Eating in a box

Ok 2013 is closing and i'm bound and determined to finish this post tonight before the "Dick Clarke's special" rings off the new year. Day 7 is having trouble exiting my camera. It was a day off so you're not missing much we went to the Chinese restaurant at the hotel and had some Bejing duck and Abalone cold plate (abalone is an expensive ingredient VERY.) If I managed to pull the photos then i'll finally post day 7. Day 8 we went down south to the City of Refuge (the pictures are also stuck on my camera) But the best part of was our visit to Super J's with their famous Lau Lau. I saw them on the food network on one of those "best things I've ever eating" shows. I'm so glad I took notice because it would not have otherwise jumped out at me. We drove by the place and I exclaimed "ooh ooh that's the super J's  place" so after the island of refuge we returned to check the place out. Just like in the show Janice...

Ok the Coffee tour and roasting class was so awesome and informative I had to break it out into it's own post. We learned so much about the coffee plant, the process of arriving at a bean and finally roasting, grading and what makes a good cup of coffee. There's a lot of pictures so this will be a long post but hopefully informative. Also note that all of this information is based on Kona coffee specific to this farm, why? At Mountain Thunder they farm at higher altitude, by hand, and conform to organic farming practices. I'll try to call out the info that's specific to this farm but since I've not been to another coffee plantation to compare this information I can't be sure what's specific to Mountain Thunder and practices are different at a commercial producer that's trying to control environmental conditions to produce the highest yield all at one time. Ok it all starts here with the coffee plant and the coffee flower which is part of the gardin...

Day 6 of our adventure. Today's big thing was the coffee plantation tour at Mountain Thunder located in Kailua-Kona south of where we were staying. Before that we had a bit of time to burn. So we started with breakfast. Here's our view from breakfast. We stopped by Island Lava Java Cafe. Nice breakfast joint that features 100% Kona coffee (as opposed to the places that serve "blended" Kona) The view was spectacular and they had a guy singing up front part time ukulele Hawaiian music and part time Christmas melodies. Breakfast was pretty straight forward the only thing unique about my breakfast was that it was served with some Portuguese sausage, it's slightly sweet and red from the paprika (not spicy at all). My wife ordered the "Oatmeal Brulée" (pictured above). Plain oatmeal topped with vanilla yogurt and bananas dusted with brown sugar and sugar burned by a torch. It certainly a unique presentation and very tasty. We went and shopped aro...

Day 5 of my trip. Did some more snorkeling and got up close and personal with my frowny faced turtle friend. I plan on doing a morning snorkel to see what I can see before all the other guests cloudy up the water. Sorry, the dolphin swim didn't allow us to take our own photos. I got this photo with one of the dolphins and a trainer. It was a fun experience, the dolphins have such great personalities. The two dolphins that we played with were the two newest moms. They would whistle to their young during our session and the little ones would swim across the pools and do a drive by on us. The first two meals today were rather unremarkable. For breakfast we went to the breakfast buffet. The only unique thing was a chicken Jook (congee) the rice was cooked with a seasoned chicken broth that had some ginger in it. I'm going to have to recreate this as it was a very flavorful congee. For dinner we went out to Hawi 45 mins north of our the resort to a great local restau...