Sonja’s Homegrown Lilikoi Soufflé Pie

Instead of going straight to the recipe, this pie has a bit of a story. First of all, lilikoi are passion fruit, also called maracuyá or granadilla in their native South America. The Hawaiian name comes from the valley where they first went wild on Oahu. They have since invaded all islands and several varieties can be found wild in the forests all over Kaua’i:

• Yellow skin with yellow plup - the most common in Hawaii, a bit tart but still good
• Yellow skin with orangish pulp - a lucky find that is usually sweeter
• Purple skin with orangish pulp - common in South America but not on Kaua’i
• Velvety orange skin with grey pulp - has an appealing smell but a particular musty flavor (I’ve heard it called Thai lilikoi, and it looks like something called a water lemon)
• Banana Poka - The beautiful pink flower that is threatening to choke Kokee, edible but not eaten

You can just split or cut them open and eat the pulp, seeds and all. The taste is typically tart but refreshing. The ones with smooth, shiny skins get dimples as they ripen, and those are usually sweeter. The seeds are crunchy but not bitter like grape seeds. At home you can squish the juice out through a sieve if you don’t like the seeds. The juice can be diluted and sweetened to make a tropical lemonade with a characteristic perfume (also use in sangria and wine coolers).

We always used to pick lilikoi on the trails and backroads, but we don’t get out as much anymore with the baby. So we sprouted some of the seeds and planted several foot-high shoots near our fence. In the meantime, a wild plant started growing in the herb garden and quickly covered almost 30 feet (10 meters) of our hedge nearby. People will tell you that Kauai is like that, you just have a desire for something and it manifests itself for you (to find things you were not looking for, head to Sri Lanka, formerly known as the isle of Serendip).

Update: I found a website all about passion fruit, including the historical explanation of how the Spanish missionaries taught the passion of Christ based on the elements of the flower (3 nails, five wounds, and a crown of thorns), hence the name.

So we now have beautiful flowers and 4-6 lilikoi fruit every day. It’s a bit of an Easter egg hunt, looking for the smooth, egg-shaped fruit in the grass and behind the herb garden, but the kid in me really enjoys that. To find a use for the juice, my wife Sonja wanted to make a pie. We didn’t have the ingredients for a lilikoi cheesecake like you find in many restaurants, and she didn’t want just a plain pudding, so she improvised a sort of mousse by combining several recipes. It puffed up in the oven like a soufflé and then collapsed into a light golden mousse, but the result was delicious:

Finally, here is the recipe she improvised:

Busted!

The Garden Island newspaper had a front page story yesterday about the state Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) warning Inter-Island Helicopter to stop illegal landings. In another example of helicopter companies flaunting the laws, they are advertising the tour on their website, and DLNR staff found a clearing and “temporary” structures to provide shade in the Moloa’a Forest Reserve, both presumably illegal. The DLNR adds that permits are needed for landings in state managed lands, though it’s likely they wouldn’t be granted for quasi-wilderness areas such as the remote forest reserves.

Inter-Island Helicopters are the bad boys of the Kauai helicopter industry. They don’t have the sleek modern helicopter fleet that most other operators have, but they were the first to fly with the doors off, which many people found thrilling. They fly out of Port Allen airport, where they have a bunch of makeshift offices and structures with questionable permits (scroll down on the linked page). However, they are not just a tourist ride, their utilitarian choppers and skilled pilots are contracted by the county for mountain rescue and fire fighting. The owner’s son perished in an accident last Christmas while refilling a fire-fighting bucket at a reservoir near Lihue.

But the competition in the industry is driving operators to seek new thrills to sell, and remote waterfalls and forests are easy targets. One of the Robinson Family members recently applied to the planning commission for a landing permit, saying that their Niihau helicopters would stop at a botanical reserve that they own in the hills above Hanapepe. At the hearing, it turned out that another company with far more flights wanted to share the landing permit and that the location happens to be in the Jurassic Park movie.

Helicopters used to fly tourists to the Kalalau valley for the day, and I’m not sure when that stopped or why. But between the noise impact and the danger of spreading invasive species, it’s easy to see why landings are undesireable. What’s clear is that the operators are looking for new products, and allowing landings for one will make them all feel entitled, resulting in more flights and more nuisance for residents, hikers, and wildlife.

Erratum

I was going to post yesterday about the second Lahaina Noon but it turns out I got the dates wrong. I finally found the Honolulu planetarium’s astronomical highlights, also known as ephemerides, for 2006. This year, instead of being on May 31st and July 12th, Lahaina noon happened a day earlier on May 30th and July 11th.

The dates for the solstices and equinoxes change up to a day from year-to-year, and Lahaina noon is directly related to those occurrances. In fact, I bet that on one day, the sun is a few hundredths of a degree south of the zenith at solar noon, and the next day it is a few hundredths of a degree north, and Lahaina Noon is just whichever day it is closest. By extension, for each given latitude, there must be one spot around the earth that experiences the exact Lahaina noon. Or for a given longitude, you could travel north or south a few hundredths of a degree to get the sun exactly overhead. I’ll have to research this some more.

As a side note, I keep calling it the Honolulu Planetarium, but its real name is the Jhamandas Watumull Planetarium at the Bishop Museum.