Exploring Portuguese-Hawai'i Food

My Story

Wanda Adelaide Adams is a Mauian, raised in verdant, storied ‘Iao Valley. Her parents operated the 20-room Hotel ‘Iao Needle with its happenin’ bar and “fine dining” restaurant. She learned to cook from her Portuguese grandmother and netted pesky white moths among Grandpa’s couves (cabbage), but never inherited his gardening skill. No threat from her harassed mother could keep her out of the hotel kitchen.

Wanda grad Lunas ’69 (she once sang the entire school song in Hawaiian at the top of her lungs in the midddle of Alan Wong’s Restaurant). She got her degrees in journalism and English literature from UWashington (“Go Huskies!”). In the Northwest, she learned to grub for chanterelles in the woods, dig for clams on the beaches, wander apple orchards for mix-and-match batches of luxuriant apple butter, cannily shop the tucked-away corners of the Pike Place Market, line her pantry with home-canned, jewel-bright jars of preserves and, of course, to smoke a salmon. (She did NOT learn, however, how to write a short sentence.)

For 15 years, she was uniquely situated to report on the development of the Pacific Regional Cuisine movement as a feature and food writer at The Everett Herald and later the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Returning home in 1989, she was among those who documented another foodie revolution, Hawai’i Regional Cuisine, which, for 25 years has malama’d our farms and food producers, fed us and taught us to buy and eat local.

Her job of love was at the late, lamented (by her, anyway) Honolulu Advertiser where as food editor she got the chance of her life when she was asked to write a history of food through the pages of the then-150-year-old newspaper. The result was the bestselling 2005 book,  “Island Plate, 150 Years of Foodlore and Recipes from The Honolulu Advertiser.” She followed this with Island Plate II and three other books of her own and two for which she acted as editor.  Read the rest of My Story here