A small room in Seattle. A bookstore that holds itself like a kitchen. A conversation that started on the page and ended somewhere deeper.

That's what the evening at Book Larder felt like.

Where We Were

If you haven't been: Book Larder is a small bookstore in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood that is dedicated entirely to cookbooks. It's the only shop of its kind in the city. Open since 2011, around a thousand titles in stock at any time, with a kitchen island in the middle of the room where chefs and authors lead demos and conversations. It feels less like a bookstore and more like someone's beloved kitchen that happens to also sell books.

I went out to Seattle to spend the evening there with Alana Kysar for a conversation about her newest cookbook, Aloha Veggies. Intimate room. Generous people. The kind of night where the line between the host, the guest, and the room dissolves a little.

I was grateful to be there. To talk story with her. To meet the people who showed up on a Monday night because food matters to them, and so does where it comes from.

What Came Up

What kept surfacing wasn't really about the recipes. It was about what food carries.

The way a dish can return you to a kitchen you haven't stood in for years. The way the first bite of something familiar can put you back in your tutu's house, in a yard you used to play in, at a table where someone you love was still alive.

Food is one of the most honest ways we keep home with us.

The Dishes That Bring You Home

A lot of the conversation circled back to the dishes that do this work. Shoyu chicken. Loco moco. The plates you'd know without being told what they were — by smell, by color, by the way they're served.

These are the ones that carry the most. Not because they're the most refined, but because they were the ones that were always there. Birthdays. Bad days. Sunday afternoons. They get woven into who you are without anyone announcing it.

What Alana is doing in Aloha Veggies is taking those flavors — the shoyu, the depth, the heat, the sweet — and rebuilding the dishes with different ingredients. More vegetables. Lighter. Kinder to the body. And the dish still brings you home.

That's the part that struck me. She isn't replacing what made the dish itself. She's keeping the soul and changing the form.

Coming Home

There's a piece of Alana's story that gives this book its weight.

When she wrote her first cookbook, Aloha Kitchen, she'd been away from Hawaiʻi for more than a decade — living in Los Angeles, building her career, writing about food. That first book came out of a particular kind of longing. The recipes were the way she stayed close to home when she wasn't there.

Aloha Veggies is different. She's back now. Living on Maui, in the place she grew up — and seeing it with fresh eyes.

She talked about driving around the island and noticing how much had changed. The endless rows of sugarcane she remembered from her childhood — gone. In their place, a mosaic of smaller farms, growing all kinds of things for the people who live there. The landscape itself had shifted while she was away. And now that she was home and paying attention, she could see what was actually growing here, today, and who was growing it.

That's the perspective Aloha Veggies is written from. Not longing from a distance. Recognition for being back.

The book is a portrait of what she's been learning since she came home.

The Farms She Walks You Through

A real part of Aloha Veggies is dedicated to the farms growing the ingredients. Sumida Farm in ʻAiea is one of them — Kyle Suzuki and his wife Emi, the fourth generation working the family land, ten acres fed by the fresh water of Kalauao Springs. Sumida grows the majority of the locally-grown watercress in Hawaiʻi. The watercress in a bowl of pork-and-watercress soup at home likely came from there.

And here's what made the night special: Kyle and Emi were there. They came out to the event. Standing in a small bookstore in Seattle and getting to meet the family Alana writes about in the book — the family that grows the watercress so many of us eat at home in Hawaiʻi — felt like a full-circle moment. The page came alive in the room.

It's a small thing to name a farm and the family behind it in a cookbook, but it matters. When Alana takes the time to walk you through who's growing what, the dish becomes more than a recipe, it becomes a relationship, pilina. It serves as a reminder that food is grown by hands, on land, by families who've been at it for generations.

That's the texture Aloha Veggies adds — not just what's in the dish, but who grew it and where.

Why This Conversation Mattered to Me

I think about this a lot with KŪ.

So much of what we make is a way of carrying home — a phrase on a mug, a word on a cap, a quiet line on a print. The point isn't nostalgia. The point is practice. Small, daily contact with the people and places and values that made you.

What Alana is doing with food is the same practice with a different ingredient. Keep the soul. Move the form. Stay in conversation with where you come from, while staying alive in the body you have right now.

That's what I left the bookstore with. Home isn't fixed. It's a thing we keep re-meeting — at the stove, on the page, in the small ordinary objects we choose to live with.

And you are not alone in this. Whatever dish brings you back, whatever flavor returns you to someone you love — someone else is reaching for the same thing, right now, in another kitchen.

Mahalo to Alana for the conversation. To Book Larder for hosting. To Kyle and Emi for coming out. And to everyone who showed up on a Monday night to talk about food and what it carries.

Want to hear more about Alana and Aloha Veggies? Listen to our full conversation on the podcast →

Stand tall. Feel grounded. Live Kū.