Feeling guilty and frustrated about your left-over pizza crusts? Then turn them into dessert!

Our globe-trotting friend, Robert Swegle, reminiscing about an old Roslyn, Washington pizzeria, hungrily described its practice of providing customers honey for the left-over pizza crust. It was a remarkable treat, especially for Neapolitan style pizza, with the slightly burnt crust. And no left over pizza crust!

Our organic Hawaiian Lehua honey, with its smooth crystalized texture and hint of salt, would be the perfect accompaniment.

So save yourself time making dessert and eliminate those leftovers with this creative idea. Thanks, Bob!

Mark Bittman  www.markbittman.com suggests a great holiday dish for our organic Wilelaiki Blossom honey, made from Christmasberry blossoms on the Big Island.

Make ploenta with half milk, half water; stir in chopped fresh or dried cranberries. When thick, pour onto a sheet tray and let cool. Cut into squares and saute or broil until slightly crisp. Drizzle with our organic Wilelaiki Blossom honey.

We prepared this side dish for Thanksgiving and it was a hit. Consider it for your dinners this holiday season.

We are once again the beneficiary of Sue Heim’s Hawaiian vacations, as she provided us another delicious recipe, this time combining the bounty of two islands; goat cheese by Surfing Goat Dairy
(www.surfinggoatdairy.com) on Maui, and our own Macadamia Nut Blossom honey from the Big Island.

• Figs
• Surfing Goat Dairy Goat Cheese
• Macadamia Nut Blossom Honey

Slice figs in half and place on plate. Crumble goat cheese over the figs. Drizzle mac nut honey over all. Enjoy! (Bet you can’t eat just one!)

Mahalo to Sue Heim for providing this recipe, which she recommends our Macadamia Nut Blossom honey:

8 oz. slivered almonds
1/4 c Macadamia Nut Blossom honey.
Warm honey in small saucepan on stove. Do not boil honey. Add almonds and stir until sticky and almost set. Drop by spoonfuls onto waxed paper or parchment and allow to set. For a festive touch, sprinkle with colored sugar crystals. Store in a covered container between layers of wax paper

Summer vacation is almost here and the children are home from school.Here is a great recipe for cupcakes using our Organic O’hia Lehua blossom honey. The bees are now in the O’hia forest and are busy filling their combs with this delightful honey. The following recipe was given to us by our friend Roseann Buritz who not only owned and ran an incredible bakery in Hilo, but she also started and ran a Waldorf preschool in Kona. Roseann knows knows how to please children. This is one of her special creations.

BLACK BOTTOM CUPCAKES

Mix dry:
3 c. pastry flour
½ c cocoa
2 t. baking soda
½ t. salt

Mix wet:
1 c. organic O’hia Lehua blossom honey
2/3 c. oil
2 Tbls. vinegar
2 t. vanilla
1 ½ c. water

Mix wet and dry together until just smooth.

Filling:
1 lb. cream cheese
½ c Organic O’hia Lehua honey
2 c. chocolate chips

Spoon batter into cupcake cups to ½ full. Add 1 t. filling. Spoon batter to cover. Bake at 350 degrees until done.

Can be eaten plain or frosted with chocolate frosting.

Can be made to look like “Hostess Cup Cakes” by frosting with ganache and decorating with a squiggle of sweetened cream cheese across the top. Delicious.

Can be made with carob powder, chips and frosting.
Aloha

One of our favorite culinary fans, Isobel Grad, recommended this delicious open-faced sandwich as great and healthy way to start the day at breakfast, or re-energize your afternoon:

• One slice of whole wheat bread, toasted
• Half ripe banana, mashed
• One tablespoon peanut butter
• One teaspoon organic Wilelaiki (Christmasberry) Hawaiian honey
• One tablespoon unsweetened shredded coconut

Thoroughly mix all the ingredients together and spread on toast. Delicious! 

Also, consider adding or substituting:

• One teaspoon of vanilla extract
• Two teaspoons of cocoa powder

SeaBear Smokehouse, the premier provider of Northwest seafood, has introduced its 2008 Limited Edition Holiday Fillet, this year utilizing Big Island Bee’s organic Christmasberry honey.

These fillets start with a brine of Hawaiian sea salt and Hawaian pure cane sugar, followed by traditional Pacific Northwest smoking. The final piece of of culinary magic occurs immediately before serving, when the fillets are brushed with our Hawaiian Christmasberry honey.

We recommend you place your orders now at www.seabear.com, because these limited edition holiday fillets sell out every year.

No, we haven’t been reading the National Enquirer. Aliens are threatening production of the rare and marvelous Lehua honey extracted from Hawaii’s Ohia forests. However, these aliens are terrestrial, introduced to Hawaii from Brazil in 1825.

They are strawberry guava plants, an invasive species that has no natural predators or competitors in Hawaii, and which the U.S. Forest Service now believes is growing so aggressively that it is damaging Hawaii’s watersheds and replacing native forests. The Forest Service is promoting a plan to slow strawberry guava’s growth to allow native plants, such as the Ohia tree, to compete for space.

And the Forest Service’s plan? To introduce the insect Tectococcus Ovatus, or scale insect, also from Brazil, to feed on the strawberry guava and thereby reduce the number of seeds produced and slow the rate of the plant’s growth. Consider this Alien v. Predator II (or is that III?).

This plan has been studied for 15 years and the Forest Service is convinced the law of unintended consequences won’t operate once the scale insect has been released. Given the problems Hawaii has with invasive species, local residents aren’t convinced, and voiced their concerns at a recent meeting of the Hawaii County Council Committee on Public Works and Intergovernmental Relations.

The alternative to the Forest Service’s plan is to manually remove the strawberry guava, a grueling, time consuming, and expensive task, and one that is likely to be difficult to fund in a time of budget constraints.

You can learn more about this at the Hawaii Invasive Species Council link:

 http://www.hawaiiinvasivespecies.org/hisc/enews/20080716hiscenews19.htm

We’ve always thought that honey was healthier than granulated sugar or high fructose corn syrup, but wondered whether it was also better for the environment than other sweeteners. 

For purposes of this post, we decided to compare how much water is consumed in producing honey versus granulated sugar, and used as a reference the book “Sugar Water: Hawaii’s Plantation Ditches” by Carol Cox (University of Hawaii Press, 1998), and our own honey production records.

Here is the comparison:

It takes 500 gallons of water to produce one pound of sugar. And this doesn’t even include the amount of water required to irrigate the sugar cane. That is 5.3 gallons of water for each teaspoon of sugar.

For a typical honey flow in one of our apiaries, we use 600 gallons of water (yes, we have to supplement the water bees obtain from natural rainfall). But this 600 gallons of water produce approximately 8,000 pounds of honey, or 768,000 teaspoons. The amount of water per teaspoon is negligible. 

While certainly not a rigorous scientific test, the differences are dramatic enough to indicate that the production of honey does require significantly less amounts of precious clean water.

We’re still working on comparing  the relative amount of energy used to produce sugar and honey and will post this when we’ve completed our review.

Please let us know if you have any information on the amount of water and energy used to produce high fructose corn syrup.

We came across a great recipe created by Ling Fong that was published in a 2003 compendium of Cooking Light recipes. It is a unique and delicious creation that uses one of our favorite flavor combinations; green tea and Hawaiian Lehua honey.

Cooking Spray

2/3 cup sugar

4 large eggs

4 large egg yolks

1/3 cup fat-free milk

1/4 cup Big Island Bee organic Lehua honey

1 cup all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons green tea powder

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Coat a 9-inch round cake pan with cooking spray; line bottom of pan with wax paper with cooking spray;set aside.

3. Place sugar, eggs, and yolks in a large bowl; beat with a mixer at medium speed until thick and pale (about 6 minutes).

4. Combine milk and Lehua honey in a small bowl; stir well with a whisk. Add milk mixture to egg mixture, stirring well.

5. Lightly spoon flour into a dry measuring cup; level with a knife. Place flour in a mixing bowl; add tea powder, stirring well with a whisk. Fold flour mixture into egg mixture. Pour batter into prepared pan.

6. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool in pan 10 minutes on a wire rack; remove from pan. Cool completely on wire rack. Yield: 8 servings (serving size: 1 wedge).

If you can’t find green tea powder, available at many Asian markets, use a clean coffee grinder to pulverize green tea leaves.