We're the Kahananuis: Keoni and Noelani (that's me, I'm the one typing), our kids Kalani (14), Pua (11) and little Ikaika (6), and my mother, Tutu, who came up to live with us in 1997 and has opinions about everything on this page. Keoni and I were both born and raised on Oahu, in Kaneohe, on the windward side. Keoni's job brought us to Oregon in the fall of 1991, and we've been here ever since. We love it. We love the trees and the rain and the people. We do not love that we can't get poi at the grocery store.

The first summer we were here we were homesick something terrible, so we threw a luau in the backyard for the six people we knew. The next year it was fifteen. This August we fed sixty, and there's a waiting list, and Keoni says if it gets to eighty we're renting the church hall. So a lot of people have asked us how we do it, and a lot of mainland friends have asked how to do their own, and that's what this page is for.

One thing first, because it matters to us: a luau is a real thing. Back home it's how you celebrate a baby's first birthday, a graduation, a wedding, a homecoming. It's a feast with family, and there's a blessing, and the food is the food our grandparents ate. We're happy to share it, and we're happy when our Oregon friends throw one of their own. We just ask that you do it with aloha and not as a joke. No coconut bras. No "funny" accents. Grass skirts on the guys are not a thing. You'll have more fun the real way, we promise.

Here's our menu for sixty. Everything scales; for twenty, cut it by two-thirds, but make the full amount of haupia anyway, trust me.

Kalua Pig (in the oven)
Real kalua pig is a whole pig cooked all day in an imu, an underground oven with hot rocks. See "the pig question," below, for why we don't do that anymore. The oven method gets you 90% of the way there and it's what every Hawaiian family on the mainland does. For sixty people we do three of these:

• One 7-8 lb. pork shoulder (pork butt) per 15-20 people. Bone-in is better.
• Pierce it all over with a fork or a knife. Rub it hard with Hawaiian sea salt (the coarse red alaea salt if you can get it; a cousin mails it to us; coarse sea salt works). About 1 tablespoon per 4 lbs. Don't be shy.
• Sprinkle on liquid smoke, 1 to 2 tablespoons per roast. This is the mainland secret. It gives you the imu flavor without digging a hole.
• Wrap it in ti leaves or banana leaves if you can get them. The Asian grocery in Portland usually has frozen banana leaves. If not, skip it. Then wrap the whole thing TIGHT in two or three layers of heavy foil.
• Roast at 325 degrees for about 5 to 6 hours, roughly 45 minutes a pound, until it falls apart when you poke it. It's done when a fork twists in it with no resistance. It cannot really be overcooked.
• Unwrap (careful, steam), pull out the bone, and shred it with two forks, mixing the meat back into its own juices in the pan. Taste for salt. Keep it warm, covered, in a low oven or a roaster.

Three roasts is 24 lbs. of pork. It goes. People come back. Tutu stands by the pan.

Lomi Salmon (lomi-lomi salmon)
"Lomi" means to massage, and that's what you do to it. Cold, fresh, salty, the thing that cuts through the pork.

• 1 lb. salted salmon (we get it from the fish counter; if you can only get fresh salmon, salt it heavily and let it sit overnight in the refrigerator). Soak the salted salmon in cold water for a couple of hours, changing the water, then rinse it and dice it small.
• 4 or 5 ripe tomatoes, diced. 1 large sweet onion (Maui onion back home; Walla Walla here, which is perfect), diced. A bunch of green onions, sliced.
• Mix it all with your hands, gently. Massage it. Chill it at least a couple hours. Serve very cold. Some people add a little crushed ice on top right before serving.

Double this for sixty. It disappears.

Haupia (coconut pudding)
The dessert. Square, white, wobbly, coconut. Kids will fight over the corner pieces.

• 2 cans (about 13-14 oz. each) coconut milk, 6 tablespoons sugar, 6 tablespoons cornstarch, 3/4 cup water.
• Whisk the cornstarch into the water until smooth. Heat the coconut milk and sugar in a pot until it just starts to simmer, then whisk in the cornstarch water and keep stirring over medium-low heat until it gets thick, 5 minutes or so. It should coat the spoon heavily.
• Pour into an 8x8 pan, smooth the top, cool, then refrigerate until firm (a few hours). Cut into squares. That's it.

For sixty we make five pans. Pua is in charge of the haupia. It's the only thing she's allowed to be in charge of, and she takes it very seriously.

Rice
Two rice cookers, going all afternoon. Plain white rice, medium grain. About 12 cups dry for sixty, and that's with a lot of people taking seconds. Rice goes with everything and everybody eats it. If you take one thing from this page: you need more rice than you think.

Also on the table
Chicken long rice (chicken, ginger, and the clear bean-thread noodles, in broth; Tutu's job). Macaroni salad (mayonnaise, elbow macaroni, a little grated carrot; every plate lunch back home has it and no luau is complete without it). Fresh pineapple, cut up. Sweet bread rolls. Poi, when a cousin can send it up frozen, and we ration it. Fruit punch for the kids and a cooler of whatever the grown-ups bring.

Everybody asks. "Do you cook a whole pig in the ground?" We did. Once. In 1994.

A real imu goes like this: you dig a pit, you build a big fire in it, you heat lava rocks on the fire for hours until they're white-hot, you lay down banana stumps and ti leaves on the rocks for steam, you put in the pig (salted, with hot rocks in the belly), you cover it with more leaves and wet burlap and then bury the whole thing in dirt, and you wait six or eight hours, and then you dig it up and it's the best thing you've ever eaten. At home Keoni's uncle does this in the yard like it's nothing.

In Salem, Oregon, in 1994, it went like this: we didn't have lava rocks, so we used river rocks, and one of them exploded (river rocks can hold water and they can crack in a fire; use lava rocks or don't do it). The neighbors called about the smoke. Keoni dug the pit too shallow. It rained. The pig took eleven hours and half of it was perfect and half of it was, let's say, very rare, and we ended up finishing it in the oven anyway at nine at night while sixty people ate macaroni salad and were very nice about it.

So now it's the oven, and it's wonderful, and nobody misses the exploding rock. If you're going to try an imu on the mainland, find somebody who's done it, get real lava rocks, dig deep, start at dawn, and have a backup plan and a very patient fire department.

Simple. You're not decorating a stage, you're making a backyard feel like a family party at the beach park.

• Tiki torches around the edge of the yard, lit at dusk. The bamboo ones from the garden center, with citronella oil, which also handles the mosquitoes. Keep them away from the kids and the tarp.
• Long tables (we borrow from the church) with plain tablecloths, and a runner of ti leaves or big fern fronds down the middle. Oregon has ferns. Use them.
• Flowers. Real ones, whatever's blooming. Dahlias in August here, and they're gorgeous and huge. No plastic leis on the tables, please. We give every guest a real lei at the gate if the cousin came through with the shipment, and a ribbon lei (Tutu and Pua make them all winter) if not.
• Paper lanterns on a string between the house and the big fir tree. That's the whole lighting plan besides the torches.
• Fabric. Keoni's mother sends us a few yards of Hawaiian print every year, and we drape it over the food table. That's the one thing that makes it look like home.
• A sign at the gate that says E komo mai (welcome, come in). Ikaika painted this year's.

Things we don't do: the inflatable palm trees, the plastic grass skirting stapled around the tables, the "tiki" masks. It's not that they're wrong for somebody else's party. It's that they're not us.

We have a boombox on the porch and a stack of tapes and CDs from home, and the order goes something like this:

• Afternoon, while people arrive: slack-key guitar. Ki ho'alu. Solo acoustic guitar in the open tunings, slow and sweet, the sound of a porch in Kaneohe at four o'clock. It makes people talk quieter. Keoni plays a little himself and will if you ask him twice.
• Dinner: the old Hawaiian standards. Ukulele, steel guitar, the falsetto singers, the hapa haole songs from the 1930s and '40s that everybody's grandparents danced to. Tutu sings along. Tutu knows all the words.
• After dinner: contemporary Hawaiian. The stuff on the radio at home now: a lot of it is a Hawaiian-reggae blend, "Jawaiian," with ukulele and a reggae beat, and the teenagers like it, and honestly so do we.
• After dark, if the mood's right: a ukulele circle. We've got four ukes and somebody always brings one. Nobody has to be good.
• Chant and hula: live, not recorded. See below.

No song lists here, because half our tapes were dubbed from cousins and don't have labels. Go to a music store with a world music section and ask for Hawaiian slack-key; that's the one to start with.

The hula lesson. This is the heart of the evening and I (Noelani) teach it. I danced hula from age five through high school, with a real halau (hula school) and a real kumu (teacher), and while I'm out of practice, I can teach a room of Oregonians one simple hula in twenty minutes. The hands tell the story; the feet keep the time. Everybody does it: the dads, the teenagers, my boss. Nobody laughs at anybody. That's the one rule. Every year somebody who was dragged into it comes up afterward with something in their eye.

The blessing. Before we eat, Tutu or Keoni says a short pule (prayer) in Hawaiian and then in English, thanks the people who came, and remembers the people who couldn't. Then the line forms. Elders and kids first. That's not a game, but it's the part I'd never skip.

For the keiki (kids):

• Coconut bowling on the lawn with a real coconut and plastic pins.
• Ukulele petting zoo: Kalani sits with the ukes and shows little kids two chords.
• Lei making at a table with ribbon, yarn, and whatever flowers we've got extra. They wear them home.
• Hukilau relay: teams "pull in the net" (a rope) across the yard. Loud. Good.
• Yes, we have a limbo stick. No, limbo is not Hawaiian (it's from Trinidad). Yes, the kids love it and we tell them where it's from.

1992: six people. 1993: fifteen. 1995: thirty. 1997: forty-five. This August: sixty, on the nose, with a list. It's Keoni's coworkers and their families, the kids' friends and their parents, our neighbors on both sides (who have long since stopped calling about smoke and now bring dessert), the Hawaiian families we've found in the Willamette Valley (there are more of us up here than you'd think; we find each other at the Asian grocery, standing in front of the frozen case looking for poi), our church, and Tutu's card club.

How we keep it to sixty: invitations go out July 1st, by hand, with an RSVP date. If you don't RSVP, we love you, and we'll see you next year. Sixty is what the yard holds, what three roasts feed, and what Noelani can hula-teach without losing her voice. Everybody brings a chair. Half the people bring a dish without being asked, which is exactly how it works at home.

Next year's date is already set: the second Saturday in August, 2000. If you're one of the sixty, you know who you are. If you want to be, come find us in front of the frozen case.

Aloha nui loa,
Noelani, Keoni, Kalani, Pua, Ikaika and Tutu