushrooms.  We have goat cheese farms, but none make a Romano or cheddar or Brie and other style cheeses, so for items like these, we rely on imports.

On our last grocery buying trip, I spotted some beautiful portobello mushrooms and inmediately thought of a meal centered on an open faced marinated grilled mushroom sandwich!  The rest of the ingredients list was easy as we shopped at the farmer's market in Hilo and at a new little produce roadside stand located on the way home.

After we selected the portobellos we wanted, we next moved to the bakery to select our bread.  Our local Safeway bakery has been baking what they call Sourdough Bread Bowls....beautiful, round, big rolls perfect for an open face sandwich or as the name implies, a bread bowl when hollowed out to serve soups and stews in them when the weather is cooler... Perfect for what we had in mind.

At the farmer's market and the roadside stand, we found some sweet Maui onions and selected a bunch of arugula, a bunch of salad bowl cutting lettuce and some hydroponics grown buttery Manoa lettuce - Manoa lettuce was developed by the University of Hawaii School of Agriculture Department and is named after the UH Oahu campus.

We also found some beautiful heirloom tomatoes grown not too far from where I live and we have a bunch of avocadoes I need to use up, fast....so included them in my meal plan.

I first marinated the mushrooms in a mix of my homemade liliko'i (passionfruit) vinaigrette to which I added some herbs such as basil and pineapple sage blooms which I chopped up.

After slicing the onions and before grilling, we placed them in the dish where we had marinated the mushrooms, so the marinade would coat the slices.

The bread was cut in half and grilled last, after the mushrooms and onions were ready.

To assemble the plate, a large leaf of the salad bowl cutting lettuce was placed on the plate, then, since we love mayonnaise, I spread some on the bread, then added the grilled mushroom and the grilled onion slices.  To finish it up I sprinkled some freshly grated Romano cheese on top. 

The heirloom tomato slices and avocado wedges added the finishing touch to the plate with a wedge of one of the sour orange/limes that grow in our yard to sprinkle on the avo.

Iced tea laced with liliko'i syrup was a refreshing touch to a very satisfying meal!

Can't wait to make this one again...

To find sources for locally grown produce near you click on the link for Local Harvest, insert in the search boxes what you're looking for and your Zip Code to find the one closest to you.

Other articles about liliko'i (passionfruit) in Gather:

A passion for liliko'i

Liliko'i...the passionate fruit and the Elizabeth Cake

Passion Fruit Hot Peper Jelly

		Sonia Martinez, Gather Food Correspondent
	Sonia's column, 'Tropical Taste' is a regular twice-monthly feature of Gather Essentials: Food. Sonia is a cookbook author and freelance food writer for several publications in Hawaii, and is also a Hawaii Island Journal restaurant reviewer in partnership with her son Anthony Mathis.  She lives in a beautiful rural rainforest area on the Big Island of Hawaii. You can keep up with Sonia's adventures and ongoing love affair with Hawaii by joining her network, or visiting her food & garden blog at Sonia Tastes Hawaii.