CRANBERRY COCONUT SALT SCRUB + MAUI!

Maui!!
My dad took these awesome pics of all the INSANE fruit grown either in our garden or the gardens of our neighbors and friends:

Frames 1-3) The largest cherimoya I’ve ever seen or eaten in my life, grown by my childhood BFF Tara’s mom, Rosily.

Frame 4) A face-size avocado with the creaminess and flavor of the best avo you’ve ever eaten in your life.

Frame 5) Papaya!

This place is brimming with the buoyant natural abundance of the tropics, a place where the volcanic soil is full of minerals that make everything vibrant, alive, awake to its fullest potential. Even the avocados.

Here’s the path out back to our vegetable garden, surrounded by a fence laden with Kula black raspberries.

And then there are the flowers. Far, far too many to show (at least 50 kinds of orchids, poinsettia, hydrangea, and more), so I’ll leave you with these gorgeous heliconia and shell ginger, sandwiching a panoramic view from the side and front yards. That’s the island Kaho’olawe you see in the distance, and tiny Molokini crater jutting out of the ocean just in front.

I’ve spent some of my favorite moments on this island playing under the leaves of the shell ginger, diving deep underwater at the edge of Molokini basin, and wandering these carefully tended and deeply loved gardens. My father spends hours each week making sure every plant is getting just the attention it needs to continue to thrive. He does this for himself and his partner, Susan—for their enjoyment in their lives there now—and, too, in my mother’s memory. This garden is as much her legacy as I am.

There’s so much more to show you, but I’ll end with these lilikoi (passion fruit), both yellow and purple varieties (we grow one more, Jamaican lilikoi, which are bright orange and have a soft skin, and are much sweeter—I don’t like them). These babies, in tandem with pomegranates, are my absolute favorite fruit. Their flavor is perfume, is sweet, is tart, is richly complex and sexy. I could eat them for days.

When I’m not out frolicking in the garden, I like to do something I did often as a young girl alongside my mom, a consummate aromatherapist—whip up crazy body products. This Cranberry Coconut Salt Scrub (shown here on a beautiful cutting board made by AHeirloom) will have you feeling tropical and rejuvenated in no time.

Coconut in shredded and oil form impart both a creamy, luscious scent and a deeply moisturizing lustre. Cranberry, diced and smashed to release the antioxidants and vitamins in its skin, acts as a potent cleanser and glow booster. And salt exfoliates like whoa.

You can mix up a batch of this in a few quick minutes, and keep it in the shower for a week or more. The salt helps preserve the cranberry, and I found that the cranberry coconut scent only gets richer, and the color deeper, as the week wore on.

This is the perfect way to use up your leftover cranberries—and, jarred, this scrub makes an excellent host/ess gift!