Alana Kysar’s sophomore cookbook, Aloha Veggies, is a stunning story of exploration and rediscovery. She returned home to Maui after living in California for nearly a decade to find that the island had changed — blossomed, really — into an agricultural oasis. In place of sugarcane, for instance, she found a familiar mountain road “lined with rows of citrus trees, coffee plants, and other new crops.”
The majestic landscape inspired Kysar to rethink vegetables’ place in both Hawaiian food culture and on the plate. The result is a thoughtfully written, beautifully designed collection of recipes that home cooks can easily weave into their everyday lives. The hardest part will be deciding what to make first!
I recently chatted with Kysar to learn more about how she approached putting her own spin on a cuisine with such deep, storied roots. Plus, her decision to include a delicious — and essential — sweets chapter.
Local Hawai’ian food is deeply rooted in multicultural history. How do you decide which traditional elements are non-negotiable and where to be playful — especially with vegetable substitutions?
There are a few really traditional dishes in the book. Laulau is one of them, and for me the thing that was a non-negotiable there was the method of wrapping. I thought it was really important to stay true to actually wrapping them the way you would when you’re making it in a traditional way.
I think the non-negotiable throughout was talking about where the dishes come from and giving them the space they deserve on the history side. I think that when you are expanding on something, if you don’t honor what came before then you’re not exactly expanding, right? You’re just saying, I’m doing this other thing. I wanted to expand. So that was the key part for me.
The modular subchapter structure is so unique — what inspired you to format the cookbook this way?
That one was one that took me a long time to land on. There are a lot of facets to that, but part of it was, because I live in Hawai’i and we have such a meat-centric diet, it feels like there’s a barrier to entry on a veg-forward front. And so I wanted to make it as approachable and accessible as possible.
So when you give four variations to any given profile, what you do is you just give choices, number one. Number two, say you just have picky eaters. I hope that within those four recipes there’s something that your picky eater likes. And then on top of that, it’s like, I love the flavor profile so much, I want to eat them often, but I don’t want to eat the same exact dish every single time.
It’s really creating a structure that allows for a lot of movement — it brings everyone in. It really allows for the book to be woven into your life. I’d hate it if you picked up the book and you made one thing, you know. My goal is for you to make many things.
You spotlight several local farms throughout the cookbook, which are stunning. How has your move back to Maui changed the way you view the local cuisine and where it’s headed?
It really took moving back to Hawai’i for me to grasp the total concept because I had had this idea in my mind — we should have veg-forward cooking folded into our lexicon of what local food is — but when I actually moved home and I saw Maui in particular, the way that our land looks is so, so different than the way I grew up, especially going up the mountain. I’m up on Haleakalā. We used to have sugar all along Haleakalā highway, and now we have citrus and we have coffee and you know, those are tons of crops just moving into that area. But the sugar land is so vast that you’ve got kalo (which is tarot) — there’s just a lot growing that I don’t remember seeing.
That part just alone, when you’re driving home, you’re like, wow, we’re moving into a different time for agriculture. But then when you dig in and you start to look at the farming, it’s also really changed. So, where I lived in Kula, it was primarily when I was growing up like Japanese farmers, and they [grew] mono crops. You’re a strawberry farmer or whatever it is; it’s very one thing. And now I’m seeing a lot of farms — some are perpetuating one crop, but they wanna do it because they wanna do it so well, like Sumida farms. They have access to that natural spring water, and [watercress is] what grows best there. But then you have other farmers in parts that are very fertile trying new crops to see what will go off, or rotating it because they don’t wanna deal with diseases and they want to start growing more organically or biodynamically.
It’s very exciting to be around, honestly, and to get to know all the farmers. And I thought that it was a key component in the book, not only to share their stories, but to share the wide breadth of what is being grown and what farming looks like is not just one thing.
Like you, I firmly believe that there’s always room in life for something sweet. How did you apply your veggie-first lens to the sweets chapter to ensure it felt like a natural extension of the book?
I really expanded on the idea of vegetables in my mind where I thought, lots of vegetables are fruits, therefore fruits can be in the book. That was the lens I chose to take for myself to weave it in to make it feel like it was like a cohesive unit. So I just expanded on the idea of fruits and vegetables.
Many of your recipes are inspired by food memories. Do you have a favorite from the book?
One of my favorite things about writing the book was getting my mom together with my husband’s mom, and them making the laulau together. It was such a special moment. I think it was one that really changed my mom’s mind about what a veg-forward dish could be.
When you make a laulau it takes a lot of time because you’re wrapping each element. You are literally wrapping it first in tarot leaves and then in another tea leaf, and then you’re steaming it or baking it. It just takes quite a lot of time, so it feels like this parcel of genuine love that you’re like eating. So to have them eat it together and to get very excited about like, wow, this is so good. I didn’t expect it to taste so good. You know, like, that was like a really special moment.
