I had a cleaning lady once who was a bit ADD. Well, a lot ADD.

She alphabetized my spice cabinet. Then taped an inventory of the spices in my collection to the door of the cupboard. I loved that woman.

Now I’m back to the usual chaos in the cupboard, freezer and fridge. The other day, getting ready for a photo shoot, I made a shopping list and left somethings out I KNEW I had. Got home. Could I find them? You know the answer.

But, of course, two days later, you will inevitably come across that thing you KNEW you had. And more. Now I’ve got three bottles of oyster sauce (which I don’t even use that much), two of rice vinegar, a half an acre of Chalula hot sauce that was hiding…..

And then there are other times. Last night, Husband said, after dinner. “So where’s the ice cream?” I headed toward the freezer. “Oh, no,” he said. “I don’t think you’ll find any in there.” He knew he’d eaten it all. Ha! Eat your words, o ye of little faith. I’d hidden a box of Magnum bars in the rear because if he gets his hands on a box, the whole thing is gone and I occasionally like a bite. (If you haven’t tried Magnum bars, go directly to the nearest grocery story, walk right by the Dove and try them. The chocolate on chocolate is my favorite: the outer coating of ganache is so crackly and thick and the ice cream so creamy.)

If I ever get a spare minute between freelance deadlines, I’m going in there with a backhoe and maybe a native tracker and I’m going to find all the mayonnaise and peanut butter and sardines and stuff I KNOW I have but get tired just looking for.

Maybe I’ll alphabetize.

Maybe not.

Meanwhile, I suffered a fate worse than death Monday. I didn’t die but my hard drive did. Everything after February, 2010, wiped out. I had an external hard drive that either wasn’t working or I wasn’t using properly, having gone through this once before. Now I’m finding, day after day, things I don’t have any more. I had to work hard not to cry real tears in the Apple store. (There’s no crying in the world of earbuds and shiny, expensive white plastic.)

So I’m not appending a picture again today because I’ve got a lot of digging to do this morning. Though not in my cupboard.

Hurray! No pictures agian, kala mai, but just to let you know that last night, Friday, a book I edited (and, believe me, the one-word title editor doesn’t cover it; cat herdeer would be much more accurate), won the cookbook diviion of the Hawaii Publishers Association awards. I was beyond elated for the team who put this book, “A Sweet Dash of Aloha,” together. It was about healthful, lowfat, low-sugar desserts and snacks and the chefs had to work within exacting nutritional guidelines.  I never though it would win bu because of other commitments, I was asked to go and represent the effort. A good time. Saw a lot of people in the shrinking publishing industry that I haven’t seen for years. So sweet. And then we won! I was 6 feet off the ground all night!

But the best, best part for me was seeing a nonfiction book, a very important and well written book about the seamy side of life on our island’s Windward Side, win nonfiction. I had never met the author, though we had corresponded and talked on the phone (he’s based in Hilo), but, by circumstance, I met him and he sat next to me. When his category came up, I held on to his arm and I prayed. Hard. And he won! Oh, thanks be, I was more excited than when our team won. A cookbook, though a lot of work, is just a minor piece of craftsmanship and reporting. But an investigative nonfiction work? I am in awe of people that can do that. And Mark Panek, with “Big Happiness,” did it. We had much “big happiness” together.

Some days, life is a struggle. Some, rare days, it is heavenly joy. Last night was heavenly joy. I cannot properly say how meaningful the work is of all these authors, most of whom gave their lives over to their work for, at best, inadequate remuneration. That our tiny state recognizes our gigantic culture, with these works is a blessing of huge proportions.

Happy, happy. Joy, joy.

If  you care about Hawaii, go buy “Big Happiness.” It’s on Amazon. You will receive big thinking.

What has kept me from blogging?

Busy, yes. Tired, yes, yes. Traveling, yes, yes. Not cooking as much as I usually do, definitely. I think I was writing so much for other media, I just…ran out. Nothing left. Pau ka hana (the work is finished), my Grandma would say, with a sigh, sinking into our nubby green couch to nap while pretending to watch the 10 o’clock news. Me, too, Grandma. I got no gana, Grandma would say. (From the Portuguese verb meaning to work, but also to have the energy to do so). Me, too, Grandma. It’s not on your head, Grandma would say. Meaning, if it doesn’t have to be done, thought of or dealt with right this minute, forget it. I did, Grandma.

That woman was wise. Thank you, ke Akua, for the years I had with her. And for my mom, who reminded me just last weekend on Maui of that last saying of Grandma’s.

So, to catch up a little:

Hilo: I blogged for the Star-Advertiser from Merrie Monarch Festival hula competition and stayed with friends in their big, old Hilo house. Let me advise you: You need a rest? Hilo. Do NOT stop in Honolulu (unless you’re coming to visit me). Do NOT go to Maui, unless you love traffic. Go to Hilo. Hilo, 9 p.m.: Dark. Take a bat’. Hemo da light. Moemoe. (Shower, turn off the lights and go to bed.). Even though I was working and I’ve been chronically insomniac, I got more rest in four days in Hilo than any similar period on O’ahu would allow. The food is fabulous. The little shops are a dream. The scenery is indescribable. The people are friendly. Nothing is fancy. Going to Hilo from Honolulu is like going from Taladega on race day to the kind of small town where you can stop in the middle of the street, hail a friend, talk for a few minutes and nobody will beep the horn. They’ll just wait. I know my Hilo friends know how much it has changed but compared to city living….Ho! I felt my hearbeat go from staccato to lullaby just stepping off the plane.

Cooking: My latest thing is scorching vegetables. I’ve always roasted hard vegetables but recently somewhere, in some restaurant, I had something (do I remember when or where? are you kidding me?), I had some leafy green that had been either flash-fried, grilled or broiled and it was so good, I was eating it like potato chips. So last night, I took a little baby bok choy, tore it apart into leaves and chopped stems, put it in a bowl, drizzled it with peanut oil (it was an Asian meal) and some of the marinade I was using on the shoyu chicken and a good bit of salt. Let it sit. Heated a foil-lined roasting pan to 400 degrees. Spread the veggie out on it and let them wilt and brown a bit, about 12-15 minutes, turning once. I gotta say Mahalo ke Akua again. On some hot rice, with a shoyu chicken thigh on top. Braddah, da mout’ still stay broke! You can do this with anything, even lettuce. Just be sure to oil and season the veg, preheat the pan, and watch carefully. Not as healthful as steaming but if it gets me to happily eat a green, I’m gonna do it. Did I take a picture? Well, see, I was hungry and Husband was waiting and … okay, we ate the whole thing. Next time I’m doing two or three heads. It would be wonderful with any grain, with or without meat. Any oil that fits the bill. I shoulda tried some sesame.

Other than that, Honolulu got a Portuguese restaurant and I had to reluctantly not recommend the food. My brethren hate me. Oh, well. I’m checking out The Whole Ox, which specializes in aged and smoked and roasted meats and I’m lovin’ it, even though I have to go small on the portions because meat really slows me down. Got some pork loin country-style pate today, some watermelon and tomato salad and a barley salad. Take-out. $16. Soooo ‘ono. Husband is going out so I’m having leftovers for dinner before I go to the annual local publishers award event to find out if a book I edited wins anything. (That would be a first, though all I really did was herd cats — er, chefs — and contribute a few recipes, then edit the manuscript.) As no one else could go, I get to accept the award if we win.

I now have four cookbooks in the works and one is my dream: My Hawaii Portuguese cookbook, which I have been working on on the side for years. I got a contract for it out of the blue. Mahalo ke Akua again again again.

I hope anyone who still checks this website is as blessed as I am and more. I promise recipes and pictures…and not a month from now, either.

Photographer Romeo Collado and creative director Miki Fletcher at work on Celebrations, Island Style.

Been gone a bit, but I have a good excuse: Working on the photography for my fourth cookbook. Long awaited, at least by me (and to my contributor, Kay Beppu, who allowed me the use of her family’s ozoni recipe in return for the promise of a copy of the book . . . two years ago!). I hope to see “Celebrations Island Style” from Island Heritage later this year, about dishes to prepare for all the holidays celebrated in the Islands.

Romeo lights slow cooker kalua pork while I peek. We're at the Design Studio at the SubZero Showroom (thanks, Brad and all!).

It was, as usual, a source of great anxiety, a huge amount of work, and then as much fun as it’s possible for someone like me to have in public. I love the cooking, the shopping for props (thanks to Savers and Goodwill), the fussing over details, working with food stylists, creative directors, photographers, the small aesthetic disagreements, seeing the photos projected from the camera directly to video, full-size, in full color, immediately after they’re shot. We are always, as the song says, “looking out for a hero.” “Hero,” in photo-speak, is the bit of food that’s absolutely perfect — the right color, the right shape, complementary to the rest of the environment.

One of the recipes we worked on was a great favorite of mine: Chinese pepper steak. It’s a quick stir-fry flavored with lots of black pepper. The version we’re using, unlike the one I enjoy so much at Little Village Noodle House, includes bell pepper and tomato in a slightly thick brown gravy. The photographer’s assistant came to me afterward and asked what the difference is between this dish and Beef Tomato, the familiar local favorite.

The only answer I could come up with was “pepper.” And the only conjecture I can make is that the mild-flavored Beef Tomato is a Chinese American dish and the more robust Black Pepper Steak may be the original probably from Szechuan or the north of China. But, truly, I have no idea. Actually, I prefer the dish without the tomatoes and bell pepper; the other ingredients are optional in my book. But I used them for the photo because they add color. The book is, well, peppered with meat dishes that are brown, brown, brown.

You'll have to try this recipe: Mochi rice cooked with lup cheon and baby bok choy. It all disappeared once we photographed it.

When you’re preparing recipes for food photography, as everyone knows, you make changes to suit the visuals: undercook vegetables, polish foods with oil or glycerin, add garnishes, use more or less sauce, spatter or smear it, place it in a dish one might never use at home (something, for example, that looks great but actually can’t take the heat of the cooked dish). It’s a form of lying, I suppose, but of the “little, white” kind, I hope.

I insist that garnish be something that makes sense: that agrees with the cuisine in question, that appears in the dish or complements the flavors. I narrowly avoided the creative director garnishing slow cooker kalua pork with cilantro, but then she turned the table and prevented me from garnishing a pudding with culinary lavender — something is never eaten raw and whole, but is infused or cooked in a bouquet garnis. We garnished the Lavender Spanish Cream with mint, instead, a conventional garnish for sweet desserts.

Anyway, we had fun. I hope you have fun with the book, when it comes out. Meanwhile, here’s the Pepper Steak as I prefer to make it, without the bell pepper or tomato. It’s still not as good as that of Little Village but it’s darned delicious!

Pepper Steak Haole

2     T. vegetable oil
1     lb. round steak or flank steak, cut into strips
1/2     onion, cut into crescents
1     T. black pepper (or less, if desired)
1/4     t. garlic powder or 2 cloves minced fresh garlic
1     c. beef stock (homemade, store-bought, or from bouillon cubes)

2 tsp. sugar

2     T. cornstarch or arrowroot
2     t. soy sauce
1/4     c. water

Heat oil in high-sided heavy sauté pan. Sauté steak with onion, black pepper, and garlic until meat turns color. Add stock and sugar. Cover and cook on low heat 10 minutes. In a small bowl, whisk together cornstarch, soy sauce, and water. Add to sauté pan and cook 3 to 4 minutes more, stirring, until mixture thickens. Serve hot on a platter or spoon over rice.

Wouldn't you know it? Pepper Beef was the one dish I never photographed! This is smoke meat.

The next time Jimmy Buffett, my favorite of all time, comes to town, remind me to do a blog on the food in his songs. He talks a lot about food and drink and not just magaritas and hamburgers. I had a ball at Jimmy’s Waikiki Shell concert last night. Husband was mildly amused (he’s not a fan). Crowd was grayer, plumper and less hirsute than ever. We took our own food (including Jewish honey cake — see my story in the Star-Advertiser). There’s another story in why the food at concerts can’t be better, don’t you think? I did a walk-around and there wasn’t one thing I would have purchased if I’d had the money or was hungry. They oughtta get some of those Eat the Street trucks in there.

I wish I could say I’d cooked anything of interest lately but the barley soup and sugar-dried tangerine peel I’ve already written about were about it! We’re being overrun with ants and the kitchen hasn’t held much interest for me. I mean flowing RIVERS of black. I brought in some heavy duty stuff recommended by a bug expert and it seems to be working. When the ant thing dies down (I’m being optimistic), I’m going to tear everything out of the pantry and scour it. They discovered the dry catfood and have been hosting a banquet for all the ants in the neighborhood in there, I think. And the damn flying flour bugs are back, too. It’s this wet weather.

It’s odd what these ants will and will not eat. They love cat food but don’t care about Oreos. (Husband did it, not me.) They love honey but ignore honey cake. I’ve been tempted to leave small bits of a variety of things on the counter just to see what would draw their attention but I figured I’d then have to pack all MY small bits and find a new home because Husband loathes ants and has no sense of humor about them. If he thought I was courting them, he’d probably stop courting me.

This reminds me of my all-time favorite Cyrilla-my-godmother story. One time, she got roaches. When you realize that she is the quintessential Portuguese housewife who cleans her floors on her hands and knees and still uses a push lawnmower you’ll understand how much this upset her. She called an entomologist friend. He asked her what the roaches looked like. She described them and he said, “Oh, those are German roaches.” And she said (get ready to laugh), “I don’t care what nationality they are, they can’t live in my house!”

A productive morning. My favorite kind: Doing something I want to do.

Begin with ripe tangerines, peel and remove pith. Cute little buggers, aren't they? You can use oranges or even limes but cut out thick with pith beneath skin.

After a rare sleep-in (9 a.m.!), I made sick husband an omelette and tackled a project that’s been nagging at me for a week. I had scored a huge bowl full of tangerines from my cousin’s Kane’ohe garden and, almost in the same minute, received a tiny bag of candied tangerine peel from my dear friend, Marylene Chun, complete with the recipe. Before the fruit began to go over, I HAD to find time to make these delightful and complex-flavored munchies, used by Chinese to flavor chicken soup and other chicken dishes as well as just to enjoy with tea.

As with so many old-timey recipes, candied peel is not difficult, just a bit tedious. First, count your fruit; you’ll need the number later, the minimum for this recipe is six ripe, unblemished fruit. (A little green blush is fine.) I soon got quite good at reaping the peel in large pieces, ready to cut. Hold the fruit in the palm of your hand, stem side down. There’s a little depression at the center; curl your thumb around and dig into that until it breaks. Then use your other hand to neatly tear the peel into five petals curving out from the fruit.Pretty.

Pull the segments out, cut away the little pith and the hard stem. Cut the peel into strips about 1/2 inch wide and 2 inches long (neatness not a requirement).

A mess o' tangerine peel. Thanks, cuz!

For every six fruit, place 1 cup water in a large soup pot and dump in the sliced peel. Bring to a boil. Drain. Repeat twice. This lessens the bitterness of the peel. (Meanwhile, place fruit segments in a food processor and process; you may need to work in batches. Drain through a fine sieve. Later you’ll use the sugar water from making the candied peel to sweeten this juice to taste. Chill. Left slightly bitter, it would be lovely in duck a l’orange or spicy orange beef; sweetened, it’s breakfast juice.)

Place a rimmed baking sheet on the counter and line with a rack (such as you cool baked goods on).

Finally, for every six fruit, place 1 cup water and 1 cup granulated sugar in a soup pot. Bring to a boil. Lower heat to a high simmer and cook 15 minutes. Drain. Place a bunch of sugar in a deep bowl and spoon in peels a cup or two at a time, roll in sugar.

Cooking the tangerine peel; no need to drown it; stir every so often.

Arrange the strips of fruit on the rack; this needn’t be a perfect, lined-up regiment but try not to pile them on top of each other. Allow to season for a day. Recoat a second time; (I used a sieve full of sugar, then turned the pieces around). Dry for a second day. Store in an airtight container or zippered plastic bag. Or freeze.

If you’ve got ants as creative as determined as my tribe, definitely freeze.

Sugaring tangerine. The sugar will be absorbed into the peel as you dry it; this takes two days.

Beef barley soup. Cold comfort. Get it? Husband had a cold and I . . . Oh, never mind.

Husband came down with a fluish cold this week. He must have been Portuguese in another life, because he’ll eat soup any day for any meal, in sickness and in health. But he especially craves it when he’s sick.

So I reached back into the comforting past, to Grandma’s kitchen and an ingredient I haven’t used or eaten in quite some time: pearl barley.

Except for the occasional cup of smoky barley tea in a Korean restaurant, I haven’t made barley anything of late. It’s a healthy grain sadly underutilized in the U.S., though valued in Asia (even if there it’s considered everyday or even poor person’s food).

I love pearl barley’s creamy but still substantial texture and mellow flavor and the way its starch thickens soups. We always called it “pearl” barley, but properly, it’s “pearled,” meaning hulled. Pearled (or “pearl”) barley is to barley grains as white rice is to brown; it’s been hulled and finely polished. It’s the most common form of barley found in grocery stores. Barley for flour is generally malted — allowed to sprout, then dried and ground.

Japanese lightly toast barley, grind it and package it in tea bags for mugicha, a plain tea almost universally served cold.

Koreans make tea bags, too, but are more likely to thriftily purchase whole, toasted barley, boil it briefly or steep it in hot water, strain it and serve it either hot or cold, depending on the weather. This is called boricha; some local Korean restaurants serve complimentary cups of cold boricha as a digestive. As barley is naturally a bit sweet in a vegetal sort of way, these teas need no sweetener. They contain no caffeine and are considered health aids.

Tibetans, too, drink barley tea too, called tsampa. They use their cold-chapped fingers to stir toasted barley flour into their famed yak butter tea for a bracing, nutrition-packed pick-me-up.

Hulled or pearled barley can be treated like rice: boiled or steamed in water or broth; Koreans sometimes steam rice, corn kernels and barley together as a starch side dish. It can also be breakfast food, like oatmeal: boiled with honey and spices, with butter stirred in at the end.

But back to more familiar territory: soup and bread.

I went through a Celtic cooking phase during which Scotch broth — a lamb-barley soup or stew — figured large in my life. You have to like the assertive flavor of lamb, blood and bone, to appreciate this soup. Based on my summertime travels there, I think one winter in Scotland would probably convert you; their kind of cold calls for hot, substantial, power-packed foods.

I’ve made barley bread, a baked or griddled flatbread (barley doesn’t contain gluten, so bread made from barley flour doesn’t rise). This bread is so hardy and rustic you feel as though you should be wearing a homemade dress of scratchy linen that you wove yourself and dipping the bread in milk from your own cow. Barley flour can be purchased online or at some health food stores and may be eaten by people who are gluten-intolerant.

My beef barley soup is based on my grandmother’s. Because she filled her freezer with Chinese takeout cartons full of “solid pack” (rough-chopped, lightly cooked whole tomatoes, skin, seeds and all) from her garden,  pretty much all of her soups and stews were tomato-based. But I love capital B beef gravy, so I skip the tomato and use beef broth instead. If I have frozen homemade stock, I use that, boiling it down a little to concentrate the flavors further. If not, I use canned broth. Alter the recipe to your taste: Add a can of tomatoes, vegetables that are in season, dried herb mixtures that please you.

Beef barley soup

2 1/2 cups beef broth

1 cup pearled barley

1 carrot, peeled and roughly cubed

1 large Russet potato, peeled and cubed

1 pound beef stew meat, lightly coated with seasoned flour (salt and pepper or add dried herbs, if you like)

Vegetable oil

Water

In a soup pot, bring the beef broth to a boil; stir in barley, lower heat to medium and boil until barley is tender, about 20-30 minutes. Meanwhile, peel and chop the vegetables and place them in water to cover so they don’t dry out or turn brown. Also meanwhile, heat 1/8 inch of vegetable oil in a frying pan and brown dredged and seasoned beef. Drain off fat and place beef in with cooked barley. Add vegetables, water and all. Cook until flavors meld, stirring occasionally and adding more water if it begins to stick or thicken too much. Serve hot with good, buttered bread.

Well, that’s how it feels, anyway.

Me and my mini-garden; in my hand, microscopic carrots, beside me, tomatoes and behind, a couple of confused cucumbers (they can't figure out how to climb).

My tiny sidewalk garden is growing: a couple of cuke plants, tomatoes just a few weeks old that already need transplanting yet again, a gaggle of miniscule carrot tops and a windowbox of mesclun-style greens. Got some worm poop from Waikiki Worms (they’re closing their King Street location and there’s a super sale on until the end of March; consider vermiculture/composting for an earth friendly way to make your own rich soil amendments; see my story in The Honolulu Weekly from three weeks ago). Going out to buy pots and yet more soil. The carrots will go into my cousin’s dandy water-fed bucket gardening system once I get the thing put together. I cannot wait to eat something I’ve grown. It’s been years since I gardened other than a couple of dwarf fruit trees and some herbs. The feeling is as gratifying as I’m sure the eating will be.

On the other hand, they are somewhat like children, or at least pets: Every time you turn around, they’re in need of something — watering, transplanting, thinning, topping, an encouraging word.

Some of the greens in my windowbox; they'll have to be thinned. Just like kids; it's always something.

Alas! My Venetian arugula didn’t sprout at all. The seed must not be viable, though I think I’ll try again with the seed I have left.

In anticipation:

Roasted carrots — Wash and peel 3-4 fresh, medium carrots. Slice and cut into precise little squares (maybe 1/3 inch on a side or slightly larger). In a bowl, toss carrots with 1 tablespoon olive oil or melted butter (I prefer the latter), 1 tablespoon brown sugar and a sprinkling of sea salt. Add snipped fresh herbs, if you like (dill is customary). Arrange the carrots  in a rimmed baking pan lined with nonstick foil (Reynolds Release or like that) and bake at 450 degrees until the carrots are tender and slightly caramelized. Stir or turn them once or twice during cooking to color evenly.

While you’re not using much fat, salt and sugar, there’s just enough to form a lovely glaze. I learned this from a cooking student at KCC who invented the recipe using butternut squash for her mother who was trying to eat more healthily. Wish I could recall her name. But this crazy simple recipe stood out among a number in a food competition I judged precisely because it was straightforward and the flavors so clean. You could take a similar approach with potatoes but without the brown sugar; I like olive oil and minced parsley and garlic.

News: I’ll be blogging from the Merrie Monarch hula competition for the Star-Advertiser this year. It’s just a month away; I’ll be there from Tuesday to Sunday (April 10-14) and can hardly wait. You’ll be able to read about my daily activities on the S-A web site but I’ll do some food reports on this site, too. Hilo is one of my favorite eating towns.

Visiting my mom recently, I joined her in watching her favorite morning talk show with Kelly Ripa. I never watch these at home but it’s easy to get hooked; Ripa is actually quite charming in a slightly ditzy way. But I was appalled at the food advertising that is paired with the show. Most of the time, I live in a rather rarified world of locally grown or harvested, fresh, organic, sustainable, mostly healthy, unprocessed or less processed foods. These advertisers are so far from that it was like receiving communications from a distant planet, one I’d forgotten existed.

I’m no food snob; there is cream of mushroom soup in my pantry. I like SPAM. I like Japanese-style curry gravy made from the box (Vermont brand, or, as a Japanese waiter pronounced it recently, “Ber-MONT-u”). I think that new concentrated stock  in little plastic cups is the bomb. I use frozen prepared products (Bertolli’s pasta; we had Safeway Select butternut-stuffed ravioli last night and it was easily as good, with homemade browned butter-nutmeg sauce, as anything I could make myself). But . . .

After a few minutes of watching the show and not muting the commercials as I usually do, I began to take notes. These were some advertisers: McDonald’s (touting its fillet of fish sandwich; sorry, burgerfied fish is not a fillet); Campbell’s Tomato Soup (okay, I do eat that; comforting when I’m sick or cold; Grandma only let me have it as a treat), Hamburger Helper, Green Giant, Zippy’s, Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup (“stir it, stir it up, stir it up, stir it”).

The ones that put me over the top, however, were:

1) the suggestion that you pour a can of undiluted Campbell’s beef soup on rice and call it dinner. I can think of few things nastier — that odd smell, gelatinous texture, overcooked vegetables, too much salt. Soup is NOT gravy.

2) the truly inspired partnership between Kraft and Hormel that would have you stir SPAM chunks into the blue box macaroni and cheese! By the time that one came on, I was pretty much laughing so I wouldn’t cry. I can’t count high enough to add up the fat calories, the sodium, the sugar. I really loathe Kraft Macaroni and Cheese; it’s much too sweet and has some kind of caramel off flavor. (If you have to use a box, Annie’s isn’t bad.)

I almost retch when I see the commercial for Hamburger Helper Cheeseburger Macaroni where the mom character asks how her son likes his cheesy glop and he is so moved he can’t speak; he just leans into her with a seraphic smile. That’s what a whole lot of fat, salt and sugar at once will do to you; put you into a mindless food coma.

The other thing that got me was the assumption behind these commercials that women are so busy they have no time to cook but are still charged with doing whatever food provision gets done (accurate) and that these products are there to help Busy Mom, leaving her smiling, carefree and adored by her family (oh, please!). It’s as though they’re layering a seemingly up-to-date viewpoint (Mom works) with an outdated and even reprehensible one (that technology-driven shortcuts will save us all).

In just a little more time than it takes to use the box, Mom could wilt chopped in a little onion oil, throw in lower-fat hamburger (ground turkey or buffalo for and even lower fat protein), pour off the fat, boil some good-quality Italian pasta, snip some parsley from the windowsill or pull some dried herbs out of the cupboard and grate good, aged cheese into the thing at the end. She’d know exactly what was in the dish, she’d have had some time to decompress from work while cooking, she’d have a sense of accomplishment and she’d still get hugs. She might even have, oh, I don’t know, involved the family in food preparation, teaching them something about cooking, caring for oneself, taking responsibility, teamwork.

And you know what else? Dad could have done that. Wouldn’t it be nice to see a man cooking who was not a) in a white coat on a cooking show, or b) wearing a silly apron and wielding a grilling tool?

Shine a “lite” on this: There’s a brand of lower fat mayonnaise that actually tastes like the real thing. It’s Duke’s, which rules in the South the way Best Foods rules here. You have to mail-order it, but that’s not too onerous if you split up the order between friends. Great gift for a friend who is dieting or health-conscious. A pack of four 32-ounce jars of Duke’s Light is $14.71 marked down from $18.59 on Amazon.com right now; you can get free shipping, too.

Safeway artisan pizza, with a little help from yours truly. Yum!

Pizza for one or two: I’m not much for prepared foods or a huge fan of grocery store delis but Safeway’s Signature Cafe Rustic Style pizzas are pretty darned good stuff, especially at $4.99. (Have you ordered a pizza lately? Sticker shock!). The only thing truly rustic about these is that they’re not round, but hand shaped into odd oblongs. But the toppings (Pesto Chicken, Six Cheese, Veggie) are good and they’re just the right size for one medium eater or two lighter eaters. I always “doctor” them anyway, with goat cheese or marinated artichoke hearts or Kalamata olives or something. And I don’t follow package directions: I heat up my pizza stone at 500 degrees and pop them onto that; since they’re fully cooked anyway, they’re done in five minutes. Saturday night: Sauteed onions for Husband, goat cheese for me.

More on pizza: I enjoy cold pizza for breakfast as much as the next guy but hate to spend $20 on a pizza and watch the leftovers go soggy if I don’t happen to be in a pizza in the a.m. mood. I went into mourning when Pizza Hut stopped doing their individual pizzas; they had a Thai chicken, I think it was, that wasn’t bad. And DOES ANYONE KNOW: Is there anyplace in Honolulu to buy fresh, raw, shaped pizza dough?

My K-Cup garden; the first row is my smuggled-in Venetian arugula.

A mini mini-garden: Every time I pop another K-Cup into my single-serving Keurig coffeemaker, I feel a bit guilty — all that packaging in the trash. I avoided using the thing until they began marketing the attachment that allows you to use your own ground coffee. However, spoiled brat that I am, I found that arrangement a hassle and allowed myself to be wooed back to the prefilled cups. Doing a story about home gardening for The Honolulu Weekly, I got an idea: a K-Cup garden. So I saved up my empty cups, which are already conveniently pierced at the bottom when you use them, filled them with organic potting soil and added a few seeds to each. That was Wednesday and the cucumber has already sprouted!

Going green: Visited my multi-talented cousin Anthony (retired printer and machinist, inventor, insists he’s “not a farmer” but harvests a heck of a lot of vegetables, fruits and herbs from his Kane’ohe yard and bucket garden) and tasted one of his inventions today,  four-greens dip. It’s the texture of cooked lu’au leaf, the color of (God help us) wheat grass, full of nutrients and actually tastes good. All he did was throw roughly equal parts of raw, loosely chopped Portuguese cabbage, flat-leaf parsley, watercress and purslane into a blender and blend it fine, adding enough water to create a loose paste. This, he serves with Ritz Crackers. (Granted, you could serve some pretty nasty stuff with a Ritz and all that fat and salt would put it over.)

Tony's Green Goo: Purslane, watercress, Portuguese cabbage and parsley on a Ritz, a Superbowl invention that has potential.

Here’s what I think I’ll do: Add some calories. I’ll use the same lineup — Portuguese cabbage (you could use collard greens or kale but I’d blanch them first), parsley, watercress and purslane (a succulent ground cover that’s ridiculously easy to grow but if you don’t have any, don’t worry about it) — a container of concentrated chicken broth (the one chef Marco is advertising on TV) instead of water, and a modest amount of something creamy (chevre, cream cheese, mayo, creme fraiche, mascarpone). Still a lot better for you than most dips.

Have you made any food discoveries lately that you’d like to share?