Nesting So Hard Off the Grid in Hawaii
After finding a calling in Nesting So Hard and Meticulous Bulk, I took off with my new husband on an 8 month honeymoon journey, to no certain places, with an unspoken need to find home.
What we found was an invitation to co-caretake a house in the final stages of construction up on a misty hill near Waipio Valley on the North Shore of Hawaii. The land, the air, the trees, the uniqueness of the house, the people of the place all of these were both welcoming and imposing. This was not a place where you just bring or adapt your usual way of life. This was a place to start over, to start from scratch, to work with the rhythms of sun and moon, warmth and mist and wind, to be called to work and rest and learn to be together.
The house is called Hale Aloha, and it’s purpose is to be a watering hole for intimacy. With an elder mentor down the hill and no furniture but two mattresses and a desk, it was certainly a place of reflection and focus.
In this very special place, I had an empty kitchen to build up, this time with a plan. There was no electricity save the occasional generator to power occasional running water. There was amazing produce from the local farmers markets twice a week. There was a local Ayurvedic Health store in our town of Honokaa (Alohaveda, pictured below) and there were two relatively fancy and abundant health food stores in the 90 minute drive away surf town of Honoli.
To spice things up a bit, I was prescribed a special diet by a naturopath to deal with dysbiosis (digestive disorder) and candida (a yeast overgrowth in my intestines). All the old ways of eating were off the table, and heck, there wasn’t even a table to eat of anyway, nor a refrigerator.
Upon the doctors recommendations, I embraced the dietary guidelines of the Body Ecology Diet, which looking back, is one of the more extreme regemines of nutrition for healing involving food combining and fermenting and avoiding grains. Note all the concessions, which aren’t included in the strictest version of the diet.
I met my husband in the middle and we mapped out the foods we wanted to eat and stock up on. We’d have a baseline of dried bulk foods- «seedlike grains» nuts and nut butters, rice (a grain concession), beans ( a carb concession) cocoa (an addiction concession), teas, sea vegetables (doesn’t seaweed sound fancy now?), healthy oils and spices.
These were complimented with danger-ridden hand-harvested coconuts, bananas and papayas (sweetness concessions), along with occasional wild dried and fresh fish and daily eggs from local hen hosting neighbors.
So, we were eating with a bulk system almost by necessity – for price considerations, for meal planning without the convenience of easy anytime food or refrigeration, and for health, a major concern in my state of health.
Our household of 4 naturally resulted in many bags and some boxes and some duplicates. My approach was to group them and get them into jars with satchets of silica to stave off critters (regular guests) staleness, and mold, which was a constant battle in the door and window frames.
The Jar System Kitchen emerged as a way to provide visual comfort that we had plenty of food to cook for 4 people thrice daily and as a way to store larger quantities separately from smaller, handier everyday jars. I placed complimentary ingredients in groups for easy staging (mise-en-place) and I eyed the refill process to time market trips for sales.
Gastronomically, the no-refrigerator Jar System Kitchen was a boon to our culinary creativity. We ate huge, exciting salads at every meal in wooden bowls and varied the ingredients, spices and proportions or cooked to raw foods.
I loved going grocery shopping and setting up the kitchen as my contribution to a place that welcomed us and taught us so much, requiring only labor rather than rent.
What I learned was that the system could be expanded to assist shopping by making purchasing in bulk both easier and potentially even less packaging-intensive. Rather than needing to scribble the code on a twist tie every time we bought more nuts and quinoa and using a new plastic bag each time, I stored bags to re-use and attached the twist ties to the larger refill super-jar to check and grab before heading to the market. We always knew what we had, and we knew when we needed more. At the store we knew what to purchase and back home we knew where to put it and where to find it when we wanted it — it was always best positioned for use.
I tried out various label systems, from grease and chalk markers on glass, to chalk markers on vinyl and chalkboard stickers. I found that chalkboard stickers labeling the cabinets eliminated the confusion of where to put jars back, and the labels on the jars made a difference in quick recognition. A dark background and a white text was the best combination for easy reading. Chalkboard stickers can be removed from cabinets without harming them with a little elbow grease. Vinyl decals, miraculously, can be removed, moved, replaced, erased, and relabeled with no extra effort. These are ideal for jars that need washing, from fermentation (another adventure) to nut butters and homemade chocolate fudge.
