Coconut Red Thai Curry Beet Soup

Last weekend, Laura and I stopped by the local farmer’s market in Haleiwa, which is about 20 minutes north of where we live. It’s fairly small, at least compared to the big farmer’s market in Hawaii-Kai, down by Diamond Head, but there’s always a pretty decent selection. We had planned to go to the big one on Saturday morning. It opens at 7:30 am, but everybody gets there around 6:30. There are a lot of vendors there, and although no sales can be made before 7:30, the vendors are allowed to pre-sell their items, as long as money isn’t exchanged. Hawaii-Kai, being about an hour away, proved to be too ambitious for a baby that decided to fuss all  throughout the night before, so we settled for Haleiwa on Sunday.

Farmer’s markets around here are great, because it is always growing season, and only a few harvests are seasonal, such as mangoes. We can always get really good tomatoes, zucchini, summer squash, yellow zucchini (which is different than summer squash), spring mix, arugula, mushrooms, and all sorts of other things. There are a variety of local and tropical produce as well, like a type of avocado that is the size of a grapefruit, dragon fruit, ramatan (which is very similar to lychee), and fresh coconut. The selection is really quite nice.

 

Barrack’s Cooking: Coconut Curried Beef Braise

I haven’t been shy about my love for the crock pot. The slow cooker is one of many highly used tools in my kitchen arsenal that I find an absolute pleasure to use. There’s something about slow cooking that appeals to me. Our society places way too much priority on work, money, careers, social media, any media, that we often put food on the back burner. Many cultures celebrate food daily and center their culture, families, and social interactions around food. American culture views food as a means of sustainment and rarely anything more than that, save for around the holidays.

Which is why I love Slow Food. Slow Food is a movement that was started in Italy and has made its way over to the US. As a whole, slow food celebrates the process of bringing food from the farm to the kitchen to the table. It’s a bit of a grass roots movement to get people involved in their food and close the gap that people have when associating the food they eat with actual ingredients. For me, though, Slow Food is more about a cooking process that involves putting time and love in so one appreciates the flavors as much as they appreciate the effort they put into their food.